There is no such music as Cape jazz; it is pure invention. As a geographical label, it has all the veracity of a tourist brochure, since it says little about the spatial politics of Cape Town. As a historical label, it flattens the debates that have existed regarding its social significance and cultural identity since at least the 1930s (Layne, 1995). As a musical label, it is as misleading as so-called township jazz, and serves similar functions to suggest otherness and exoticism in the discourse of world music. More invidiously, the term “Cape jazz” cements racial divisions between coloured and black South Africans, undermining jazz’s integrative role in South African history and in music history more broadly. For these and other reasons, the designation “Cape jazz” has contributed to the marginalisation of jazz from Cape Town in our broader stories of South African jazz. While much research has been conducted by Cape Town-based academics, researchers and students, little of this has been published, and so the mystification continues. 

 

In our exploration of jazz’s significance in Cape Town then, the term “Cape jazz” is used, but under erasure. Similarly, racial classification will be for the purposes of clarification (ironically). For example, black will be used to refer to black African and coloured African jazz musicians. When referring to the Cape as a geographical region, the focus will mostly be on the Cape Flats and specifically Athlone. This is because Athlone, as a kind of portal that connects white and black Cape Town, arguably brings us closer to something that may be called Cape jazz. As an in-between space, Athlone mediated the sounds from these typically South African divides and, when it played host to Cape Town’s historical sounds, it became a kind of crossover space. Imagine, if you will, that Athlone is that space between two strong radio frequencies: if you manually manipulate the dial, you might hear only static for some time; less frequently, you might discover a new kind of music.

 

My reflections of jazz sounds that crossed Athlone are from the perspective of an outsider to the region. I am an East Londoner. Having studied classical music from the age of eight, I began studying jazz in East London’s Stirling High School at the age of thirteen, in what was then called Standard Six. It was then that I began an annual pilgrimage to the Grahamstown National Arts Festival, which had begun to make regular space for a Schools Jazz Festival. The Festival exposed me to legendary musicians from all over the country (and from abroad), including those from Cape Town: lecturers from the University of Cape Town (UCT) College of Music gave seminars and were bandleaders of the ensembles, for example. More exciting was the presence of musicians like the late Duke Ngcukana and his brother Fitzroy Ngcukana. I had little idea back then that I was in the presence of South African jazz royalty and, had I known, I doubt I would have known what to do with this knowledge rather than become dumbstruck with awe. 

 

The 1990s saw a different flowering of jazz in South Africa. It was distinct from comparable periods of earlier years because it included a generation that had minimal knowledge of apartheid and of jazz under apartheid. This generation would go on to study jazz at tertiary level, mostly at UCT, or at the former University of Natal, or at the Durban University of Technology. During the 90s, in any case, Grahamstown would be suffused with the sounds of South African jazz with which different musicians identified, a messy conversation that reminded one of the area’s historical position of frontier country. I therefore heard these jazz styles in flux, as part of South African jazz and of jazz more generally. From the trumpeter Johnny Mekoa, who is also a director of a music school in Johannesburg and would bring his students with him to the Festival, I caught snatches of the dominant Johannesburg sound: mbaqanga. It was also Mekoa who introduced our group to the music of the Durbanite Themba Mkhize, to show us the beauty of Afro-jazz that was an antidote to the Festival’s American mainstream fare. For years, I nursed the suspicion that the University of Natal’s jazz programme only admitted 6-foot tall men (you have to be at least this high to play this music), because the tutors and students of Darius Brubeck – the programme’s director – were almost uniformly tall and male. They were also mostly Indian South Africans (Nishlyn Ramanna, Neil Gonsalves, Mageshen Naidoo), and from them one heard distinct iterations of South African jazz with a Durban accent: a mosaic of Indian classical music and mbaqanga. 

 

Apart from the ambassadors of black Cape Town, the visitors from the Western Cape (and their students) were white or came as representative of their institution, UCT. There was very little aural presence of coloured Cape Town. Nor was there much more during a tour our band undertook in 1998. I remember Darryl Andrews, jazz guitar lecturer from UCT, strumming some lone sounds in Grahamstown, but when running seminars he strictly taught American jazz. The closest we came to playing anything close to the jazz associated with coloured musicians of Cape Town was when we played big band sambas or Latin-tinged arrangements. Why, I wondered, seek fusion from elsewhere when there was already so much jazz fusion or crossover right here? 

 

Athlone is where it’s happening: Cape jazz and spatial politics

 

According to one scholar of music in Cape Town, Denis-Constant Martin, a history of music in Cape Town cannot proceed without thinking through ideas of space and belonging. This is because modes of belonging in a space change in time and inform how we experience time. As space is occupied, it is transformed in various ways, and it is these transformations that cement our senses of belonging. Our efforts to make a space our own often occurs against or in counterpoint to official understandings of who belongs where. As Martin (2013, p. 6) writes, “when people are forced to live in an imposed space, they try to make it their own, mark it in various manners (including with sounds) and often rename it; even when a bounded space is ascribed to a particular group, efforts are made to appropriate it and give it a certain homeliness”. The Cape Flats, and other townships in South Africa, are examples of such an imposed space. Coloured Africans were, as we know, forcibly displaced to the Cape Flats and were there further separated from neighbouring black Africans. 

 

This separation was further marked by the kinds of names given to the different areas, with black areas given Xhosa names (e.g. Khayelitsha) and coloured areas English names (e.g. Mitchell’s Plain). These sub-divisions were spatial realisations of apartheid, since they echoed the divisions imposed within Blackness (in Johannesburg’s Soweto, for example, a road may separate a given township into a Zulu or a Sotho area). Divisive spatial planning is best seen as a response to messy cosmopolitanism. For example, in smaller cities like Port Elizabeth or East London (in the other Cape), coloured townships like Korsten (in PE) and Braelyn (in EL) were separated from black townships New Brighton (PE) and Duncan Village (EL), but there was little appetite or more probably money to house Eastern Cape’s Indian South Africans separately from their coloured fellow citizens because numbers were small.  

 

This anti-cosmopolitan imagination was, as we know, ruthless. It led to a counter-push from black South Africans in at least two ways, showing that space can become a site of struggles to assert belonging. In such struggle, Martin (2013, p. 6) further notes, “music is often used as an identity marker” to lay claim to possession of space. The term “Cape jazz”, viewed as part of this argument, is an example of this process. It shows, firstly, how people of the Cape Flats created “particular types of sociability”: dance, leisure, neighbourliness. For jazz musicians, these forms of sociability were a source of work, even while they were dependent on, and were crucial in the formation of, notions of community. In their movements across different work-spaces – from community halls to cinemas to school halls and shebeens – they connected these disparate spaces. For a region to feel part of the broader space, it became important for it to have hosted, or to host regularly, a particular jazz band. It could then claim to be part of the scene, and it is the proliferation of these scenes that connected to form something that may be called Cape jazz. 

 

The second way in which jazz has been used as an identity marker is less edifying. Rather than jazz scenes in Cape Town being seen as levers for connection, for the making of community, it has been used to delineate borders – often more successfully than the apartheid government could have hoped to do. Types of sociability become less dependent on human interaction; they become, instead, mere soundtracks to an already existing reality and serve to fix that reality. It is in such contexts that music may be said to be in the service of ideology, as it thereby frames the apartheid project: musical areas for group areas. It also naturalises this project, because music is imbricated in powerful formations of identity – it feels owned. In this perspective, music or jazz contribute to a splintering of community and a contraction of scenes. Scenes come to index difference and an outsider status. The idea of Cape jazz seems to have served mostly this function. It has, silently, come to reference a particular kind of coloured jazz sensibility that is seen as antagonistic to black jazz sensibility. Space contracts: coloured South African jazz musicians are seen to be “doing their own thing”, while black South African jazz musicians supposedly have more in common with innovations in the rest of black South Africa. This has significant consequences for notions of belonging: if black jazz musicians play no role in Cape jazz, what role do they play in Cape Town? Are they, as Premier Helen Zille noted in 2012, merely refugees (‘Zille says sorry…’, 2012)? 

 

Several factors undermine this second view. First, jazz musicians have long memories. In his important book Jazz People of Cape Town (2003), Lars Rasmussen interviews approximately thirty musicians. Their stories tell of a development of jazz in Cape Town that encompasses more than their biographies. In the course of these reminiscences, Athlone emerges as an important space – it is mentioned in at least fifteen pages. If the book is read as a story rather than as individual biographies of musicians’ lives, Athlone’s roles in this story are numerous: a home, a lively neighbourhood of music, a space for work because of its amenities, and as a thoroughfare to elsewhere. Musicians recall Athlone, from the 1960s to the 1980s, with a mixture of resignation and pride. In one of these interviews, with the pianist Gary Hendrickse, Rasmussen has the Groups Areas Act and the Mixed Entertainment Act (the Publications and Entertainments Acts of 1963) explained to him, as well as its contribution to the death of the jazz scene in Cape Town. Then, with a rhetorical shrug, Hendrickse tells the following story:

Anyway, so we moved to Athlone. There was quite a lively music scene. With this Mixed Entertainment Act and the forced removals, a number of liquor outlets opened up. This was a situation created when the government decided to go for subsidising or supporting the liquor outlets, but one of the conditions were that they had to have the premises, they couldn’t just have a bottle store, they had to have premises with a restaurant and a lounge and everything. Of course, it was a way of getting rid of all the shebeens. They had a thing called the Coloured Business Cooperation … But no white person was allowed to perform in those places. So a number of places opened up on the Cape Flats, there was The Goldfinger, Scruples, in Athlone, The Athlone Hotel, The Landrost Hotel which was in Lansdowne, quite near to Athlone. The Beverley, The Canyon Steak House, and a number of night clubs in the area, but I never really played at those. Technically, Africans were not allowed to perform there either. It was purely for the coloured group. I had [double bassist and composer] Victor Ntoni and [drummer] Max Diamond playing for me (Rasmussen, 2003, p. 96-97).

 

Jazz memories are, therefore, rooted in space. The notion of Athlone as a jazz space is crucial for the rescue of Cape jazz from the exile imagination. For the latter, we have Dollar Brand/Abdullah Ibrahim to thank. Adolf Johannes “Dollar” Brand, later known as Xahusi Dullar Brahim/Xahuri Abdullah Ibrahim, and finally Abdullah Ibrahim, was born in Kensington, Cape Town, on October 9, 1934. Little is written about his family background, except that his aunt and mother had a formative influence on his early musical education (they taught him the piano). He started playing piano from the age of seven. His father was a painter, and his mother is known for her involvement in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. His early musical career involved playing with bands such as the Tuxedo Slickers, filling in with the Johannesburg-based Manhattan Brothers. His early musical triumph in South Africa was arguably with the Jazz Epistles – Kippie Moeketsi, Hugh Masekela, Jonas Gwangwa, Johnny Gertze and Makhaya Ntshoko. He left South Africa for Zurich on January 27, 1962. At that time, Duke Ellington happened to be in Zurich, was impressed with Brand, and took him to record in Paris, along with Bea Benjamin (Brand’s future wife).  He returned for a short period in 1968–69. He left and returned again in the early 1970s, only to leave permanently after the political events of 1976, swearing never to return until some state of normalcy existed in the country. His places of residence when away from South Africa included Swaziland, Denmark, Switzerland and New York. While overseas, he became a cultural ambassador for the ANC and played many concerts for the latter’s cause. Although his exile was self-imposed (he could move in and out of the country as he wished), it was politically inspired.

 

In the course of his long and illustrious career, Ibrahim’s imagining of the Western Cape underwent complex and intriguing transformations. The late 1950s and early 1960s witnessed and welcomed his musical dedications to friends in the language of modern jazz (as may be heard in Jazz Epistles Volume 1). Like many musicians from the Western Cape, he visited Johannesburg to grab a stake in the music industry, but his early career really belongs to Cape Town (see Rasmussen, 2001). His first departure from South Africa for Europe and the United States saw further engagements with modern jazz. Ibrahim returned to Cape Town in 1968, having converted to Islam. His conversion changed how he thought about the relationship between music and space. For example, throughout 1968, Ibrahim had a column in the Cape Herald titled “The World of Dollar”. In an article published on July 27 of that year, “District Six in Carnegie Hall”, he spends some time relating the difficulty of staging a concert in New York (lack of good pianos, intercultural misunderstandings etc.), and then writes of the concert:

 

The first notes I struck even jarred me. The tension was that much. After the first minute everything fell into place. Homesickness is probably the worst emotion one can experience, and it seems to become more acute as the distance between you and your homeland increases … Everything flooded back. I played through District Six, up Hanover Street, Doug Arendse’s little place in Caledon Street, the Coon Carnival, Windermere, children’s songs, up Table Mountain, through the hills of Pondoland, my mother, father, sisters, brothers – everything (Brand, 1968a).

 

Like Hendrickse, Ibrahim retains acute memories of Cape Town’s small spaces of music and musicking. One can, however, already glimpse the making of an exilic imagination’s relationship to space that would infuse his career: children’s songs, Table Mountain, and the hills of Pondoland in the Eastern Cape. Ibrahim’s writings for the Cape Herald were lessons from the boy who did well overseas (Brand, 1968b). They were meant to instil pride. This is one reason why some ruminated on the problem of imitation in jazz, and local musicians were urged by Ibrahim to find their own voice (Brand, 1968c,e).  For example, in one of the earliest articles, Ibrahim urges his imagined audiences not to be ashamed of “doekums and coons”, while invoking the protea as a unique and precious feature of the South African landscape (Brand, 1968a). Since this was the first article in the “World of Dollar” series, this invocation of the specific and the national is suggestive. As an international jazz refugee, an exile, Ibrahim was narrating what he had deemed more collectively owned in South Africa, and wished to narrate the particular – venues, places, family, doekums – as related to this collective, black, identity. 

 

In his period of second voluntary exile, between 1969 and the 1970s, Ibrahim’s musical memories of space increasingly became what we may describe as epic in scope. Albums such as Good News from Africa and Echoes from Africa, with the bassist East Londoner Johnny Dyani, which we’ll discuss later, can serve as place markers. More relevant, for now, is that Ibrahim’s spatial imagination moved from the particularity that nurtured Cape jazz to generalities of South Africanness – at least until the release of Basil Cotzee’s “Manenberg” in 1974. The tune was about the place Manenberg and played a similar role to “Meadowlands”, since both documented forced removals in ambivalent ways. David Coplan describes the piece as follows: 

 

With great imagination and technical skill, [Ibrahim] took an old jazz mbaqanga melody composed by trumpeter Elijah Nkonyane in the late 1950s, and combined it with marabi, Xhosa ragtime, and hymn melodies, Cape coloured folk music, kwela, American swing, and township rhythms to create Manenberg (Is Where It’s Happening) (The Sun, SRK 786134) in 1974, a record that began a new trend with old materials in black South African urban music. A collaboration between Ibrahim’s nostalgic piano rhythms and fellow Capetonian Basil Coetzee’s saxophone melodies, Manenberg (named after a Cape Town ‘coloured’ suburb) was laid-back, swinging marabi jazz, rectified by the hymnody of the AME Church. Manenberg’s enormous success was due to its combination of so many forms of South African music into a coherent whole with which listeners of all kinds could identify (Coplan, 2007, p. 232).  

 

If the song “Manenberg” was, as Coplan notes elsewhere, an example of authentic syncretism, it is because it sought to remember a time that the new space would erase. This new space, whether Manenberg or exile, was seen as a ploy to eradicate a complex history of black cosmopolitanism to which marabi, mbaqanga, hymn melodies, kwela and folk music pointed. It is significant that, against Coetzee’s saxophone, Coplan describes Ibrahim’s pianism as nostalgic, for this shows the degree to which the latter was experientially out of step with contemporary black Cape experience. Hendrickse and people like Vincent Kolbe knew more about the messy realities of the post-1963 jazz scenes in Cape Town. The music of “Manenberg”, heard in this way, fulfils what Christopher Ballantine has noted as its burden. It is, he writes (2012, p. 198), “a site of memory and forgetting, hope and despair, freedom and repression”. It is fortunate that, in performance, “Manenberg” begins with a statement of the groove from the rhythm section, usually repeated, before the horns enter and introduce the melody. It gives the audience space to remember the piece and to respond in recognition (“yeah!”). 

 

As the piece progresses, even after his death, the saxophone lines of Basil “Manenberg” Coetzee tend to be followed religiously, and what was once an improvised line has settled into a classic composition. The mbaqanga is in the depth of the piece’s lower segments, the short repetitive phrase from the piano’s left hand and the bass tells us that this is one of marabi’s grandchildren. The block chords from Ibrahim on piano take us back to hymn accompaniment and to Duke Ellington. The voicings of the ensemble’s frontline, their reedy textures and harsh timbre, remind us even more that this is South African jazz. Barely audible are the spaces – the breaks – that punctuate “Manenberg’s” groove. These, to my ears, are the spaces of the folk and the communal: you can hear where one may clap in response to the main melody, or rattle a stone-filled tin for accompaniment, or insert vocables in assent to what the melody proposes. “Manenberg” is a musical instantiation of Hendrickse’s rhetorical shrug, and a defiant inclusion of Victor Ntoni and Max Diamond into otherwise segregated musical spaces. I believe it is now a musical number at the University of Cape Town’s graduation ceremonies.

 

A Memory: I remember playing this piece at a September Spring Festival in Hogsback, in the Eastern Cape, in the 1990s. A little hobbit armed with a saxophone, pretending to be as tall and powerful as Basil Coetzee. When we played for the leisured whites (after logistical problems), our audience responded by forming a dancing chain and doing a strangely joyful locomotion. When we held a free concert and our audiences were black, I have a photograph of myself – in jeans and a T-shirt with a very 90s Blossom-inspired floppy hat – aiming the bell of my saxophone at an elderly lady who responded to my playing with dignified but virtuosi Xhosa dance movements. We played the piece every day.

 

Another Memory: Abdullah Ibrahim played in Durban at a Standard Bank Joy of Jazz-sponsored event about five years ago. Within days of his performance I, in Johannesburg, received numerous phone calls gleefully detailing that a drunken member of the audience was kicked out, at the pianist’s behest, for demanding “Manenberg”.

 

As the bell tolls: Cape jazz and the politics of time

 

In the early 1990s, when Brigadier Oupa Gqozo was wreaking havoc in the former Ciskei, I received a consignment of jazz LPs from my father for safe-keeping. At least, I came to see them as mine. I come from a musical family but one which favours silence and books more strongly. My father’s life was in danger. I was never really told why, probably because I was about ten years old. I do remember, however, that he was held as a political prisoner and my mother’s hair fell out from stress. I remember women – my mother’s friends – filling the house in Mdantsane from day to day, singing. By the time I received the albums, I already had a sizeable number of Father’s books, which I now know to have been officially banned. The LPs were, in comparison, innocuous, or so it seemed to me. Letta Mbulu, Hugh Masekela, Johnny Hodges, Jazz Epistles, Tete Mbambisa, Manenberg, Sakhile (with Themba Mkhize), Miriam Makeba and Gibson Kente are what I remember. I knew there was something odd about their arrival because we did not have an LP player in our new home in East London’s suburbs. As the bell tolled apartheid’s demise, and before I had switched musical allegiances from classical to jazz, I discovered South African jazz and heard our shared hymns beyond their institutional contexts.   

 

If “Manenberg” gathered lost or dispossessed space in its syncretism, we should also remember that it did so by compacting time. This gathering of time – unlike that beautifully done by the exiles – was accessibly prosaic or profane. The music from the Cape Flats was reminding Black South Africans that we used to do these things together: these types of sociability were shared. This shared heritage, for me, has always already been evident. My paternal family is from Cradock, after all. What counts for scholars of jazz in Cape Town is that, in its complexities, in the jazz chronotope, the indicators of time-space “are fused into one carefully thought-out, concrete whole. Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history” (Bakhtin, 1981). 

 

The hegemonic understanding of Cape jazz, as I have said, suppresses this aspect of time and space. It cannot, therefore, account for people: the jazz musicians and audiences who rendered this music meaningful. The time of modern Athlone and its struggles for a non-racial South Africa was thickened by musicians from Langa, Gugulethu, Manenberg, Kew Town and renegades from UCT. If the Russian theorist of the novel, Mikhail Bakhtin, had paid more attention to jazz, he would probably have agreed that in Cape jazz, South Africa’s socio-musical contradictions were fused into a concrete whole that bore the mark of historic struggles for creative and cultural agency. Although Bakhtin despised stories about the liberated woman, the story of Sathima Bea Benjamin and her relationship with Athlone is central to us.

 

The late Sathima Bea “Beatty” Benjamin has been immortalised by her music and in the book she co-wrote with the ethnomusicologist Carol Ann Muller, Musical Echoes: South African Women Thinking in Jazz (2011). Benjamin was not the only jazz vocalist in Cape Town (Rasmussen’s book discusses others, who were even more popular). Our focus on her is because, in Musical Echoes Muller’s interactions with the singer – prompting her memories of Cape Town while in New York – foreground a jazz woman’s search for safe spaces, and how those spaces, once seemingly found, informed her experiences of time. Moreover, Benjamin’s historical time thickened once she moved to Athlone, and is thereby a useful vignette for our exploration of Athlone as a place of jazz refuge and refugees. 

 

Benjamin was born in Johannesburg, 1936. According to Muller, her maternal grandmother was of Filipino descent and had settled in Kimberley in the Northern Cape. Having returned to Cape Town, Benjamin moved to Athlone (from Claremont) after her parents’ separation, when she was about four years old (Muller & Benjamin, 2011, p. 15). Benjamin, against many odds, was qualified to be a teacher from Battswood Teachers’ Training College – the first in her family to qualify for a profession rather than a trade. She started working in a school in Athlone, which was near her mother. Benjamin’s relationship with apartheid’s temporal imagination was visceral. She was not “Cape coloured” in the historical sense – “tied to a Cape history of slavery” (Muller & Benjamin, 2011, p. 43), but was designated as one in the years of the Population Registration Act’s consolidation, when she would have been a child. Her identity as St. Helenian is one of the reasons why her family had settled in the areas of District Six, Rondebosch-Claremont and in Athlone. Muller observes:

 

St. Helenians of [Benjamin’s] father’s generation kept themselves apart from others in Cape Town. Carrying British passports, they were proud that their birth certificates identified them as mixed Helenian rather than Cape Coloured. Unlike the Coloured working class, who spoke Afrikaans and danced to live band music on weekends, St. Helenians aspired to participation in a milieu of English-language cosmopolitanism and respectability … This would change with Sathima’s generation, which sought to assimilate into Cape society, popular music and jazz being an integral dimension of such integration (Muller & Benjamin, 2011, p. 43).

 

Despite its violence, the move to Athlone connected Benjamin with a wider jazz community, not least because her mother was a ragtime pianist who had purchased a piano for the home. As she told Carol Muller, “she [was] convinced that had she stayed in Claremont she would never have ventured into the public world of musical performance” (2011, p. 66). For example, The Athlone Hotel was a family favourite and Benjamin, with her sister Joan and their mother, would visit the establishment on occasion. Muller insightfully notes that “this was a new possibility in post-war Cape Town, allowing women into the lounges of hotels to socialise without male presence” (2011, p. 67). 

 

Telling her story to Muller over years, it is striking how much importance Benjamin affords these memories of singing with her sister and her mother. Moreover, her ability to lead a band as a mature musician was moulded by seeing her mother accompany various musicians (including male musicians) at The Athlone Hotel. Precisely because her mother remained a gifted amateur who could only play in three keys (C, F and G), the young Benjamin surely learnt how to negotiate musical contingencies in these times. 

 

As she made her way as a professional, Benjamin garnered further publicity and was noticed by Cape Town based journalists who were wiring reviews to Drum and The Golden City Post. These jazz ventures were negotiated from her mother’s house in Athlone, her home. This detail, for women in jazz, is not a side note: one is less likely to be bullied into taking any old bad-paying gig if they know they have a roof over their heads. One story illustrates these dynamics clearly. Benjamin was invited to the whites-only Camps Bay to listen to records of her idol, the American vocalist Billie Holiday. Her love for Holiday trumped the newly but vigorously implemented apartheid laws of the 1950s. Having braved the journey, defying racist laws, she was confronted with the laws of patriarchy, which transcends race. Muller recounts how, 

 

On one of those evenings, in a room filled with candles Meyer [who had invited Benjamin] pressured her to take the relationship to the next stage. Sathima remembers she burst into tears. “I didn’t want that,” she told [Muller]. “I just wanted to hear the music. Just then there was a knock on the door. I was terrified it could have been the police. But it wasn’t. It was Abdullah Ibrahim” (Muller & Benjamin, 2011, p. 85-86).

 

Reader, Charlotte Brontë’s Jayne Eyre would say, I married him. Benjamin here faces three kinds of patriarchy: that of the apartheid state, that of the liberal white slummer, and Ibrahim’s (their marriage was redolent with problems; my archives contain a court case Benjamin opened against Ibrahim for abuse in the 1960s).

 

Benjamin’s relationship with jazz was shaped by these times. Much like Coetzee deflected the contraction of experience and South Africanness through “Manenberg”, Benjamin kept her experiences of Cape jazz as resources for her self-construction as a South African woman jazz vocalist abroad, what she called, variously, the “southern touch” or “the spirit within you” to explain her jazz idiolect. Is it any wonder, then, that one of her most evocative compositions is dedicated to Winnie Mandela (now Madikizela-Mandela)? Part of the lyrics (Benjamin, 1990) to this composition read:

 

Nomzamo – Winnie Mandela

Beloved heroine

Winnie Mandela

Spirited soldier

Life on the fly

Mother of the nation

See her lovelight shine

 

The tune begins with the bass outlining the harmony (marabi-style) and the piece groove. The drums’ high-hat accenting off-beats enter the dialogue and the piano brackets lightly-tinctured chords. Benjamin enters by hailing Mandela’s Xhosa name, Nomzamo. Only thereafter does the tenor saxophone’s soulful wail introduce darkness into the tune. The celebratory groove is soon broken in what may be called the bridge of the song, and its dark climax is carried by Sathima Benjamin’s loaded scooped phrase to perform how Winnie Mandela “a symbol of courage, to all, who STRI-I-I-VE to be free” (see Muller & Benjamin 2011, p. 138, 184, 203-5). Striving, Benjamin sonically illustrates, is an effort, as her breathy landing on “to be free” suggests. 

 

Several jazz compositions have been dedicate to Winnie Mandela, especially in the 1980s. They include Basil Coetzee’s “Sabenza”, “Song for Winnie” and, in exile, Johnny Dyani’s “Winnie Mandela”. Benjamin’s, however, captures a Mandela whose vulnerability and strength have only really been captured in the post-apartheid Winnie: The Opera. In their own musical languages, “Sabenza” hails Winnie Mandela in a tune that stretches to jazz-rock fusion, whereas Dyani’s “Winnie Mandela” is an avant-garde portrayal of an Amazonian anti-apartheid warrior. Benjamin, by contrast, seems to enter Winnie’s spirit within: Robben Island, after all, was closer to her home than Winnie was during her house arrests. But it was precisely because of this ambivalent distance that, I would argue, Benjamin could signify on distance and distant liberation. The Western Cape was strange to Winnie Mandela; Benjamin, a Capetonian who was nevertheless far from Robben Island, could paint this space and perhaps bring Nelson Mandela closer to Winnie, and freedom and the possibility of return closer to New York exiles. 

 

Sidetrack: In Johannesburg, we mourned Sathima’s death in 2013. It was a sunny day in Melville’s iconic 7th Street. My friend, the Port Elizabethan trumpeter Feya Faku, said to me, “Man, you know I recorded with her.” I told my family in East London that she had died, and tried to remember if any of her albums were included in that consignment my father gave to me for safe-keeping. I don’t think so.

 

Another Sidetrack: In 2012, I spent a wonderful week with the “Blue Notes’ widows – Hazel Miller and Maxine McGregor – the keepers of the memories of the musicians Harry Miller (bass) and Chris McGregor (piano). We hosted a panel, The Blue Notes, at the Grahamstown ThinkFest leg of the Festival to launch the re-issue of Maxine’s Chris McGregor and the Brotherhood of Breath: My Life with an African Jazz Pioneer. The launch was in two sessions, one of which included Carol Muller talking about Sathima Bea Benjamin and their book. This was a year before Sathima’s death.

 

People’s power, people’s progress: the cultural politics of Cape jazz

 

So far, we have recalled that in the first half of the twentieth century, Cape jazz, along with South African jazz more broadly, experimented with the new popular music that was exported by the United States. The new musical styles joined their British and French predecessors in the Western Cape, since these had long suffused the landscape from the era of Dutch slavery to British colonialism. The musical and cultural traffic from black to white and, after the removals, from north to south and vice versa, was facilitated by women and male workers. Indeed, it is this feature that the public intellectual Vincent Kolbe and the pianist Gary Hendrickse note as crucial in the formation of something distinctly Western Cape about Cape Town jazz. In Hendrickse’s words:

 

You’ll find that there is a distinctive type of music that is played in this community. Like, for instance, as opposed to the stuff they do in Langa and Gugulethu, you know, the Cape Peninsula is like a rainbow country in its own, because if you play for people in Sea Point, you play differently from when you play for people in Simon’s Town. Those dance bands played a lot of quadrilles and squares that the English brought with them. What actually happened was that a lot of the so-called coloured communities, their wives were domestics, they were working in domestic services in the households of the rich English, so they picked up the culture also. So what you found in the coloured community especially was that, even at a wedding, they adopted English tradition, like for instance, every wedding used to have a wedding march … the whole formation in the hall is in the form of a W. And the type of music that was played, for a wedding march, it was Rule Britannia, you know [laughs]. That was very interesting. When I entered the scene, they were still doing that, but eventually, it went out of fashion. They said, Bugger the English, why must we play this! [laughs] But they used the quadrille and the square, they used to play is a … sort of a Cape style developed. If you want to know about that, you must speak to Vincent Kolbe (Rasmussen, 2003, p. 95). 

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The formation of Cape jazz, in other words, cannot be separated from the Western Cape’s grim social and political history. Hendrickse’s observations are reiterated throughout Rasmussen’s book. His version is chosen here for a few reasons. The pianist not only makes a frank distinction between coloured and black Cape Town jazz, he also notes variation within audiences in what he calls the Cape Peninsula. His rainbows are many. The historical cultural dynamics he outlines were remnants of Cape jazz’s early history which, as I have said, ranged from the early twentieth century to the 1950s. We may summarise them as jazz cultures and jazz dance cultures negotiating a “politics of respectability” (Bruinders, 2012). In these early years, the elusive figure of Frazer Temmy Hawker (1909–1977) looms large, since his name unerringly appears each time “there is talk about the black and coloured jazz scene in Cape Town” (Rasmussen 2003, p. 80-81). Hawker’s jazz sensibility was ambidextrous as he fulfilled the cultural needs of those who preferred jazz-tinged dance music as well as those who decided: bugger the English and the Americans. Understood in this way, Cape jazz’s early history articulates with what we know of jazz in Johannesburg and in the Eastern Cape. This space, too, had its “respectable” bands like the Merry Blackbirds and the innovatively South Africanist Jazz Maniacs, who were searching for an African style (see Ballantine, 2012).

 

From the late-1950s to the mid-1960s, Cape jazz consolidated its African style. Innovations leading to this were from the Xhosa diaspora in Cape Town, whose most iconic musicians were the late saxophonist Christopher Columbus “Mra” Ngcukana and the East Londoner (now Langa resident) pianist Tete Mbambisa. Ngcukana spawned a musical dynasty (almost all his children are giants of the South African jazz scene) and presided over a jazz generation. For Dr Sazi Dlamini, scholar of the Blue Notes, Ngcukana’s musical world captures and contains what he calls “a triple consciousness” (Dlamini, 2010). Drawing on Paul Gilroy’s signifyin(g) on WEB Du Bois’s theorising of blackness and double consciousness (Gilory, 1993), Dlamini explains triple-consciousness as a performed discourse and a crucial feature of an African post-colonial condition, which may “counter ideological disjunctures characterising diaspora and indigenous cultural experiences” (Dlamini, 2010, p. 22). Ngcukana performed his triple consciousness by articulating, Bakhtin style, his disparate experiences as a Xhosa musician with deep memories of Xhosa musicking in a jazz language that was sounded out in, strictly speaking, postcolonial Cape Town. While Ngcukana remained in his own black African jazz spaces, the musicians he inspired moved across. The most notable examples were The Four Sounds – Henry “Snowy” Jackson (organ), Basil Moses (electric bass), Billie Dollie (drums), Cliffie Moses (guitar), Danayi Dlova (alto saxophone), and Buggs Gongco (piano/keyboards). They kept the jazz performing scene alive in places like the Beverly Hotel in Athlone, during what is otherwise known as the silent decade in South African jazz history (Eato, 2013, p. 23-37; Albertyn, 2013, p. 134-139; on the silent decade see Breakey, 1997 and Eato, 2017, p. 241-267).

 

During the silenced times, roughly from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, Cape jazz underwent astonishing transformations. As Lars Rasmussen’s work reveals, white jazz musicians (and music students from UCT) crossed the colour bar to play and to listen to jazz (and perhaps to take relationships to “other levels”). This was the age of Die Sestigers, after all, and young white South Africans partook of the broader post-war rebellion against the establishment that was gaining pace in most of the so-called West. Chafing against the mainstream, legends like Chris McGregor and the trombonist Dave Galloway entered a period of intense crossover collaboration and experimental composition. Galloway, for example, composed one of the earliest examples of “third stream music” with his Imagination ’61, which was commissioned by the Cape Town Arts Festival. The proliferation of similar activities are what has led to this decade being called silent or dark, because we have yet to understand their post-apartheid tone and their significance for South African jazz in exile (Dalamba, 2014). As I have noted elsewhere (Dalamba, 2014), 1968 had its jazz moment in South Africa, which was echoed by exiled compatriots. In 1968, the Capetonian saxophonist Winston Mankunku Ngozi released Yakhal’ iNkomo (the bull bellowed). The significance of this album for the burgeoning Black Consciousness influenced artists has been richly theorised by Michael Titlestad, especially for its resonance with later Soweto Poetry (Titlestad, 2004). The Port Elizabethan saxophonist Kevin Davidson has added a crucial point to our knowledge of this Coltrane-drenched album. A paean to African American hard bop – with all the allusions to civil rights movements, soul and Black Power that entailed in the 1960s – Mankunku Ngozi’s conscious (these days “woke”) album was made with black African and coloured African musicians – the latter being the other royal jazz family in Cape Town: the Schilders (Davidson, 2012). With this in mind, the making of “Manenberg” some six years later becomes par for the course (Mason, 2007).

 

A listening test: While for many Ngozi’s title track from his seminal 1968 album was something akin to the Eucharist, Ngozi continued to experiment with the work. Years later, he recorded a new version of the song “Yakhal’ iNkomo”. Note first: this version included white Cape-based jazz musicians like Mike Campbell. Jazz’s customarily anti-racist stance digested this. But Ngozi fell foul with all kinds of musical and ideological purists too. Like Miles Davis, he went electric, because he was tapping into the fusion scene dominating the 1980s. 

      

Jazz anthropologists, sociologists and theorists tend to get excited by the 1980s. Christopher Ballantine, for example, records this decade as a euphoric time (2012, 11-12), and David Coplan seems to share this sentiment in his narration of black music and theatre (2007). Colin Miller’s oral history of jazz in Cape Town also proceeds from the 1980s (2007). For this staid historian, however, the 1980s was a nightmare (perhaps one should not research the decade in which one is born? Is this an avoidance of the Lacanian mirror stage?). 

 

Exiled cultures shifted focus from the United States and Europe to the African frontline states; the cultural boycott rendered the archive impossibly diffuse, and black South Africans were spoilt for choice regarding how to resist. For those jazz musicians who resided in Britain, the British Library in London kept a well-ventilated and calming archive. Miriam Makeba’s life in Guinea, although meticulously documented, is predominantly in French. Jazz exiles like Makhaya Ntshoko and Johnny Dyani have their histories in Scandinavian languages. The musicians who resided in Zambia with the ANC in exile – well, for them we rely on family archives. The key country is Botswana, but our memories there are interrupted by the bombs that killed people and destroyed information. Through imagination and schlepp, we must bring the shades of our musical exiles home. It is they who haunt the shadows of our imaginings.

 

The UDF, NUM, COSATU and the BCM. These are the acronyms of the ‘80s. They indicate the degree to which black South Africans forged spaces of resistance to the apartheid government during this time. They are as numerous as the social movements that, in our time, we have collectivised as #Fallism. It was the resurgence of this energy that I discerned in my senior colleagues, most of whom were alumni of the University of the Western Cape. On my way to the Union Building with them, I was told one story: “Lindelwa, when this kind of thing happened, we would holler ‘hek toe’ (to the gate!).” As a contented middle-class child of the great South African transition, I felt no regret for having missed these “interesting times” (Martin 2013, p. 241). For me, the 1980s signalled nothing more pleasant than brash make-up, Ronald Reagan, PW Botha and Margaret Thatcher. Jazz’s answer to these turbulent times was fusion. Unlike the genre that is called fusion, South African jazz musicians – in particular those from Cape Town – corralled temporal and spatial “others” to forge a music that would speak to the broader populace. In this milieu, in-between spaces were crucial, and they could not be beholden to the music industry. Jam sessions, the ultimate refuge for jazz experimentation, again took centre stage in the making of this culture. As Martin (2013, p. 232-233) explains:

 

In the 1980s, there were jam sessions at the Villa Review, Athlone, and Five-to-Four on Lansdowne Road, which supplemented the regular programmes offered by the Base in the city, the Goldfinger in Athlone, or the Landrost Hotel in Landsdowne where be-bop, jazz-rock and fusion could be heard. Pianist Tony Schilder, who belonged to a large family of talented musicians, opened the club Montreal, in Manenberg, which for several years served as a the rallying place for jazz musicians in Cape Town. 

 

The jazz that was being played in Athlone (and in Schilder’s club Montreal in Manenberg) was mostly fusion. Athlone, having for so long been an in-between place, could host this stylistic plenitude, and bands like Sabenza (Basil Coetzee) and The Genuines (Gerald McKenzie, featuring Hilton Schilder and the alto saxophonist Robbie Jansen) thrived. In-between the jerry-curls, the Afros, the shoulder-pads, the sophisticated mixing desks and the loud make-up, Cape Town’s jazz musicians sought a more faithful translation of black modernity than that provided by, for example, Ipi Tombi’s disco. The jazz purists might have seen these innovations as regression, but jazz purists tend to do that anyway when the music moves on from the style they feel purist about. The complexity of jazz and jazz-influenced styles in the 1980s was no more heterogeneous and cosmopolitan than what had occurred in the 1950s (remember, too, that the 1950s were undergoing energised resuscitation in these years; the broad-based non-racial solidarities of the 1980s was presided over by ‘50s spirits).

 

Jazz musicians are not philanthropists: they use their work and talents to live a fruitful life. Beyond thriving, however, our Cape Town musicians had never relinquished their striving for freedom. The pan-ethnic and cross-racial collaborations that characterised concerts at this time are testimony to this (Martin, 2013, p. 240-242). That jazz and radical humanism in the arts were a resource of hope generally is perhaps most evident in how black jazz musicians renewed their attention to music education. Grassroots schools sprang up across the Cape Flats, laying the foundations that would become so necessary in post-apartheid’s neo-liberal order. The most iconic came out of the Music Action for People’s Power (MAPP), whose guiding spirit was that gentle soul I met in Grahamstown, some ten years later: 

 

Trumpeter and maths teacher Duke Ngcukana, who became the coordinator of the MAPP music school in 1989, explained that: “MAPP, when it started, it was an affiliate of the UDF, it was Music Action for People’s Power, it was to use music as a vehicle for liberation. Also to subvert the government through music, for instance, meetings were banned, but concerts were not banned, so through concerts you could have these rallies without the authorities knowing.” After a UDF concert given in 1986 at Rocklands Civic, Mitchell’s Plain, Basil Coetzee and Steve Gordon, a sound engineer and cultural activist, felt the need for a structure which would bring together musicians committed to democratic movements in Cape Town. At a first meeting organised in April 1986, it was agreed that “while it is important to facilitate the building of a ‘culture of resistance’, we need to move beyond mere resistance … that apartheid had created ‘islands of culture’ in our society, and that as cultural activists, their role was to help break down the barriers, and be part of the building of a true ‘South African Culture’” (Martin, 2013, p. 243).

 

These jazz pedagogies for the oppressed have received little attention from institutional academia, even while the latter punts for community engagement and community music. Our cumulative history of jazz in Athlone should mean Ngcukana’s wish for the inclusion of jazz education there is not surprising. We should also nod in sympathetic understanding that Basil Coetzee (shortly before his death) and Steve Gordon (who wrote the commentary for Beyond the Blues) were party to this scheme. It is significant that Ngcukana, Coetzee and Gordon were most concerned by the “islands of culture” that South Africa’s long apartheid had cultivated. This, to me, is a disavowal of the ideology of Cape Jazz. Once this desire for a true (not ideal) South African culture, MAPP, was born:

 

MAPP participated in all kinds of political events: it held cultural workshops with trade unions, community organisations and youth groups, but also acted as a booking agency and opened a school. Duke Ngcukana considered that a school was indispensable for the achievement of MAPP projects: “So I proposed that actually MAPP should be a school, doing all these other fields, but the core should be a school, and then the school would get four areas of work. One was a full-time course, with two streams, one was a jazz course to prepare the youth and young adults, some actually were quite old, to enter the University of Cape Town to follow the professional circuit. The other lot was a choral programme to train teachers … The third programme was working with a music therapist; the first one was Sol Abner, working with street kids, disabled children. Then the fourth programme was identifying community centres, as far as Stellenbosch, where there were music activities; we would go there and check out their needs and play whatever was reckoned there.” In 1989, the year the school opened, MAPP, changed its name to Music Action for People’s Progress, and moved from Landsdowne to the Joseph Stone Auditorium in Athlone. MAPP was able to mobilise many musicians as performers and teachers; it trained a new generation that would enliven the Cape musical scene after 1990 … MAPP was able to extend its activities, to open the school, to support Duke Ngcukana’s Chorimba project, and to run outreach programmes in New Crossroads, Khayelitsha, Langa, Gugulethu, Athlone, Manenberg, Green Point and Stellenbosch … Unfortunately, with the advent of democracy in South Africa, foreign donors considered that it was no longer necessary to fund former anti-apartheid organisations, whatever the work they continued doing in the 1990s. The Network’s grant to MAPP was discontinued, and since it did not get enough subsidies from the local authorities or the national government, MAPP was compelled to put an end to its activities after a three-day festival organised at the Nico Malan Theatre, the former stronghold of white culture in Cape Town, from 2 to 5 February 1994, an event which featured what looked like a who’s who of Cape Town’s musicians (Martin, 2013, p. 243-244).  

 

MAPP was able to translate the imagination, ideas, and dreams of the 1980s to a musical reality, with jazz as that ambivalent mediator (a signifyin(g) monkey) across South Africa’s constructed boundaries in Cape Town. Excavating the memories, sounds, people and jazz venues of the Cape Flats shows that the current discourse that writes the Cape Flats as a site of lack and underdevelopment, including Athlone, is one that fails to see struggle as love and endeavour: thriving and striving. Black Cape Town jazz musicians pooled their talents, yes, to create a scene that was marketable. Their striving, as Ballantine inimitably writes (2012, p. 10), was an insistence of “their status as fully fledged and equal members of the international society of human beings. By adopting jazz, urban black South Africans were proudly and self-consciously [i.e. knowingly] identifying themselves as actors on the international stage of world history”. 

 

What I have learnt and remembered in the course of writing this essay is that I am of the Cape. My separation as an Eastern Caper from my Western brethren is but for the sake of bureaucracy. I claim the Eastern Cape, from Potedwedwe (Port Edward) to Kaladokwe (Cradock) and beyond. The Dalamba people are mostly to be found eKomani (Queenstown). But my claim of relation is due to our place being called the Cape Colony. That’s fine. I am even reconciled with how my place of birth (eQonce, King William’s Town) used to be called British Kaffraria. I like a good post-colonial joke. My umbilical cord is buried in the Eastern Cape, in Ginsberg Location, King William’s Town: it vibrates each time I move south to Port Elizabeth or to Cape Town, but only when I visit jazz musicians. My family is all-sort Xhosa: from a white Majola to a Shona-identifying Zimbabwean. I do not wish to recognise a triple consciousness, for that would lead to more. 

 

Against Cape jazz

 

Cape jazz is an invidious label. It must make way for South African jazz, suitably calibrated. The history of Cape jazz defies the essentialism that the label would embrace.   

 

A typical (but true) jazz anecdote:  I met Robbie Jansen, one of the most important ghoema captains of Cape jazz in 2010, shortly before his death in July 2010, at the BAT Centre in Durban. He was already lugging around the oxygen tank that enabled him to play. I asked him how he viewed the genealogies of marabi, mbaqanga and ghoema in the making of South African jazz’s identity. He responded that each were accents, the goal was the same.

 

But I also understand why such a label may be strategic. In a guest column for the News24 website, the cultural activist Moeshfieka Botha pointed out that there was much to be proud of on the Cape Flats:

 

Nearby in gangland Hanover Park, lives a young man of gentlemanly stature. Muneeb Hermans is only 22, but he has worked extremely hard and even attended the UCT South African College of Music. Amazingly, he has now travelled the world and played his beloved trumpet in Carnegie Hall, New York, Paris, London, Beijing and the Seychelles. Yet, we don’t see pictures of Muneeb Hermans on the covers of glossy magazines. We don’t see journos hounding his parents for his awesome story. No, the likes of Muneeb Hermans will go unnoticed – until God forbid they get shot and killed. For that will be a story to be covered in typical Cape Flats style. Perhaps Muneeb says it best: “How can I be ashamed of the Cape Flats? It is the place that through my experiences, good and bad, moulded me and shaped me into the musician I am today. Everywhere I go in the world, I tell everyone who crosses my path of my amazing community filled with resilient, diverse, talented, caring, “lagbol” and “lekker” people – who make me extremely proud to be from the Cape Flats” (Botha, 2017).

 

To write and hear against disparagement is none too difficult. Should another exhibition of this kind be dedicated to the Western Cape, I sincerely hope it will not need an Eastern Caper in a Johannesburg economic exile to write. Grassroots movements and marginalised sites of creativity do what they can. The establishment has its ethical mandate.

 

References

 

Aboobaker, S., 2011. Zille sparks new twitter war with ‘professional black’ jibe. Cape Times. 29 December.

 

Albertyn, C., ed., 2013. Keeping time, 1964–1974: the photographs and Cape Town jazz recordings of Ian Bruce Huntley. Chris Albertyn & Associates CC and Electric Jive.

 

Bakhtin, M.M., 1981. The dialogic imagination: four essays. Edited by M. Holquist. Translated by C. Emerson and M. Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press.

 

Ballantine, C., 2012. Marabi nights: jazz, ‘race’ and society in early apartheid South Africa. Scottsville: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press.

 

Benjamin, S., 1990. Lovelight. Enja Records: 6022-2.

 

Botha, M., 2017. Contrary to what you may think, there’s much to be proud of on the Cape Flats. News24. 8 March. Available:  http://www.news24.com/Columnists/GuestColumn/contrary-to-what-you-may-think-theres-much-to-be-proud-of-on-the-cape-flats-20170308 [Accessed 28 June 2017].

 

Brand, D., 1968a. Don’t be ashamed of doekums and coons. Cape Herald.  27 July.

 

Brand, D., 1968b. Bed bugs, cold and cha-chas in sub-zero Switzerland. Cape Herald. 3 August

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Brand, D., 1968c. The veiled power of Africa. Cape Herald. 10 August. 

 

Brand, D., 1968d. Kyk uit vir die “Non-electric Outeniekwa Goggas”. Cape Herald. 17 August.

 

Brand, D., 1968e. Imitation – the destroyer of originality. Cape Herald. 24 August. 

 

Brand, D., 1968f. District 6 in Carnegie Hall. Cape Herald. 21 September. 

 

Brand, D., 1968g. Are you a ghost or a bug? Cape Herald. (n.d).

 

Breakey, B., 1997. Beyond the blues: township jazz in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Cape Town: David Philip.

 

Bruinders, S., 2012. Parading respectability: an ethnography of the Christmas Bands Movement in the Western Cape, South Africa. Unpublished PhD dissertation. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

 

Coplan, D., 2007. In township tonight! South Africa’s black city music and theatre. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

 

Dalamba, L., 2014. Passports to jazz: the social and musical dynamics of South African jazz in Britain, 1961–1973. Unpublished PhD dissertation. University of Cambridge. 

 

Davidson, K., 2012. Stylistic traits in South African jazz, Barney Rachabane: a case study. SAMUS: South African Music Studies. 32:21-35.

 

Dlamini, S., 2010. The South African Blue Notes: bebop, mbaqanga, apartheid and the exiling of a musical imagination. Unpublished PhD dissertation. University of KwaZulu-Natal.

 

Eato, J., 2013. The Ian Bruce Huntley Archive. In: Albertyn, C., ed. Keeping time, 1964–1974: the photographs and Cape Town jazz recordings of Ian Bruce Huntley. Chris Albertyn & Associates CC and Electric Jive, 23-37.

 

Eato, J., 2017. A climbing vine through concrete: jazz in 1960s apartheid South Africa. In: Johnson, B., ed. Jazz and totalitarianism. New York: Routledge, 241-267.

 

Gilroy, P., 1993. The black Atlantic: modernity and double consciousness. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

 

Lunn, H., 2010. Hippies, radicals and the sounds of silence: cultural dialectics at two South African universities, 1966–1976. Unpublished PhD dissertation. University of KwaZulu-Natal. 

 

Martin, Denis-Constant. 2013. Sounding the Cape: music, identity and politics in South Africa. Somerset West: African Minds.

 

Mason, J., 2007. “Mannenberg”: notes on the making of an icon and anthem. African Studies Quarterly. 9:4, 25-46.

 

Miller, C., 2007. Julle kan ma New York toe gaam, ek bly in die Mannenberg: an oral history of jazz in Cape Town from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s. In: Field, S., Meyer, R., and Swanson, S. eds. Imagining the city: memories and cultures in Cape Town. Cape Town: HSRC Press, 133-149. 

 

Muller, C.A. and Benjamin, S. 2011. Musical echoes: South African women thinking in jazz. Durham: Duke University Press.

 

Rasmussen, L., ed. 2001. Cape Town jazz 1959–1963: the photographs of Hardy Stockmann. Copenhagen: The Booktrader.

Rasmussen, L. 2003. Jazz people of Cape Town. Copenhagen: Booktrader.

 

Titlestad, M. 2004. Making the changes: jazz in South African literature and reportage. Pretoria: UNISA Press. 

 

Zille says sorry for ‘refugee’ tweet. 2012. IOL. 24 April. Available: http://www.iol.co.za/news/politics/zille-says-sorry-for-refugee-tweet-1282417 [Accessed 28 June 2017].