The South African Music Graph

Everyone and everything on the map

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 Town3 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 Town1 connection

• 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 Town1 connection

• 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 Town1 connection