The South African Music Graph

Everyone and everything on the map

Person

• Rashid Lombard

  Cape Town news photographer who documented the worst years of the 1980s, including Desmond Tutu being tear-gassed in Gugulethu in 1989, and then co-founded the city's international jazz festival and ran it through his company espAfrika. He was given the National Order of Ikhamanga in Silver in 2014 and died in June 2025, aged 74.

  Cape Town1 connection

Artist

• Abdullah Ibrahim

  Born Adolph Johannes Brand in Cape Town in 1934, he grew up in Kensington and learned marabi, langarm and American jazz before helping found the Jazz Epistles in 1959. He left South Africa in the early 1960s, recorded in Paris at Duke Ellington's urging, and came home to cut "Mannenberg" in 1974. He died in June 2026 at the age of 91.

  1930sCape Town13 connections

• Basil Coetzee

  Tenor saxophonist born in District Six in 1944, whose family was moved to Manenberg under the Group Areas Act. He took the first solo on "Mannenberg" in 1974 and carried the nickname of the township for the rest of his life. Through the 1980s he played the tune at rally after rally, which is how it became an anthem. He died in 1998.

  1940sCape Town11 connections

• Bokani Dyer

  Pianist and composer born in Gaborone in 1986, the child of a South African exile family, who moved to South Africa as a child and studied jazz at the University of Cape Town, graduating in 2008. He won the Standard Bank Young Artist award for jazz in 2011 and plays in Shane Cooper's band Mabuta. His music runs from trio jazz to electronics.

  1980sCape Town2 connections

• Brenda Fassie

  Singer born in Langa in Cape Town in 1964, who moved to Soweto at sixteen and became the biggest pop voice in the country. "Weekend Special" made her name in 1983 and Memeza was the best selling South African album of 1998. Time called her the Madonna of the townships in 2001. She died in Johannesburg in 2004, aged 39.

  1960sCape Town1 connection

• Chris McGregor

  Pianist born in Somerset West in 1936, who studied at the University of Cape Town and built the Blue Notes out of the city's mixed jazz scene. Playing across the colour line was illegal, so in 1964 the band left for the Antibes festival and stayed away. In London he built the big band Brotherhood of Breath. He died in France in 1990.

  1930sCape Town3 connections

• Errol Dyers

  Self-taught Cape Town guitarist, born in 1952, who put the goema beat of the carnival into jazz guitar. He played with Abdullah Ibrahim, Basil Coetzee, Robbie Jansen and Winston Mankunku, and Mason quotes him on how musicians turned "Mannenberg" into a protest anthem. He died of emphysema in Cape Town in 2017.

  1950sCape Town6 connections

• Hilton Schilder

  Cape Town pianist from the Schilder family of musicians, son of Tony Schilder and nephew of Chris Schilder. He supplied the jazz side of the Genuines in the 1980s and played in Robbie Jansen's bands. Mason quotes him remembering Jansen talking to crowds about rising up while "Mannenberg" played.

  Cape Town4 connections

• Hotep Idris Galeta

  Cape Town pianist, born Cecil Galeta in 1941 and known as Cecil Barnard before he left. He went into exile in 1961, worked in the United States with Hugh Masekela and Jackie McLean, and taught at the University of Hartford. He came home in 1991 and spent the rest of his life teaching young musicians. He died in 2010.

  1940sCape Town3 connections

• Kesivan Naidoo

  Drummer born in East London in 1979, who studied jazz at the University of Cape Town's South African College of Music and won the Standard Bank Young Artist award for jazz in 2009. Bheki Mseleku shaped his playing, and he worked with Hotep Idris Galeta, Winston Mankunku Ngozi and Miriam Makeba. He leads Kesivan and the Lights.

  1970sCape Town4 connections

• Kyle Shepherd

  Cape Town pianist and film composer born in 1987, who started on violin and moved to piano at fifteen. He was mentored by Zim Ngqawana and trained partly around Abdullah Ibrahim's M7 school, where his mother taught, and he leads a trio with Shane Cooper and Jonno Sweetman. He won the Standard Bank Young Artist award for jazz in 2014 and scored Noem My Skollie.

  1980sCape Town7 connections

• Louis Moholo-Moholo

  Drummer born in Langa in Cape Town in 1940, who left with the Blue Notes in 1964 and became a central figure in European free jazz. He was the last of the six left alive, and the only one who lived to play in a South Africa without apartheid. He moved back to Cape Town in 2005 and died there in June 2025, aged 85.

  1940sCape Town3 connections

• Mac McKenzie

  Bassist and composer, born Gerald McKenzie in Bridgetown, Cape Town, in 1951, the son of a banjo player and carnival leader known as Mr Mac. He led the Genuines, the band that took the carnival's goema rhythm into rock and jazz and then called the result goema. He died in 2024.

  1950sCape Town4 connections

• Morris Goldberg

  Cape Town saxophonist, white and classically literate, who was brought into the 1974 "Mannenberg" session because he could read music and could teach Ibrahim's scores to players who could not. His remark about going to visit Gladys Williams in Manenberg gave the tune its name. He was left off the first credits.

  Cape Town2 connections

• Reza Khota

  Guitarist born in Johannesburg and now based in Cape Town, classically trained at Wits, who won the national classical guitar competition in 1998. He leads his own quartet and plays in Mabuta and in Kesivan and the Lights, and has worked with the artists William Kentridge and Nicholas Hlobo.

  Cape Town2 connections

• Robbie Jansen

  Alto saxophonist and flautist, born in 1949, who came up through the Cape Town rock and soul circuit and the band Oswietie before playing on the 1974 "Mannenberg" session. Known as the Cape Doctor, he spent the 1980s playing the tune at anti-apartheid concerts and talking to the crowds between choruses. He died in Cape Town in 2010.

  1940sCape Town12 connections

• Sathima Bea Benjamin

  Cape Town singer, born in Claremont in 1936, who left South Africa with Abdullah Ibrahim and spent most of her life in New York. It was Benjamin who persuaded Duke Ellington to come and hear the trio in Switzerland in 1963, the audition that opened Europe to them. She returned to Cape Town in 2011 and died there in 2013.

  1930sCape Town1 connection

• Shane Cooper

  Bassist, composer and producer born in 1985, who moved to Cape Town to study jazz at UCT and now works between jazz and electronic music. He plays in the Kyle Shepherd Trio, leads the band Mabuta and records dance music as Card On Spokes. He was the Standard Bank Young Artist for jazz in 2013.

  1980sCape Town4 connections

• Taliep Petersen

  Singer, composer and director who grew up in District Six and sang with the klopse from the age of six in his father's troupe, the Dark Town Strutters. With David Kramer he wrote the musicals that put Cape Town's own music on the stage, from District Six the Musical in 1987 to Ghoema in 2005. He was shot dead in his house in 2006.

  1950sCape Town3 connections

• Winston Mankunku Ngozi

  Tenor saxophonist from Retreat in Cape Town, born in 1943, who stayed in South Africa when others went into exile. His 1968 album "Yakhal' Inkomo" became one of the country's best selling records and a landmark of South African jazz. He played with Chris McGregor and Dudu Pukwana before they left. He died in Cape Town in 2009.

  1940sCape Town5 connections

Group

• Jazz Epistles

  The bebop group formed in 1959 by Abdullah Ibrahim, Kippie Moeketsi, Hugh Masekela, Jonas Gwangwa, Johnny Gertze and Makaya Ntshoko. It mixed players classified coloured and African, and men from Cape Town and Johannesburg, at a time when that alone was a provocation. Their one album is remembered as the first jazz LP by black South African musicians.

  1950sCape Town1 connection

• Kyle Shepherd Trio

  Kyle Shepherd's trio with Shane Cooper on double bass and Jonno Sweetman on drums. Kesivan Naidoo held the drum chair earlier, and the group recorded and toured through the 2010s.

  Cape Town3 connections

• Oswietie

  The Cape Town band, steeped in rock and soul rather than jazz, that Abdullah Ibrahim worked with on Underground in Africa in 1974. Basil Coetzee and Robbie Jansen played saxophones in it, and the sessions began the working partnership that produced "Mannenberg" later that year.

  Cape Town3 connections

• Pacific Express

  Cape Town band started in the 1960s by the bassist Paul Abrahams and the guitarist Issy Ariefdien, first aimed squarely at American soul and funk. Martin calls it the conservatory where a generation cut its teeth, Jonathan Butler, Basil Coetzee and Robbie Jansen among them.

  Cape Town3 connections

• The Blue Notes

  The mixed sextet Chris McGregor built in Cape Town, with Dudu Pukwana, Mongezi Feza, Nikele Moyake, Johnny Dyani and Louis Moholo-Moholo. A band of black and white players could not work legally in South Africa, so in 1964 they played the Antibes festival and stayed in Europe. Their sound changed British jazz, and only Moholo-Moholo lived to come home.

  Cape Town3 connections

• The Genuines

  The 1980s band led by Mac McKenzie, with Hilton Schilder on keys and Robbie Jansen often in the line-up, that pushed carnival rhythms through rock and jazz and called what came out goema. They played political rallies, and in 1987 recorded with McKenzie's father for Shifty Records.

  Cape Town4 connections

Song

• Mannenberg

  The tune Abdullah Ibrahim improvised at a prepared upright piano in Cape Town in June 1974, with Basil Coetzee taking the first solo. The groove is marabi, the saxophone sound is langarm and the beat sits close to a slow goema. Coetzee and Jansen then played it at rally after rally, and it became the anti-apartheid anthem of Cape Town.

  1970sCape Town11 connections

Album

• Mannenberg - 'Is Where It's Happening'

  The 1974 LP that carried the tune, released by Rashid Vally after he decided the working title was not marketable. A photograph Ibrahim took of Gladys Williams was on the sleeve. With Gallo distributing it, 43,000 copies sold in South Africa within seven months, extraordinary for a jazz record.

  1970sCape Town1 connection

Genre

• Cape jazz

  The name for jazz as Cape Town plays it, built on the goema beat of the carnival, the marabi groove and the saxophone sound of the langarm dance bands. Martin's view is that the idea of it was probably inspired by Abdullah Ibrahim's reworking of carnival tunes, and that what happened in the 1980s was the systematising of an older habit.

  Cape Town9 connections

• Goema

  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.

  Cape Town9 connections

• Langarm

  The dance band music of coloured Cape Town, built on waltzes, foxtrots and South African steps such as vastrap and ticky-draai. Mason's point about "Mannenberg" is that its saxophone sound is langarm, which is a large part of why Cape Town listeners recognised themselves in it.

  Cape Town3 connections

Place

• Cape Flats

  The sandy plain east of central Cape Town where the apartheid state built the townships it moved people to, including Athlone, Manenberg, Gugulethu, Bonteheuwel, Hanover Park, Mitchells Plain and Khayelitsha. SAHO notes that the area has produced musicians from jazz to hip hop, alongside long unemployment and gang violence.

  Cape Town2 connections

• Cape Town

  The city whose music this graph is mostly about. Denis-Constant Martin's study treats it as a creole city where slavery, carnival, church music, dance bands and American jazz kept feeding each other. Apartheid then cut the city up, clearing District Six and pushing people out to the Cape Flats, and the music carries that history.

  Cape Town24 connections

• District Six

  The inner-city neighbourhood named in 1867 as the sixth municipal district, home to about 55,000 people before apartheid emptied it. It was declared a white area on 11 February 1966, and more than 60,000 people had been moved out to the Cape Flats by 1982. Basil Coetzee was born there and Taliep Petersen grew up there.

  1860sCape Town5 connections

• Langa

  The oldest township in the Western Cape, opened in 1927 under the Urban Areas Act of 1923 after black residents were removed from Ndabeni. The name is Xhosa for sun and also recalls Chief Langalibalele. Louis Moholo-Moholo and Brenda Fassie were both born there.

  1920sCape Town3 connections

• Manenberg

  A Cape Flats township planned from November 1964 and built from 1966 under the Group Areas Act for families classified coloured. People were sent there from Constantia, District Six, the Bo-Kaap, Wynberg, Crawford, Sea Point and Lansdowne. Between 1966 and 1970 the state built 5,621 dwellings for 33,922 people. The song spells it with three n's.

  1960sCape Town4 connections

Venue

• UCT South African College of Music

  The University of Cape Town's music school, where Chris McGregor studied in the 1950s and where Kesivan Naidoo and Bokani Dyer trained half a century later. Kyle Shepherd started there and left.

  Cape Town4 connections

Event

• Ghoema the musical

  The stage show David Kramer and Taliep Petersen made in 2005, which ran at the Baxter Theatre from 11 November 2005 to 7 January 2006. It follows Cape Town's music back to the spice trade and to the people brought to the Cape in slavery from Mozambique, Madagascar, India, Ceylon and Indonesia.

  2000sCape Town2 connections

• Kaapse Klopse

  Cape Town's new year carnival, whose troupes and competitions are one of the places the goema beat lives. Martin records that Afrikaans moppies, the comic songs descended from the old drum songs, were introduced into the carnival competitions in 1949. Taliep Petersen sang in his father's troupe from the age of six.

  Cape Town3 connections