Who takes part in the Carnival?
Overwhelmingly, the members of the minstrel troupes, Malay choirs, and Christmas bands come from the working-class “Coloured” community in and around Cape Town. In smaller numbers, the Coloured middle class participates as well, especially in the Malay choirs and Christmas bands. Whites and Africans are rare. The Coloured community is descended primarily from (1) slaves and political exiles that the Dutch and British colonizers brought to South Africa in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries Asia and East Africa, (2) indigenous African peoples, and (3) white settlers. They’re the largest segment of the Cape Town population, outnumbering both whites and Africans. Members of the troupes, choirs, and bands are often economically poor, but culturally they’re the richest of all Capetonians. (It’s worth noting that there is much controversy attached to the very idea of a “Coloured” identity. The category was created by the British colonial government, in the early nineteenth
