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 network

4 nodes on the map.

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 Town1 connection

Kwela
The pennywhistle music that carried South African sound abroad in the 1950s. South African History Online glosses the name as Zulu for get up, and notes that in township slang it also meant the police van. Basil Coetzee started out on the pennywhistle in 1958.

3 connections
Marabi
The township party music that grew in the slum yards of the mining towns from the end of the nineteenth century, built on a repeating chord pattern. Abdullah Ibrahim grew up playing it, and its groove is what people hear in "Mannenberg", helped by a piano prepared with thumbtacks in the hammers.

2 connections
Mbaqanga
The African jazz that grew out of marabi and kwela from around 1950 and became the popular music of the townships. Zacks Nkosi's "Jackpot" is an mbaqanga tune, and Robbie Jansen counted mbaqanga among the styles a working Cape Town musician simply had to know.

2 connections

Play the South African music quizTen new questions every day, most of them short clips from more than 90 South African recordings, from kwela and Cape jazz to amapiano. Answer to read the story behind each song.