A drum built like a wine cask, a beat you can play with your feet, and a word three good sources cannot agree on. Goema runs from the New Year parade through the Malay choirs into Cape jazz, and it started with enslaved people making an instrument out of what was to hand.
At a glance
- The drum
- single-headed, built from staves and hoops like a wine cask, carried under the arm (Martin)
- How it is played
- left hand marks the beat, right hand plays the rhythm (Layne, University of the Western Cape)
- Spellings
- goema, ghoema, ghomma, and several more listed by the Dictionary of South African English
- Etymology
- DSAE says probably a dialectal Malay word related to gong; Martin calls it most probably a creole coinage; Layne links it to ngoma
- First English citation
- 1934, as gomma (DSAE)
- Where you hear it
- klopse and Malay choir competitions, langarm and vastrap dance music, and Cape jazz (Martin)
- Second meaning
- since the 1980s, a style mixing klopse music with jazz and rock (DSAE)
Start with the object
A goema is a drum you can carry. Denis-Constant Martin, whose book Sounding the Cape is the fullest study of this music, describes it as a single-headed wooden drum built the way a wine cask is built, from staves held together with metal hoops. It is usually tucked under one arm and struck with both hands. Valmont Layne, writing as a researcher at the University of the Western Cape, gives the same picture and adds the division of labour between the hands: the left marks the beat, the right plays the rhythm.
Martin makes the obvious point that is easy to miss. This is a creole instrument, invented in a wine-making country out of the materials enslaved people could actually get hold of, some of whom worked as coopers. He compares it to the drums that enslaved people built in the sugar islands of the Caribbean out of rum barrels, such as the Guadeloupean gwo-ka. The shape of the thing is a piece of Cape economic history.
The word, and the argument about it
You will see goema, ghoema and ghomma in print, and they all mean the same drum and the same beat. Our own Cape jazz piece uses goema.
Where the word came from is genuinely contested, and the two best sources we opened disagree. The Dictionary of South African English lists the headword as ghomma, records it in English writing from 1934, and derives it probably from a dialectal Malay word connected to gong, adding that the resemblance to Xhosa and Zulu ingoma is probably coincidental. Valmont Layne writes that it is more than likely that the word has strong connections to ngoma, the term for drum and for ritual and healing practice across much of the continent. Martin lays out both, plus a Khoikhoi musical bow called the gom-gom and I.D. du Plessis's suggestion that the word simply imitates the sound, and concludes that the most probable answer is that ghoema is a creole invention formed where several words for drum, rhythm and music met at the Cape.
That is not a failure of scholarship. It is what a word looks like when it is made by people from four continents living in one port.
The rhythm
The beat is a short pattern repeated twice in a bar, and Martin prints it as notation rather than describing it, because it is simpler to play than to explain. He also notes it can be produced without a drum at all: banjos and guitars can carry it, and in a street parade feet and sticks will do.
What Martin argues about it is more interesting than its shape. He calls the ghoema beat very closely related to the vastrap rhythm of boeremusiek and langarm, links it, through the ethnomusicologist Simha Arom, to the indlamu pattern that underlies African jazz and mbaqanga, and suggests it settled in as the basic pulse of Cape Town music because it was the smallest thing that the rhythmic habits of everyone at the Cape had in common. A unifying creole pulse, in his phrase.
Carnival, choirs and the songs
Most Capetonians meet the beat at New Year, under the /en/products/blogpost/753/ troupes and the Malay choirs. The repertoires have names. Ghoemaliedjies were dancing songs accompanied by the drum, sung in the streets and at picnics, and Martin notes their lyrics were usually sharp, made to mock people who held or pretended to authority. Their descendants are the Afrikaans moppies, the comic songs that are still one of the most popular competition items: medleys that stitch bits of existing melodies to new material, held together by the ghoema beat, built on call and response, with a soloist who acts as much as he sings. Alongside them are the nederlandsliedjies, the slow ornamented songs whose ornaments are called karienkels.
Both terms belong to communities that have been labelled by other people for centuries. "Cape Malay" is one of those labels, widely used and also contested, and many families prefer Cape Muslim. The music does not need either word to be understood.
Goema and jazz
This is where the beat leaves the parade. Martin writes that the ghoema drum had already infiltrated the drumming of Cape Town jazz drummers before anyone consciously used it in a fusion. When musicians did start using it deliberately, in the 1980s, the results got their own name. The Genuines, led by the bassist Gerald "Mac" McKenzie with Hilton Schilder on piano and Robbie Jansen often in the line-up, called their jazzy kind of rock ghoema, and cut Mr Mac and the Genuines for Shifty Records in 1987. The Dictionary of South African English records exactly that second sense of the word: a style mixing klopse music with jazz and rock, popularised in the 1980s. McKenzie and Schilder later worked with the Goema Captains of Cape Town.
The line runs on. The pianist Kyle Shepherd, quoted in Martin's book, credits Alvin and Errol Dyers, Hilton Schilder, Robbie Jansen and McKenzie with taking traditional ghoema and extending it until it became an art form. Layne places Abdullah Ibrahim in the same conversation, and Martin suggests the very idea of Cape jazz was inspired by Ibrahim's reworking of carnival tunes. Our /en/cape-town-explained/mannenberg/ page follows one tune along that route, and the interactive network of Cape jazz musicians shows how tightly this small group of players is tied together.
On stage and in the museum
Goema has also been the subject rather than the soundtrack. David Kramer and Taliep Petersen wrote a musical called Ghoema, first performed at the Baxter Theatre in November 2005, which uses the drum as a way into the musical history of the Cape and the slave trade that shaped it. Denis-Constant Martin records an Iziko Museums exhibition at the Castle in 2010 and 2011 titled Ghoema and Glitter.
Why it matters now
Martin's closing argument about the beat is a political one. Because it comes out of the history of the poorest people in a port city, playing it and naming it has become a way of claiming that history back. Layne puts the same thought more briefly when he calls goema the rhythmic essence of collective life among the poor. A drum made from a wine barrel by people who were not free is now the thing Cape Town points at when it wants to say what it sounds like.