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
5 nodes on the map.
Everyone and everything on the map
Event
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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.
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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.
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King Kong
The all-African jazz opera that opened in Johannesburg in 1959, written by Todd Matshikiza with Harry Bloom and Pat Williams. Miriam Makeba took the female lead and Hugh Masekela played in the orchestra, and the European tour that followed carried several of the musicians out of the country for good.
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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.
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Soweto uprising
The student protest of 16 June 1976 against being taught in Afrikaans, and the police shooting that followed. It is the event behind Hugh Masekela's "Soweto Blues", and Abdullah Ibrahim declared his support for the ANC openly after it.
Hear the music for yourself