The Irish-South African Research Chair was launched in 2023 as a collaboration between the Trinity Long Room Hub and the Centre for Humanities Research (CHR) at the University of the Western Cape (UWC). The Research Chair, which has already seen three Irish visiting researchers travel to Cape Town, draws on the humanities to explore a shared legacy of colonialism, empire, partition and apartheid between Ireland and South Africa.
These themes are central to Dr Layne’s work, particularly in his earlier experience as curator and archivist with the District Six Museum in Cape Town.
“I’m sitting there as a curator thinking, how does one engage with memory without falling back into the trap of racial thinking? It’s very difficult because we’re all products of the world and we can’t always apprehend the completeness and fullness, the biases we have”, Dr Layne reflects.
Now many years later, through his research towards a book, Goema’s Refrain: Cape Jazz and the Slave Archive, he’s exploring music and different archival practices as a way to do just that and “to think anew about what it might be to engage with the past through the sonic, through the sensory connection, and through memory.”
The emergence of jazz in South Africa is central to thinking about slave memory. Jazz, he proposes, was both a form of resistance and commercialized as a tool of apartheid.
“South African jazz is one of the recognisable regions in the world where jazz has been established outside the USA. And inside of that—there’s this conversation about Cape Jazz and I’m using that title (of his project) a little bit tongue in cheek because many people would say there isn’t such a thing as ‘Cape Jazz’, but I’m deliberately using that word because Cape in South Africa is central to South Africa’s colonial history and its slave past.”
“The struggle took place through sensory experiences”, Dr Layne says, as he seeks to explore enslavement history in relation to the folk form, ‘Goema’, within the jazzing tradition associated with the Cape.
In South Africa, slaves were freed in the British colonies but immediately encountered obstacles to freedom or to complete liberation. District Six, the former municipal district of Cape Town, is central to this story. Between the 1840s and 1860s, this neighbourhood was established with freed slaves. “People came to settle there, and eventually by the end of the 19th century, it was a fairly cosmopolitan densely populated neighbourhood with all kinds of people,” he explains.
Over the twentieth century, the British began addressing the “racial formation of South Africa”—and what to do about the “native question”, or as Dr Layne frames it “how to get the natives to be obedient citizens or semi-citizens in the colony.” With the ensuing destruction of District Six and other neighbourhoods in the 1960s, “thousands of people are forced into exile, including a renaissance of artistic creation that was happening in urban areas among black people, progressive white intellectuals and artists.”
“Because of this flight into exile the local jazz scene was left in despair, as people were forcibly removed out of the city into new housing projects. In that process there’s a spatial reorganisation process that affects how the music is then experienced.”
At the Trinity’s Long Room Hub’s weekly gathering of early career researchers, fellows and staff, Dr Layne also spoke about the complicated relationship between the carnival tradition in South Africa and jazz memory. Looking at dance music, and particularly square dancing or ‘vastrap – a black folk dance and musical style – he explained that “some of these things were appropriated for white nationalism alongside some of the carnival music.” Referring to carnival’s most famous song, ‘Daar kom die Alibama’, recorded in the early 20th century, he suggested that “the dialect with which people pronounce this particular kind of Afrikaans signifies something about race”, adding “there’s this complex relationship that people have with memory because the song is recorded in order to support a claim by Afrikaner nationalism.”
“In the process a kind of racial identity is also fixed—it’s not ‘black face’, it’s ‘black voice’. It’s the way in which black voices sound when they speak Afrikaans”.
One of the key musicians of this tradition, and featured in his book, is Abdullah Ibrahim, a sort of “James Joyce of South African music”, as Dr Layne contextualises it. “He’s the first person who gave international profile to music from South Africa that honoured the carnival tradition.”
“Abdullah Ibrahim’s music is purely sonic; there’s no visuality that goes with it and he had a completely different non-racial, inclusive view about South African history. So there was no controversy about his use of carnival in his music and that’s what I’m trying to think about.”
In the book, Dr Layne is also looking at a punk band called The Genuines. “That’s where I get the word ‘Goema’ from: they took this word and reclaimed it. Many people in the community – especially middle-class intellectuals – were turning their backs on this music because of its association with oppression. These young musicians took the music and gave it a radical punk sensibility, and again, there are many parallels with what’s going on with music in Ireland”, notes Dr Layne.
“It’s interesting being in Ireland with your recent memory and history”, Dr Layne notes. “Obviously there’s a long relationship between South African and Ireland, but being here…there’s something about Ireland that’s very novel for someone like me, coming from the global South. To come to a city that’s so very European in many ways but also so very different. There’s an affinity with colonised peoples that is very interesting to experience. Being here has given me a much richer sense of what Ireland is all about.”
Valmont Layne is a musician and Researcher at the Centre for Humanities Research. He is also the Programme Director for New Archival Visions at the University of the Western Cape. In addition, he has worked as a university arts administrator, curator, and cultural advocate. He played curatorial and leadership roles in developing the District Six Museum in Cape Town and the Klein Karoo Nasionale Kunstefees in Oudtshoorn, both internationally celebrated. Currently, he is developing a monograph based on his doctoral thesis titled "Goema's Refrain: Cape Jazz and the Slave Archive." He also co-convenes the Sound Working Group at the Centre and is co-PI on the Oscillations: Sonic Inquiries and Practices project.
The Charlotte Maxeke-Mary Robinson Research Chair emerges out of a longstanding collaboration between the Centre for Humanities Research (CHR) at UWC and the Trinity Long Room Hub that has focused on colonialism, partition, postcoloniality and race. Relationships and networks forged through these institutions’ fellowship programmes have laid the groundwork for the establishment of this research chair. The CHR has now welcomed a number of fellows from Trinity College, including Professor Ruth Barton (Creative Arts), Professor Eoin McNamee (English) and former artist in residence at the Trinity Long Room Hub Rita Duffy.