Abdullah Ibrahim's 1974 tune carries the name of a Cape Flats township, with one letter too many. Here is the session, the people in the room, the township on the sleeve, and what the best scholarly account of the song says about the spelling.
At a glance
- Recorded
- Cape Town, June 1974, at what SAHA calls the old UCA studio and Mason places on Bloem Street
- Album
- "Mannenberg - 'Is Where It's Happening'", the first release on As-Shams, founded in Johannesburg in 1974
- In the room
- Abdullah Ibrahim, Basil Coetzee, Robbie Jansen, Morris Goldberg, Monty Weber and Paul Michaels, produced by Rashid Vally
- Sales
- 43,000 copies in South Africa within seven months of release, after Gallo took on distribution, according to Mason
- The township
- Manenberg, planned from November 1964 and established in 1966, per South African History Online
- The spelling
- Mason notes three n's on the record and two in the township, and gives no reason for the difference
A winter session in central Cape Town
In June 1974 Abdullah Ibrahim, still billed then as Dollar Brand, took a band into a studio in central Cape Town. The historian John Edwin Mason, who interviewed Rashid Vally, Robbie Jansen and Morris Goldberg for his article on the song, puts the studio on Bloem Street and calls it a winter's day. The Sunday Times Heritage Project calls the room the old UCA studio. Several days of playing produced enough material for four or five albums, most of it never released.
Then, Mason writes, three or four days in, Ibrahim sat down at an old upright piano that had been prepared with thumbtacks in the hammers. That gives a piano a hard, metallic ring, the sound of the marabi parties of his youth. He started to improvise, waved Basil Coetzee in first and then the others, and suggested lines to them while leaving them room to find their own. Robbie Jansen told Mason they felt something they had not felt on any of the other days. One or two takes later it was finished.
The title came from a visit, not a plan
The band had a new piece and no name for it. Ibrahim said he had pictured an elderly woman walking down a township street. Morris Goldberg mentioned that he was about to go and see Gladys Williams, his family's former housekeeper, in Manenberg. Mason reports that Ibrahim's answer was that "Mrs. Williams from Mannenberg" would make a great title. Rashid Vally chose something he thought would sell better, and the album went out as "Mannenberg - 'Is Where It's Happening'". It was the first release on As-Shams, the label Vally started in Johannesburg that year. Gladys Williams did not disappear from it: a photograph of her, taken by Ibrahim, went on the cover.
The township on the sleeve
Manenberg was not an old place in 1974. South African History Online dates its planning to November 1964 and its establishment to 1966, the same year District Six was declared white. It was built for low-income families classified coloured who were being moved out of Constantia, District Six, the city centre, the Bo-Kaap, Wynberg, Crawford, Sea Point and Lansdowne. Between 1966 and 1970, 5,621 dwellings went up for a population of 33,922. So the name on the record was eight years old, and everybody who bought the record knew exactly what kind of place it described. Mason puts it plainly: the township had already become a symbol of both the dispossession and the endurance of the coloured community.
You can read the whole arc in one musician. Basil Coetzee was born in District Six in 1944 and his family was moved to Manenberg in 1969, five years before he played the solo that made the township famous.
What is actually in the music
Mason's reading of the tune is worth following, because it explains why so many different listeners heard something of their own in it. The groove is marabi. The beat sounds like ticky-draai, or, he adds, a lazy ghoema, depending on who is listening. The saxophone sound is langarm, the dance band sound of coloured Cape Town. The aesthetic underneath all of it is jazz. Most South African listeners had something familiar to hold on to and something unfamiliar to enjoy. If you want the longer version of how those ingredients fit together, our piece on Cape jazz and the /en/cape-town-explained/goema/ explainer both take it further.
There is also an argument attached to the melody. Mason notes its strong resemblance to "Jackpot", an mbaqanga tune recorded by the Johannesburg saxophonist Zacks Nkosi around 1960, and reports that South Africa's Sunday Times wrote in 2006 that Nkosi and his son went to their graves believing "Mannenberg" was taken from it. Mason's own view is that the song is far more than an mbaqanga melody and that the sum of its parts makes it anything but a copy. It is a real dispute, and it belongs in the story.
How a dance tune became an anthem
Nothing about the record in 1974 sounds like protest. It is gentle, long and danceable, the kind of thing Mason calls a Friday night song. Its second life started later and, he argues, had little to do with Ibrahim, who was back in exile in New York by the end of 1976. It was Basil Coetzee and Robbie Jansen who made it an anthem, by putting it at the centre of rally after rally and benefit concert after benefit concert through the 1980s. Coetzee played it at the youth festival that went with the national launch of the United Democratic Front in August 1983. In 1982 the anti-apartheid paper Grassroots had already called it a symbol of our hardship.
Mason is careful about how far that goes. He quotes the Cape Town musician Gus Ntlokwana saying it is too heavy a statement to call the tune South Africa's unofficial national anthem, and concludes that it was very much the anti-apartheid anthem of Cape Town. That is the honest size of the claim.
The spelling
This is the question the page is named after, so here is where it stands. Mason, who is the closest thing there is to a definitive account, puts the spelling in a footnote and leaves it there. He records that the township is spelt with two n's, that the song has been spelt with three ever since it was released, and that the title refers to the township. He does not say who added the letter, or when, or why, and neither does anything else we opened. Even the sources that tell the story most carefully wobble: South African History Online's biography of Coetzee prints the album title with two n's, and his nickname appears in print both ways.
Why it still matters
"Mannenberg" is the reason a lot of people outside South Africa can name a Cape Town sound at all. It is also the point where a township built to break a community ended up carrying its name around the world, spelt slightly differently. Our profile of Abdullah Ibrahim follows his life around it, and the interactive network of Cape jazz musicians shows how many players in this city connect back to that one session.