South Africa Festivals and Celebrations

South Africa’s calendar is unusual in that its biggest public days are political before they are festive. The commemorations are the fixed points, and the festivals arrange themselves around them.

The Kaapse Klopse

On the second of January, Cape Town fills with minstrel troupes in satin, sequins and face paint, marching and competing through the city with brass and banjos. It is known as the Kaapse Klopse and as the Cape Town Minstrel Carnival, and Tweede Nuwe Jaar, the second new year, is the older name for the day itself.

Its origin is the single day of the year on which enslaved people at the Cape were given rest, and the celebration has been held continuously ever since. It is the oldest and most distinctive street event in the country, and it belongs to specific neighborhoods and families who have run troupes for generations.

An older name for the carnival, still attached to archive photographs and even to some library records, is a racial slur. It is not used by the city, by the troupes or on this page.

The commemorative calendar

Human Rights Day falls on the twenty first of March, marking the Sharpeville massacre. Freedom Day, the twenty seventh of April, marks the first election in which all South Africans could vote. Youth Day, the sixteenth of June, marks the Soweto uprising and the schoolchildren who were killed in it. Heritage Day is the twenty fourth of September.

These are observed seriously and also, in the way of such things, with a great deal of eating. Heritage Day in particular has acquired an informal second identity as a national day of braaiing, which some people find a trivialization and others find exactly the point.

Arts and music

The National Arts Festival takes over the town of Makhanda in the Eastern Cape for eleven days each winter, and is among the largest arts festivals on the continent: theater, dance, jazz, visual art and a fringe that spills into every available hall.

Cape Town hosts a large international jazz festival in the autumn, a genre with deep and specifically South African roots. Durban’s best known event is a horse race in July that functions mainly as a fashion occasion, and there are food, wine and literary festivals through the calendar in the Cape.