The sandy plain east of central Cape Town where the apartheid state built the townships it moved people to, including Athlone, Manenberg, Gugulethu, Bonteheuwel, Hanover Park, Mitchells Plain and Khayelitsha. SAHO notes that the area has produced musicians from jazz to hip hop, alongside long unemployment and gang violence.
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By his own account, in 1976 Rashaad Pandy of Super Fisheries in Athlone filled a round Portuguese loaf with chips, polony and atchar for four workers, and one of them called it a Gatsby smash.
Food Super Fisheries 1976 Cape Town
Source: Daily Maverick: In search of Cape Town's own Great Gatsby · Wikipedia: Gatsby (sandwich)
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The Kaaps Woordeboek, the first trilingual dictionary of the Cape Flats language Kaaps, was launched at the Castle of Good Hope on 23 April 2026. The UWC linguist Quentin Williams compiled it.
Language & Slang Cape Flats 2026 Cape Town
Source: Cape Towner: Kaaps language gains formal recognition with the launch of its first dictionary · University of the Western Cape: The First Trilingual Dictionary of Kaaps Launched
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District Six was declared a whites-only area under the Group Areas Act on 11 February 1966. Over 60,000 people were removed to the Cape Flats and the buildings were bulldozed.
District Six sat on the slopes above the city centre: crowded, poor, mixed, and by every account one of the most alive places in South Africa. On 11 February 1966 the apartheid government declared it a white area under the Group Areas Act of 1950. The District Six Museum records that more than 60,000 people were forcibly removed to the barren outlying areas known as the Cape Flats, that their houses in District Six were flattened by bulldozers, and that by 1982 the life of the community was over. The cleared land was largely left empty afterwards, which is its own kind of statement. The museum that carries the district's name was built around what former residents kept: their own records, photographs and memories of a place the state tried to take off the map.
History District Six 1966 Cape Town
Source: District Six Museum: About District Six
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The saxophonist on "Mannenberg" was born in District Six in 1944. His family was moved to Manenberg in 1969 under the Group Areas Act, and the township name became his own.
Music District Six 1944–1998 Cape Town
Source: South African History Online: Basil Coetzee · Wikipedia: Basil Coetzee
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Cape jazz emerged in Cape Town from the late 1950s. Valmont Layne of the University of the Western Cape, who wrote his doctorate on goema, describes it as the rhythmic essence of collective life among the poor and traces its links to Cape jazz.
Music District Six 1959 Cape Town
Source: Denis-Constant Martin: Sounding the Cape (African Minds, 2013), p. 353 · University of the Western Cape: Art activist Layne probes goema music for his doctorate
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From the Dutch and Afrikaans kwaad, meaning bad or angry, kwaai described a fierce animal or a cross person. The Dictionary of South African English records an approving sense from 1974, and both senses are current.
Language & Slang Cape Flats Especially common in Cape Town
Source: Dictionary of South African English: kwaai · Cape Town Magazine: Your Guide to Cape Town Slang
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South African History Online dates the planning of Manenberg to November 1964 and its establishment to 1966. Between 1966 and 1970, 5,621 dwellings were built there for a population of 33,922.
Places Manenberg 1966–1970 Cape Town
Source: South African History Online: Manenberg, Cape Flats · John Edwin Mason, "Mannenberg": Notes on the Making of an Icon and Anthem, African Studies Quarterly 9(4), 2007
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