Both a drum and a beat. The drum is a single-headed instrument built like a small wine cask, which the Dictionary of South African English traces through Afrikaans to a dialectal Malay word. The beat runs through the carnival, the Malay choirs and the dance bands, and in the 1980s the Genuines took the name for their own music.
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Goema is both a barrel-shaped hand drum and the Cape Town music built on its beat. The Dictionary of South African English traces the word probably to a dialectal Malay word related to gong.
Music Cape Town Cape Town
Source: Dictionary of South African English: ghomma · Wikipedia: Cape jazz
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Visiting American minstrel companies brought blackface minstrelsy to Cape Town in 1862, and local performers adapted the style into what became the Kaapse Klopse. Which troupe came first is not settled.
Traditions Cape Town 1862 Cape Town
Source: ESAT: Minstrels · South African History Online: The Cape Minstrels, Origins and Evolution of Tweede Nuwe Jaar in the Cape
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Cape jazz emerged in Cape Town from the late 1950s. Valmont Layne of the University of the Western Cape, who wrote his doctorate on goema, describes it as the rhythmic essence of collective life among the poor and traces its links to Cape jazz.
Music District Six 1959 Cape Town
Source: Denis-Constant Martin: Sounding the Cape (African Minds, 2013), p. 353 · University of the Western Cape: Art activist Layne probes goema music for his doctorate
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Martin writes that the ghoema beat had already infiltrated the drumming of Cape Town jazz drummers before it was explicitly used in fusions and in Cape jazz, and that it is very closely related to the vastrap rhythm of boeremusiek and langarm.
Music Cape Town Cape Town
Source: Denis-Constant Martin, Sounding the Cape: Music, Identity and Politics in South Africa (African Minds, 2013) · University of the Western Cape: Art activist Layne probes goema music for his doctorate
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Denis-Constant Martin describes the goema as a single-headed wooden drum assembled from staves held by metal hoops, made in a wine-making country from materials enslaved people could get. Kirby described it in 1939 as a small cask with a skin nailed over one end.
Music Cape Town Cape Town
Source: Denis-Constant Martin, Sounding the Cape: Music, Identity and Politics in South Africa (African Minds, 2013) · Dictionary of South African English: ghomma
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Mason breaks the tune into familiar local ingredients: a marabi groove, a beat close to ticky-draai or a lazy ghoema, saxophones with a langarm sound, and a jazz aesthetic holding it together.
Music 1974 Cape Town
Source: John Edwin Mason, "Mannenberg": Notes on the Making of an Icon and Anthem, African Studies Quarterly 9(4), 2007 · Denis-Constant Martin, Sounding the Cape: Music, Identity and Politics in South Africa (African Minds, 2013)
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Martin records that Afrikaans moppies, comic songs built on the ghoema beat, were introduced into the carnival competitions in 1949, and that nederlandsliedjies became a full item in the Malay choir competitions around 1957.
Traditions Cape Town 1949–1957 Cape Town
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Martin writes that the Genuines, led by Mac McKenzie with Hilton Schilder and often Robbie Jansen, named their music ghoema and recorded Mr Mac and the Genuines for Shifty Records in 1987. The Dictionary of South African English lists that 1980s style as a second sense of the word.
Music 1987 Cape Town
Source: Denis-Constant Martin, Sounding the Cape: Music, Identity and Politics in South Africa (African Minds, 2013) · Dictionary of South African English: ghomma
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Martin describes Afrikaans moppies, one of the most popular items in klopse and Malay choir competitions, as the descendants of ghoemaliedjies: dancing songs accompanied by the drum, sung in streets and at picnics, usually caustic about people in authority.
Music Cape Town 1949 Cape Town
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AFP described performers at the January 2026 parade in bright satin costumes, many twirling umbrellas and tossing walking sticks, accompanied by brass bands, goema drummers and banjos. Martin records that troupes have competed on costume since the nineteenth century.
Traditions Cape Town Cape Town
Correct as of 19 September 2026. Source: AFP: Thousands attend annual minstrel parade in South Africa's Cape Town · Daily Maverick: Tweede Nuwe Jaar parade goes ahead despite last-minute court battle
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Martin cites Percival Kirby for the first mention of a drum played by enslaved people in the Cape Colony, dated 1820 and described as a hollowed log covered at one end with an undressed sheepskin.
Music Cape Town 1820 Western Cape
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David Kramer and Taliep Petersen's musical Ghoema ran at the Baxter Theatre from 11 November 2005 to 7 January 2006. It uses the drum as a way into the musical history of the Cape and the slave trade behind it.
Music Baxter Theatre 2005–2006 Cape Town
Source: Encyclopaedia of South African Theatre, Film, Media and Performance: Ghoema · Dictionary of South African English: ghomma
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