Mama Goema

Mama Goema: The Cape Town Beat in Five Movements is a multinational documentary film by Ángela Ramirez (Colombia), Sara Gouveia (Portugal) and Calum MacNaughton (South Africa).

Cape Town musicians guide a journey to the beat at the heart of the Mother City and a primal rhythm named Goema. With indigenous Khoi-San roots, colonial influences and shaped by the city’s slave history, Goema’s blueprint lies in Cape Town’s carnival culture.

It is from these annual festivities that new and exciting variations have emerged. These include defiant Rock sounds from the 1980s that overcame barriers imposed by Apartheid as well as healing Jazz sounds in the wake of the country’s democratic rebirth.

Despite this, Goema has yet to fulfill its potential to unite a city and evoke collective pride. It remains a word that is misunderstood and in the process of discovering itself as the common denominator of a culture defined by diversity.

Mama Goema charts the evolution of Goema through composer Mac McKenzie and multi-instrumentalist Hilton Schilder. Having traced the course of Goema’s history, we see it take a bold step into the future.

Tracy African music archive digitised.

More than 80 years ago Hugh Tracey made his first recordings of African music and earned himself a reputation as a madman who sallied into the bush with people playing drums.

That was in 1929, today his unique archives have been digitalised and used as teaching aids in two new school textbooks, realising his life dream of preventing the music from dying out.

The International Library of African Music (ILAM) is made of up recordings on 78 rpm discs and magnetic tape. Its contents amount to a running time of six months, gathered from what is now Zimbabwe throughout southern and eastern Africa and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The Tracey collection is housed at the Rhodes University campus at Grahamstown in South Africa and is the most important archive of its sort in Africa.

PRI Story

FROM: Capital FM Kenya