Photographer Melany Ismail’s intimate images raise the question: whose cultural histories are recognised and preserved in South Africa? We dive deeper.
In a new public exhibition in the Company’s Garden, photographer and filmmaker Melany Ismail turns her lens toward the people, rituals and everyday moments that keep Cape Town’s Kaapse Klopse alive. The bigger question the show is asking: what happens to a culture when the people keeping it alive are still fighting for it to be formally recognised as part of the country’s heritage?
Cape Rhythm: Goema, Klopse & Memory runs at the Company’s Garden from 5 to 27 September, as part of the Cape Town Photography Festival during Heritage Month. Drawn from Ismail’s archive, it treats Goema and the Kaapse Klopse as a living culture rather than a once-a-year performance, and makes a pointed case along the way: that Cape Coloured culture has long been underrepresented in South Africa’s official cultural narratives and visual record.
There is a version of the Kaapse Klopse that most people know. Bright satin, painted faces, feathers, brass instruments and thousands of people filling the streets of Cape Town on Tweede Nuwe Jaar. It is spectacular, colourful and deeply tied to the city.
But what happens before the streets fill?
There are months of Sunday rehearsals. Music played on concrete courts. Costumes prepared. Friendships formed. Older generations passing traditions on to younger ones. Quieter moments of fellowship, exhaustion, preparation and belonging that rarely make it into the public image of the Klopse.
These are the moments Ismail’s photographs sit inside, moving between rehearsals, preparations, streets and celebrations to document a community keeping its cultural memory alive through music, movement, ritual and collective experience.
For Ismail, the work is personal.
“I am a South African documentary photographer and filmmaker born in Manenberg, Cape Town. My practice is dedicated to documenting the lived experiences of Cape coloured communities through an intimate and honest lens. Working from within my own community, I create images that celebrate our humanity while contributing to a richer and more authentic visual record of a culture that has long been underrepresented in South Africa and beyond.”
“I create images that celebrate our humanity while contributing to a richer and more authentic visual record of a culture that has long been underrepresented in South Africa and beyond.” – Melany Ismail
Her connection to the Kaapse Klopse began through Playaz Inc., a Cape Minstrel group based in Mitchells Plain. Ismail first worked with the group while directing the music video for Boskasie’s “Goema!” It was during that first visit to one of their rehearsal spaces that the project began to take shape.
“It wasn’t something I initially set out to photograph as a subject in itself. I first worked with Playaz Inc when directing the music video for Goema!. When I first visited them where they practised at a school in Mitchell’s Plain, seeing them in their own space, it made me realise there was something much deeper there that I wanted to explore and communicate. In my work, I’m interested in documenting the everyday lives of our people, and this felt like another part of that story. I wanted to photograph the people beyond the performance, the relationships, the sense of belonging, the joy and the tradition.”
The Klopse are usually photographed at their most spectacular. One exhibition panel calls the rehearsal spaces “the groundwork of our heritage”; another points to “the quieter moments,” where identity is lived rather than performed, around tables, in neighbourhoods, within communities.
Ismail’s own practice comes from this perspective. Born in Manenberg and working closely with Playaz Inc. in neighbouring Mitchells Plain, she describes her photography as an extension of lived experience. Both communities share a history shaped by apartheid’s forced removals, but also one marked by creativity, resilience and enduring cultural traditions.
Rather than positioning her subjects as observers of their own culture, Ismail photographs from within it.
“My work with Playaz is rooted in a desire to preserve and honour the living culture of the Kaapse Klopse. Rather than focusing solely on the spectacle of carnival performances, I am drawn to the quieter moments of rehearsals, preparation, and fellowship—where traditions are nurtured, community is strengthened, and culture is passed from one generation to the next. These moments reveal the heartbeat of our people and the profound role that music and collective memory play in sustaining cultural identity.”
“I am drawn to the quieter moments of rehearsals, preparation, and fellowship—where traditions are nurtured, community is strengthened, and culture is passed from one generation to the next.” – Melany Ismail
That idea of memory runs through the exhibition. The photographs show people resting together in the street after marching, performers moving through familiar neighbourhoods, and crowds where the line between performer and spectator begins to disappear.
“We march to remember who we are,” reads one of the accompanying texts, a particularly loaded statement in a country where cultural memory is still shaped by what gets recorded, taught and officially recognised.
Exhibition curator Heidi Erdmann situates Goema within a much longer history of cultural exchange. The genre emerged in the Cape Colony through encounters between enslaved people of diverse ancestral origins, developing into a distinctly Cape-based sound closely tied to the New Year celebrations that became the Cape Town Minstrel Carnival, or Klopse. During apartheid, it was also linked to counter-cultural resistance against the regime.
For Erdmann, Goema shares important ground with other Creole musical traditions, including Mauritian sega and Réunion Island’s maloya, all born from histories of displacement, enslavement, cultural encounter and creolisation, and all ways for communities to express identity, resilience and belonging.
But there is a crucial difference. Sega and maloya have come to be recognised as forms of intangible cultural heritage. Goema, despite being just as tied to the history and identity of a cultural minority in the Cape, does not have that status in South Africa.
That gives “Cape Rhythm” a purpose beyond documentation: an invitation to consider how culture survives, how memory is carried and whose histories get recognised and preserved, and an appeal to authorities to finally recognise Goema and the Klopse as part of South Africa’s intangible cultural heritage.
For Ismail, photography is one way of contributing to that recognition.
“Through film and photography, I am building a living visual archive that preserves our stories and celebrates the richness of coloured culture. My practice is a direct response to the underrepresentation of our communities in the media, both in South Africa and abroad. Every image I make is an act of preservation—for my people, our history, our traditions, and the enduring dignity, beauty, and resilience of our culture.”
“My practice is a direct response to the underrepresentation of our communities in the media. ” – Melany Ismail
There is a particular power in seeing these photographs installed in the Company’s Garden, one of Cape Town’s most historically significant public spaces. As Erdmann puts it, bringing photography into a historic public space lets the work meet audiences beyond the gallery, turning the public into the art critic.
“The street belongs to us all,” reads another of the exhibition’s texts. In the images, that belonging is tangible. The streets become spaces of memory and celebration, but also spaces where a community sees itself reflected back: the families, friendships, rehearsals, rituals and relationships that let the tradition continue.
For Ismail, the relationship with Playaz became something she could never have planned when she first arrived to make a music video.
“My relationship with the troupe. What started as a music video ended up with me and Nicole (Boskasie) marching with them as part of the troupe during Tweede Nuwe Jaar. To this day, we say it was the best day of our lives, for reasons I can’t even put into words.”
“Cape Rhythm: Goema, Klopse & Memory” is, ultimately, a small contribution to a much larger and ongoing story that belongs to the communities who have kept this culture alive. And we wonder, what does it say about South Africa when a living tradition still has to make the case for being remembered as part of its own heritage?
- Cape Rhythm: Goema, Klopse & Memory is on view at the Company’s Garden in Cape Town until 27 September, as part of the Cape Town Photography Festival and Heritage Month.
