For generations, the calls of beach traders have been part of the soundtrack of a Cape Town summer. Now a new book is putting the people behind those familiar voices at the centre of the story.
If you have spent a summer on the beaches of Camps Bay or Clifton, chances are you know the call.
“A lolly to make you jolly!”
Long before smartphones, playlists and food delivery apps became part of a beach day, Cape Town had its own soundtrack.
It came from traders walking across hot sand carrying cooler boxes, calling out to beachgoers with rhymes, jokes and enough personality to turn buying an ice cream into part of the holiday experience.
Now, as spring arrives and another Cape Town summer edges closer, a new book is celebrating the people behind those calls.
A Lolly to Make You Jolly – In Memory of Our Forgotten People, co-authored by former beach trader and community advocate Paul Jacobson and Vinetia Cedras, tells the stories of Cape Town’s beach traders and celebrates the Cape Coloured community that helped shape this distinctive part of the city’s beach culture.
At the heart of the book is the late Vincent “Vinna” Cedras, Vinetia’s father and a man remembered as one of the pioneers of Cape Town’s beach-trading community.
More than the man selling you an ice cream
For Jacobson, the story is personal.
He spent 12 years trading on the beaches of Camps Bay and Clifton and says he has spent more than three decades among a community he considers family.
“I traded on the beaches of Camps Bay and Clifton for twelve years, but I have spent more than thirty years among this incredible community,” Jacobson said.
“People often remember the lolly, the jokes and the laughter, but they don’t always remember the extraordinary people behind them. This book is about changing that.”
For generations of families returning to Cape Town’s beaches each summer, the sellers became familiar faces.
They carried heavy cooler boxes through the sand, remembered regular customers and entertained beachgoers with calls that became almost as recognisable as the beaches themselves.
They were entrepreneurs, entertainers and, in many ways, unofficial ambassadors for Cape Town’s beaches.
They became part of summer.
Remembering Vinna
For co-author Vinetia Cedras, documenting the stories also meant preserving the legacy of her father.
“To many people, my father was simply Vinna, the beach trader everyone knew and loved,” she said.
“To us, he was our father, our mentor and someone who believed in helping others succeed.”
The book reaches beyond Vinna’s story, using photographs, memories and poetry to document the characters, humour and history of beach trading.
Readers are also introduced to people such as Zenobia, one of the few women to establish herself in what was traditionally a male-dominated beach-trading environment.
For Cedras, these are not simply entertaining stories from summers gone by.
“These stories belong to all of us. They are part of our shared Cape Town heritage.”
Preserving a piece of Cape Town
The book also celebrates the contribution of Cape Town’s Coloured community to the personality and culture of the city.
For Jacobson, preserving these stories is about pride rather than nostalgia alone.
“This book isn’t about looking backwards with sadness,” he said. “It’s about looking back with gratitude and pride.”
It is a particularly fitting message as South Africa marks Heritage Month and the city begins looking towards another summer season.
Soon Cape Town’s beaches will fill again.
And among the umbrellas, towels and children running towards the water will be traders continuing a tradition that stretches back generations.
A Lolly to Make You Jolly is a reminder that heritage does not only live in museums, monuments or history books.
Sometimes it is a familiar face returning every December.
A joke shouted across a crowded beach.
A cooler box carried through deep sand.
And six words generations of Capetonians can still hear in their heads:
“A lolly to make you jolly!”
A Lolly to Make You Jolly – In Memory of Our Forgotten People by Paul Jacobson and Vinetia Cedras is available now.
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