With reference to moppies, the notions of author and composer are largely irrelevant; most artists involved in creating moppies remain anonymous, although some songs may continue to be associated with the group that performed them.
Sometimes the name of the composer of a song, which has been extremely successful with audiences and has won several awards, is remembered (Omar Adams with “Mavis van Bishop Lavis”; Adam Samodien with “Die Toyi Toyi/Ons Hoor”; Anwar Gambeno with “Die Son”). Composers themselves used to consider that once a song had been sung, it was passé: they had to concentrate on writing new moppies. Adam Samodien confessed that he did not systematically keep the texts of his own compositions. Rashaad Malick explained: “When they’ve done them, the merit is gone [laughs]” and Adam Samodien added: “Because […] the compositions was for the love of the sport, I never had the idea of compiling all those things.”101
Composers of moppies get paid by choirs and Klopse in their capacity as coaches who prepare the performance. As a matter of fact, when they are hired to coach the moppie item, it implies in most cases that they will provide the song. When the coach is also the leader of the group, he obviously writes the moppie that will be entered into competition. However, a moppie composed by a coach may be used by other teams, Klopse or choirs, the same year or later. The teams who
“cover” a successful moppie “buy it or they get permission to use it. They have to find out who’s not using it, but they don’t really bother.”102 Moppie composers are aware that they work with musical material that is, in most cases, copyrighted, and know that “snatching” bits of melody from commercially circulated songs could raise a few problems, although the practice of borrowing pre-dates by many decades the discovery that there are laws and regulations defining artistic property rights. Ismail Dante explained:
We borrow the tune from different songs, because if you’re gonna use the whole thing, the whole musical thing, then people can put in trouble, because you’re using their tune, their melody. Now, if you break away from that melody and put in another melody, from
then on to another melody, they can’t say it’s their melody.103
As a matter of fact, it seems that no complaint has ever been lodged against moppie composers for their use of copyrighted melodies, probably because since moppies are not commercially circulated and have hardly been recorded; they are not visible on the international landscape of commercial music. Moreover, legal suits may eventually prove too costly since moppies do not generate any profit. In the other direction, there is at least one example of a Cape Town traditional song that has been “snatched” by commercial pop musicians. “Daar Kom die Alibama”, the anonymous anthem of the New Year festivals (Martin 1999: 83-84), which appeared at the end of the 19th century has been and still is played in Cape Town in many various ways by white and coloured bands and singers. It appeared on a Boney M album titled Ten Thousand Lightyears104 under the name “The Alibama”, and was credited to Sandy Davis, Frank Farian and Reyam.105 The corresponding video clip seems to have been removed from YouTube,106 although a version of the same song, including only the calendar part of “Daar Kom Die Alibama”
(“Januarie-Februarie-March”), still appears on the CD Kalimba de Luna107 under the title “The Calendar Song”, attributed this time to Frank Farian108 alone, and this version can be seen on YouTube.109
The intrusion of international show business in the world of the Cape Town New Year festivals — “Daar Kom Die Alibama” is but one example, others may wait to be discovered — has heightened the awareness of benefits that could accrue from composing and copyrighting songs and could change the attitude of moppie composers, and even transform the way they are conceived. Until now, a successful moppie brought its creator prestige and fame, which usually did not last long, but could lead to a reputation as a clever composer. A few songs could linger on while the name of their tunesmith was forgotten. What was produced for the New Year festivals belonged to them and did not cross any borders; the songs remained aloof from the universe of business and royalties.
Today, in a world governed by competition and profit, which the “new” South Africa gladly entered after 1994, beauty for its own sake, pleasure brought by the “sport”, prestige and reputation may not be enough to motivate the production of moppies. The youngest of the songsters we interviewed, Waseef Piekaan, who pursues a successful career as an actor and stand-up comedian, has other ambitions:
At the end of the day this is a sport, but it’s also a business. Like the Kaapse Klopse is a business […] Now a guy like me who is coaching must still be paid, but I’m not at that level where I will say I’m doing this only to be paid, I will do it but like everybody else I have expenses, I must get from point A to point B, so I must get something out of it […] But in truth, truth is that it does not matter about the money. Because in truth, if there was not any
money, I would coach comics, I would sing comics, because I love doing it, you know, I love to put a tune together [However] I want to write a moppie that is going to be an original song, an original moppie. None of the tunes is going to be used from any song: my own compositions all the way through. Once we achieved that on a moppie song, even on a nederlands song, if you write your own nederlands, or anything that’s involved with the Kaapse Klopse, combine also, if you write an original piece of music, it becomes your piece of music, and that piece of music can then be registered and then it can be played on the radio.
Waseef Piekaan elaborated: when a choir sings a moppie, they sing twenty tunes with original words. According to the present system of copyright, such as applied by SAMRO (Southern African Music Rights Organisation), royalties should be paid to twenty different composers, which of course neither Klopse nor Malay Choirs can afford.
That’s how we do it, but that’s not right. According to how the sys-tem works, how SAMRO works and all these music people work, it’s not right. So if we can then write a moppie that is original, that is your tune, and it’s viby, and it’s lekker, and it’s got this banjo, and you’ve got the outjies [chaps, fellows] singing in the back-ground, then we are going to be successful, and we can copyright it, it can be played on the radio, covered by other bands […] That is what I want to achieve in my lifetime still. Within the next two or three years, it’s my ambition to change the face of moppie for all times, so that we can have moppies played on the radio, not just pop songs […] We have to progress with time. So for example, I wrote a moppie, that happened last year, it was my moppie, five or six teams, on our very stadium, was singing the same moppie that we were singing, and then two on the other stadium was singing the moppie that I wrote, and then on another stadium there was another two singing that same moppie. Now we were compet-ing against ourselves, I was competcompet-ing against myself about eight times110 […] But now, if I had copyrights on that moppie, if I had registered that moppie and I went so far, I could have gone to that choirs and say “You cannot sing that moppie”.111
Waseef Piekaan’s projects do not seem to have materialised yet, but if he, or someone else, were to realise them, it would alter the whole notion of comic songs to a point where it will no longer be possible to speak of moppies, but where they will become the equivalent of Trinidad’s calypsos. His dream may not be shared by many of his colleagues, and even less by the leaders of Klopse associations and
Malay Choir boards. However, he articulates a new desire for recognition and the material gains that could go with it. His ambitions manifest the impact on the world of the New Year festivals of conceptions and ways of doing coming from globalised entertainment, already transformed by widespread internet practices.
* * *
The manner in which moppies are created is not exceptional. They represent a case of transforming appropriation, something that has been practised by musicians in every era, in every genre — popular and “highbrow” — and in a multiplicity of forms. What is unique about Cape Town comic songs is the combination of borrowing (“snatching”) melodic fragments from already existing songs, of assembling and reorganising them so that they fit a particular rhythm pattern (the ghoema beat), and associating them with original lyrics in colloquial Afrikaans. By using these combined techniques, moppie com-posers achieve coherence; they avoid discontinuity by adjusting their “snatches” so that the way they are stitched together allows listeners to perceive them as wholes, while some of their component parts remain recognisable. Moppies demand artistry and skill; these talents are geared towards producing a comic effect: the songs must be funny, they must make listeners laugh, whatever the topic they deal with. But there is seriousness behind the comic. The funniness of moppies alludes to realities that have to be acknowledged, and sometimes confronted, and the song’s humour often carries more or less implicitly a serious message.
This is what we would now like to turn to. After describing the creative processes through which moppies are produced, we will now focus on the content of the songs and on what they may convey.
Notes
1. See pp. 155–157.
2. In this chapter and the following, we discuss moppies on the basis of detailed studies of two overlapping corpuses of songs. Armelle Gaulier collected several songs during practices preceding the 2007 competitions and was given recordings of songs performed earlier.
She decided to analyse moppies performed both by Klopse (members of the Kaapse Klopse Karnival Association, KKKA, or the Kaapse Klopse Association, KKA) and by Malay Choirs and selected those which were frequently mentioned in interviews she conducted with coaches. In these interviews, she asked composers to provide translations of the lyrics and had these translations checked by an expert in order to avoid misinterpretations. Denis-Constant Martin gathered the words, or parts of the words, of more than seventy moppies, collected from their authors during interviews conducted in 2011 or reproduced in Armelle Gaulier’s MA dissertation (2007) and from Anne Marieke van der Wal (2009), who herself reprinted several old songs from ID du Plessis’ collection (1935). Paul Sedres translated these lyrics into English and has also been of invaluable assistance in explaining some of the innuendos and allusions they contained and in identifying the original sources of the melodies. We wish to express our utmost gratitude to Paul Sedres, who has always been ready to help us in our investigations and oftentimes provided information and advice, without which we would not have been able to conduct our research.
3. “L’ironie humoresque […] fait allusion au sérieux impalpable de l’apparence: l’ironie plaisante, mais dans sa moquerie on lit la vérité à livre ouvert; et l’humoriste joue, lui aussi, seulement son sérieux est infiniment lointain […] L’interprétation de l’humour a donc trois niveaux à franchir: il faut comprendre la farce qui est dans la simulation sérieuse, puis le sérieux profond qui est dans cette moquerie, et enfin le sérieux impondérable qui est dans ce sérieux.”
4. “Rire, c’est dire qu’on n’est pas seul, qu’on est multiple.”
5. “Le collectif se réjouit d’être ensemble et de se maintenir.”
6. “Le comique, la puissance du rire est dans le rieur et nullement dans l’objet du rire.”
Baudelaire, Charles (1884) De l’essence du rire. In Curiosités esthétiques, tome 2. Paris:
Calmann-Lévy. p. 370. See: http://baudelaire.litteratura.com/ressources/pdf/oeu_27.pdf [accessed 23 November 2011]; quoted in: Jeanson 1950: 59.
7. “il faut concevoir le rire comme étant à la fois intentionnel et spontané. C’est dire qu’en dehors de l’intention qui le commande, on ne saurait pas plus lui trouver des causes que des raisons, mais seulement des occasions, des prétextes, et tout au plus des motivations […] je ne ris pas à cause d’un événement en lui-même comique: je ris selon une certaine intention, et, ce faisant, je me fais apparaître comique l’événement à propos duquel je ris” (italics in the original).
8. Adam Samodien and Rashaad Malick, interview with Denis-Constant Martin, Woodstock, 12 October 2011; Abubakar Davids, quoted in Van der Wal 2009: 87.
9. Christine Winberg quotes Du Plessis 1935: 41.
10. In the 18th and 19th centuries, the usual vehicular language at the Cape included many elements from Malay languages, some of which have been retained in contemporary Afrikaaps (Davids 2011).
11. The Cape Times, 4 January, 1886.
12. Winberg, Christine (1992) The ‘Ghoemaliedjies’ of the Cape Muslims: Remnants of a slave culture. Unpublished paper, University of Cape Town, quoted in Bickford-Smith 1994: 302.
13. Anwar Gambeno, interview with Denis-Constant Martin, Mitchells Plain, 11 October 2011.
14. Ismail Dante, interview with Armelle Gaulier, Mitchells Plain, 7 September 2006.