These extracts, including one from Gwen Ansell’s seminal Soweto Blues: Jazz, Popular Music and Politics in South Africa, highlight the role that Cape Town jazz musicians Abdullah Ibrahim, Basil Coetzee and Robbie Jansen played in boosting morale during a dark time.

Somewhere between Bazil Coetzee’s childhood penny-whistling and Abdullah Ibrahim’s highbrow intellectual jazz, a new sound was born.

Did Mannenberg significantly alter the careers of Abdullah Ibrahim and his fellow musicians? Find out here…

When Mannenberg’s creators first tried to sell the tune to producers in Johannesburg, nobody was interested. They went ahead and made demo copies themselves, which they sold over the counter at Rashid Vally’s cult record store.

To give a sense of the atmosphere that prevailed in Cape Town at the time Mannenberg was composed, our archive lifts the scars from the painful wound of forced removals, offering oral testimonies and reports from a time in which families were torn apart and neighbourhoods destroyed.

Never has a single tune had so huge an influence on the people of Cape Town…