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The city whose music this graph is mostly about. Denis-Constant Martin's study treats it as a creole city where slavery, carnival, church music, dance bands and American jazz kept feeding each other. Apartheid then cut the city up, clearing District Six and pushing people out to the Cape Flats, and the music carries that history.
A 254-page book of Islamic law, printed in 1877, is early Afrikaans written in Arabic letters.
Abu Bakr Effendi's Bayan al-Din was printed in Istanbul in 1877: Hanafi religious law set out in the Afrikaans his Cape students spoke, written throughout in modified Arabic script.
Afrikaans grew out of Cape Dutch in contact with Khoekhoe, Malay and a Portuguese creole.
The Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Language Structures says Afrikaans arose from the colloquial Cape Dutch of Dutch settlers under the influence of Khoekhoe, South African Portuguese Creole and South African Malay. How exactly it happened is still argued about.
The world's biggest timed bike race started as a protest for safer cycling.
The Cape Town Cycle Tour began in 1978 as The Big Ride In, a protest for safer cycling paths organised by Bill Mylrea and John Stegmann. The organisers call it the largest timed cycling event in the world.
The story
In 1978 Bill Mylrea and John Stegmann organised a mass ride through Cape Town to argue for safer cycling paths. They called it The Big Ride In, and by the event's own account over 500 cyclists turned up. It kept happening. The ride around the peninsula has grown into what the organisers describe as the largest timed cycling event in the world, drawing around 30,000 riders a year, professionals and first-timers on the same road. The organisers also make a point of its apartheid-era history: it was a gathering that was not segregated, and amateurs rode alongside professionals from the start. The original point has not entirely gone away. Cape Town is still a difficult city to cycle in on an ordinary Tuesday, which is roughly what the first riders were complaining about.
Kaaps got its first dictionary in 2026, centuries after people started speaking it.
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.
The person hanging out of the taxi window shouting Wynberg has a job title: gaartjie.
In Cape Town the gaartjie, also written gaatjie or guardjie, is the crew member on a minibus taxi who calls the destination, works the door and takes the fares.
Tweede Nuwe Jaar, 2 January, is remembered as the one day off enslaved people at the Cape were given.
Cape Town's Second New Year falls on 2 January. The tradition ties it to the one day off enslaved people at the Cape were given, once New Year's Day, which belonged to their owners, was over.
Amaphela are the sedan share taxis of Cape Town's townships. The name is isiXhosa for cockroaches.
Amaphela are shared sedan taxis working inside Gugulethu, Nyanga, Crossroads and Philippi. GroundUp reported that the name means cockroaches and put the minimum fare at R8 in January 2020.
On 11 February 1966 District Six was declared white, and more than 60,000 people lost their homes.
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.
The story
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.
The first Cape madrasah taught in Malay. By the mid 1800s it taught in Cape Dutch.
Suleman Dangor writes that Tuan Guru, the first official imam at the Cape, used Malayu in the Dorp Street madrasah he established at the end of the 1700s, and that Cape Dutch replaced it in the middle of the nineteenth century.
The Cape Peninsula has 2,785 plant taxa, and at least 158 grow nowhere else.
A checklist published in the journal Koedoe in 2025 counts 2,785 plant taxa on the Cape Peninsula. It records 261 threatened species, 38 of them Critically Endangered, and the authors say at least 158 grow nowhere else.
The story
Botanists and conservation scientists published a new checklist of the Cape Peninsula's plants in the journal Koedoe in 2025, the latest major update to work first done in 1950. It counts 2,785 plant taxa on a peninsula you can drive the length of in an hour, with Asteraceae the largest family at 300 taxa and Erica the most diverse genus at 118 species. It records 261 threatened species, of which 38 are Critically Endangered, and 437 naturalised non-native taxa. Writing about their own work in February 2026, the authors say at least 158 of the peninsula's plants grow nowhere else on Earth, and describe Cape Town as the extinction capital of the world for flowering plants, because of how many species it has already lost to the city spreading across their only habitat.
The Bo-Kaap was white by rule before it was bright by choice, or so the story goes.
The usual explanation for the Bo-Kaap's colours is that rented houses had to be white, and owners painted them when they could finally buy. It is widely repeated but thinly evidenced.
The story
The Bo-Kaap grew from the 1760s, when Dutch colonists built rows of small rental houses, the huurhuisjes, and leased them to enslaved and freed people. It became the heart of Cape Muslim life, and it holds the Auwal Mosque, the first mosque in the country. The colours are the thing everyone photographs. South African History Online reports the common explanation carefully, saying the choice of colour is said to be attributed to a rule that leased houses had to be white, lifted when residents were able to buy, at which point owners painted them bright as an expression of their freedom. Note the hedging. It is a good story and it may be true, but it is transmitted as community memory rather than proved from the record. Ask a resident and you may also be told people simply liked colour.
In 1807 the Slave Lodge held 283 people: 187 men, 73 women and 23 children.
Built in 1679, the Slave Lodge is the second oldest surviving colonial building in Cape Town. A count in 1807 recorded 283 enslaved people living in it. It is now an Iziko museum.
The story
The Slave Lodge was built in 1679, and Iziko describes it as the second oldest existing colonial structure of the Cape Colony. It housed the enslaved people the Dutch East India Company owned, who did the building, farming and domestic work the settlement ran on. A count in 1807 recorded 283 people living in it: 187 men, 73 women and 23 children. In 1811 the remaining occupants were moved out and the building became government offices, housing the Supreme Court by 1817 and later the Legislative Council. It became a cultural history museum in 1966 and was renamed the Slave Lodge in 1998. Iziko notes how little is known about the people who lived there, which is its own kind of record: the building survived and most of the lives inside it did not.
The parade has an old name that is now widely considered offensive, and a current one that is not.
The troupes are the Kaapse Klopse. The City of Cape Town calls the event the Cape Town Street Parade, or Tweede Nuwe Jaar Parade. The older name, built on a racial slur, is now widely considered offensive.
Cape cooking was built in kitchens staffed by people who had been enslaved.
The Cape Town Museum records that about 63,000 people were brought to the Cape as forced labour between 1658 and 1807, from Madagascar, South Asia, South East Asia, East Africa and, early on, West Africa. Slavery ended there on 1 December 1834.
Cape cooks treat koesister and koeksister as two different cakes. The dictionary files one under the other.
In modern Cape usage the koesister is spiced and rolled in coconut and the koeksister is plaited and syrup-soaked. The Dictionary of South African English lists koesister among the spelling variants under koeksister.
Cape Town still sets its watch by a cannon cast in 1794.
South African History Online dates the Noon Gun time signal to 1806. The guns were cast in 1794, fired first at the Castle, and moved to Lion Battery on Signal Hill, where the first shot was on 4 August 1902.
The story
At noon a bang rolls across the city bowl. South African History Online says the guns have fired a time signal since 1806, when they were deployed at the Imhoff Battery at the Castle after the British occupation. Neighbours found the report unbearable, so they were eventually moved to the more remote Lion Battery on Signal Hill, and the first signal fired from there was on 4 August 1902. The guns are older than the tradition: 18-pounder smooth bore muzzle loaders to a pattern designed by Captain Thomas Blomfield in 1786, cast by Walker and Company in early 1794 and proof fired at Woolwich that June. The South African Navy maintains them. They fire daily except Sundays and public holidays, which is the kind of detail that tells you a tradition has been negotiated with its neighbours.
Some of the people the label describes call Cape Malay an apartheid term.
South African History Online notes that Malay at the Cape covered people from well beyond the Malay peninsula. In the Daily Maverick, the writer Rustum Kozain says he learned as a child that Cape Malay was an apartheid term and that Muslim was the identity that counted.
The Cape Doctor got its name because people believed the wind blew disease out of town.
The south-easter that scours Cape Town in summer is called the Cape Doctor. The Dictionary of South African English records the name from 1861, from a belief that it swept away disease.
The story
The Cape Doctor is the strong south-easterly that blows across the Cape Peninsula from spring into late summer, the wind that knocks over café chairs and lays the tablecloth on Table Mountain. The Dictionary of South African English dates the name to 1861 and quotes Lady Duff-Gordon describing a wind that keeps away cholera and fever of every sort. Nineteenth-century Cape Town had poor drainage and regular epidemics, and the idea that a hard summer wind flushed the bad air out of the streets was taken seriously. The medical theory has not aged well. The nickname has. Residents still credit it with clearing haze, pollution and heat, which is closer to true, and still curse it in January when it has been blowing for four days straight.
Pickled fish was a way to keep fish before fridges. Now it is how Cape Town knows it is Easter.
Cape pickled fish, fried and steeped in a spiced vinegar and onion sauce, is an Easter fixture in both Muslim and Christian households. How it became an Easter dish is disputed.
Baie, piesang, blatjang and baadjie are everyday Afrikaans words with Malay roots.
The Dictionary of South African English derives baie from the Malay banyak, piesang from pisang, blatjang from belachan and baadjie from baju. Their earliest South African citations run from 1786 to 1890.
The goema drum gave Cape Town a genre its name. The dictionary traces the word to Malay, not to ngoma.
Goema is both a barrel-shaped hand drum and the Cape Town music built on its beat. The Dictionary of South African English traces the word probably to a dialectal Malay word related to gong.
Bobotie's origin story gets repeated everywhere and settled nowhere.
The Dictionary of South African English calls bobotie a traditional dish probably of Malay origin and traces the word to the Malay bumbu, curry spices. The often repeated claim that the first recipe was printed in 1609 is not established.
The Western Cape has three official languages, and none of them is spoken by a majority.
Section 5 of the Constitution of the Western Cape, 1997 gives Afrikaans, English and isiXhosa equal official status for provincial government. Census 2022 records 41.2 per cent of the province speaking Afrikaans most often at home, 31.4 per cent isiXhosa and 22.0 per cent English.
American minstrel troupes toured Cape Town in 1862, and the local parade borrowed their look.
Visiting American minstrel companies brought blackface minstrelsy to Cape Town in 1862, and local performers adapted the style into what became the Kaapse Klopse. Which troupe came first is not settled.
In Cape Town, Sunday morning is koesister morning.
Buying koesisters on a Sunday morning, from a neighbour's kitchen or a corner deli, is a long standing Cape Muslim routine. Writing in the Daily Maverick, Ishay Govender calls koe'sisters a Sunday tradition created by Cape Malays or Cape Muslims.
A 2025 scholarly article says Cape Town's first marketing board coined the name Mother City.
Writing in the Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry in 2025, Cullen Goldblatt says Mother City was a coining of Cape Town's first marketing board, part of an early twentieth-century invention of a new white national identity.
The story
Ask why Cape Town is the Mother City and you usually get a menu of guesses. Cullen Goldblatt, writing in the Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry in 2025, gives an answer instead: the name was a coining of Cape Town's first marketing board, part of the early twentieth-century, Union-era invention of a new white supremacist, Afrikaner-and-English national identity. He cites Vivian Bickford-Smith's book The Emergence of the South African Metropolis for it. The familiar explanations came later and are still repeated: that Cape Town was the original colonial settlement of 1652, that a newspaper once called it the country's only true metropolis, a word built from the Greek for mother and city, that things take nine months to happen here, and that Capetonians reach easily for jou ma. Treat those as folk etymology rather than as competing histories. The Daily Maverick has argued in print that calling Cape Town the mother of the country props up a settler story and writes out the people who were already here.
The Second New Year parade was banned from the city centre for twelve years.
Martin records that the Green Point Track was closed to the troupes in 1968 after Green Point was declared white, that marches in central Cape Town were banned in 1976 under the Riotous Assemblies Act, and that the 2 January parades were suspended from 1977 until 1989.
The beat was in Cape Town jazz drumming before anyone set out to put it there.
Martin writes that the ghoema beat had already infiltrated the drumming of Cape Town jazz drummers before it was explicitly used in fusions and in Cape jazz, and that it is very closely related to the vastrap rhythm of boeremusiek and langarm.
The tune became a struggle anthem because two saxophonists kept playing it at rallies.
Mason argues that Basil Coetzee and Robbie Jansen turned a 1974 hit into an anthem by putting it at the centre of rallies and benefit concerts through the 1980s, including the youth festival at the national launch of the UDF in August 1983.
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 & SlangCape FlatsEspecially common in Cape Town
Jol went national, but the dictionary traces its English pronunciation to working-class Cape speech.
Jol means a party or a good time. The Dictionary of South African English derives it from Afrikaans and says the South African English pronunciation reflects either the Afrikaans accent of working-class Cape Coloured communities or an Englished form.
The drum is built like a wine cask, from staves and hoops, by people who often worked as coopers.
Denis-Constant Martin describes the goema as a single-headed wooden drum assembled from staves held by metal hoops, made in a wine-making country from materials enslaved people could get. Kirby described it in 1939 as a small cask with a skin nailed over one end.
Bru and bra sound like the same word. One is Afrikaans, the other is English through isiXhosa and isiZulu.
The Dictionary of South African English derives bru from the Afrikaans broer and bra from English brother, explaining the bl- variants of bra by the regular shift of r to l when English words are used in Nguni languages.
Bredie is the Cape word for a stew, and it once meant spinach in Madagascar.
The Dictionary of South African English quotes a traveller's account of 1815 saying that breedi meant spinach in the Madagascar tongue and that the word was brought to the Cape by enslaved people. It also offers a possible Portuguese root.
Street rivalry became a ticketed competition on 1 January 1907, at the Green Point Track.
Martin records that the first Grand New Year Coloured Carnival was held at the Green Point Track on Tuesday 1 January 1907. The Cape Times reported seven troupes and close to 7,000 spectators, with about two thousand of them white.
Denningvleis takes its name from dendeng, the Malay word for strips of spiced dried meat.
Denningvleis is slow cooked lamb or mutton with black pepper and tamarind. The Dictionary of South African English derives denning from Malay dendeng and vleis from Afrikaans, and its earliest citation is 1944.
Sosatie comes from the Javanese word for skewered meat and reaches Cape print in 1833.
The Dictionary of South African English derives sosatie from South African Dutch sasaatje and ultimately Javanese sesate, skewered meat. Its earliest Cape citation is from the Cape of Good Hope Literary Gazette in 1833.
Mos is the smallest word in the room and it changes the whole sentence.
Mos is an Afrikaans-derived particle meaning after all, of course or you know, dropped into a sentence for emphasis. The Dictionary of South African English traces it to West Flemish mos and cites it in English from 1900.
About 20,000 performers walked the 2026 parade, on 5 January rather than 2 January.
The City of Cape Town announced the 2026 Cape Town Street Parade for Monday 5 January, with approximately 20,000 performers on a route from Chiappini Street along Somerset Road into the stadium. AFP reported around 17 troupes taking part.
Handwritten cardboard destination signs are a familiar Cape Town taxi cue.
In Cape Town the route is often written by hand on cardboard and propped on the dashboard. Between that and the gaartjie calling the destination, you can usually tell where a taxi is going.
South African History Online calls Kirstenbosch the world's first garden devoted to a country's own plants.
Cecil John Rhodes bought Kirstenbosch in 1895 and left it to the government at his death in 1902. It was set aside as a national botanic garden in May 1913, with a grant of £1,000 a year.
The story
Cecil John Rhodes acquired the Kirstenbosch estate on the eastern slopes of Table Mountain in 1895, and on his death in 1902 he bequeathed the land to the government. In May 1913 the government set the estate aside for a national botanic garden and agreed to contribute one thousand pounds a year. The Botanical Society was formed on 10 June 1913 and the board of trustees met for the first time on 16 June. Harold Pearson, a botany professor who had come to South Africa in 1903, was appointed honorary director without a salary and served until his death in 1916. South African History Online describes Kirstenbosch as the first botanic garden in the world to be devoted to a country's indigenous flora, and as the first botanical garden inside a natural UNESCO World Heritage Site, inscribed in 2004.
Cape Town has a seasonal stew made from a flower that grows in the dams.
Waterblommetjie bredie is a meat stew made with Aponogeton distachyos, an edible Western Cape water plant. The Dictionary of South African English dates the word in English to 1950.
Troupes do not just parade. They compete in named song categories, and the categories have dates.
Martin records that Afrikaans moppies, comic songs built on the ghoema beat, were introduced into the carnival competitions in 1949, and that nederlandsliedjies became a full item in the Malay choir competitions around 1957.
In the 2013 national travel survey, minibus taxis were the main way to work for 25 percent of South Africans.
In the 2013 National Household Travel Survey, minibus taxis were the main way to work for 25 percent of South African workers, against 7 percent for buses and 4 percent for trains. The sector gets no operating subsidy like rail and bus.
There is no timetable. A rank is where routes start, and the taxi goes when the taxi is ready.
The City of Cape Town and MyCiTi describe minibus taxis as unscheduled services, hailed from the kerbside, charging by distance, working out of large ranks that serve many routes. The Dictionary of South African English says the same: fixed routes, set fares, no timetable.
The comic songs sung at carnival competitions have an older name: ghoemaliedjies, drum songs with sharp lyrics.
Martin describes Afrikaans moppies, one of the most popular items in klopse and Malay choir competitions, as the descendants of ghoemaliedjies: dancing songs accompanied by the drum, sung in streets and at picnics, usually caustic about people in authority.
Bring small money and say your stop early. Those two habits cover most of taxi etiquette.
The City of Cape Town says payment is made on board and prices rise with distance, so carry change. Cape Town Magazine's rider's guide says to tell the gaartjie your stop about 50 to 100 metres before it.
Satin, colour, twirled umbrellas and tossed walking sticks: the look is part of the performance.
AFP described performers at the January 2026 parade in bright satin costumes, many twirling umbrellas and tossing walking sticks, accompanied by brass bands, goema drummers and banjos. Martin records that troupes have competed on costume since the nineteenth century.
The earliest description of a drum played by enslaved people at the Cape dates from 1820.
Martin cites Percival Kirby for the first mention of a drum played by enslaved people in the Cape Colony, dated 1820 and described as a hollowed log covered at one end with an undressed sheepskin.
Snoek has been salted and dried at the Cape since at least 1797, when Lady Anne Barnard wrote it down.
Snoek is Thyrsites atun, a snake mackerel of southern waters. The Dictionary of South African English records it salted and dried at the Cape in 1797 and notes a horn sounded for the first catch.
Lank means plenty, and the dictionary admits it does not know where the word came from.
The Dictionary of South African English labels lank as slang used especially by schoolchildren and young adults, meaning plenty of, or good, or simply very. The etymology is given as unknown.
A Cape Town taxi driver starts the day owing money. The target has to be made before anyone earns anything.
GroundUp reported in August 2023 that Western Cape drivers named daily targets of R800 to R1,200 to hand to the owner, with R700 to R800 going on petrol, and that a driver pays his gaartjie R150 to R250 a day.
Johannesburg's taxi hand signs were learned by watching until an artist spent nine years recording them.
Gauteng's taxi hand signs, one shape per destination, are learned by imitation and word of mouth. Susan Woolf spent nine years documenting them, published a booklet, added a braille edition and took a Wits doctorate.
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