Parading respectability: The cultural and moral aesthetics of the
Christmas Bands Movement in the Western Cape, South Africa is an
intimate and incisive portrait of the Christmas Bands Movement in the
Western Cape of South Africa. Drawing on her own on background as well
as her extended research study period during which she became a band
member and was closely involved in its day-to-day affairs, the author,
Dr Sylvia Bruinders, documents this centuries-old expressive practice of
ushering in the joy of Christmas through music by way of a social
history of the coloured communities. In doing so, she traces the slave
origins of the Christmas Bands Movement, as well as how the oppressive
and segregationist injustices of both colonialism and apartheid,
together with the civil liberties afforded in the South African
Constitution (1996) after the country became a democracy in 1994 have
shaped the movement.