Cape Town Data
The South African Music Graph
See who taught whom, who played what and where, on one map of South African music.
See how South African musicians, songs and places are connected. Every connection below is sourced, and every node leads to what we know about it.
The map grew out of our article An Interactive Network of Cape Jazz Musicians.
The network
4 nodes on the map.
Everyone and everything on the map
Artist
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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.
Song
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Pata Pata
The song Miriam Makeba first recorded with the Skylarks in the 1950s and cut again in 1967 for the American market, when it reached number 12 on the Billboard Hot 100. The title means touch touch in Xhosa and named a dance popular in Johannesburg shebeens.
Place
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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.
Event
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Sharpeville massacre
The killings of March 1960 that set off the repression which closed South Africa's mixed jazz clubs and pushed a generation of musicians abroad. Mason writes that the apartheid state attacked jazz relentlessly in the repression that followed.
Hear the music for yourself