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
3 nodes on the map.
Everyone and everything on the map
Song
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Mannenberg
The tune Abdullah Ibrahim improvised at a prepared upright piano in Cape Town in June 1974, with Basil Coetzee taking the first solo. The groove is marabi, the saxophone sound is langarm and the beat sits close to a slow goema. Coetzee and Jansen then played it at rally after rally, and it became the anti-apartheid anthem of Cape Town.
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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.
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Soweto Blues
Hugh Masekela's protest song about the 1976 Soweto uprising, sung by Miriam Makeba. It carried the news of the killing of schoolchildren to audiences who would otherwise have heard only the government's account.
Hear the music for yourself