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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

  • 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 Town3 connections

Album

  • Memeza

    Brenda Fassie's thirteenth album, produced by Sello Chicco Twala, which went platinum on the day of release and sold about 700,000 copies in South Africa. It mixes pop and kwaito and was the best selling South African album of 1998.

    1990s2 connections

Genre

  • Kwaito

    The slowed-down South African house music that came out of Soweto between the late 1980s and early 1990s, with loops, deep bass and township slang over the top. The name comes from the slang word kwaai. Brenda Fassie's Memeza is described as pop and kwaito.

    3 connections

Place

  • Soweto

    The cluster of townships south west of Johannesburg, built from the 1930s under the Urban Areas Act, whose acronym was adopted in 1963. Jonas Gwangwa was born in Orlando East, Brenda Fassie moved there at sixteen, the 1976 uprising happened there, and kwaito came out of it in the 1990s.

    2 connections

Hear the music for yourself

Connections

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