Cape Town, 2000

Cape Town, 2000 l 7 l

When, on the evening of February 11, 1990, the newly liberated Nelson Mandela stepped onto the balcony of Cape Town’s City Hall to address a throng of fifty-thousand jubilant supporters, South Africa and Cape Town changed forever. Beyond the political transformations that lay ahead, Cape Town was about to enter a world where cities were being tossed into a global competition for investments, resources and advantage. It became a “world city” dominated by a burgeoning service sector. A neoliberal economic paradigm known as the “Washington Consensus” dictated that cities sink or swim on their own, unprotected by national social and economic policies. Little during the apartheid period prepared Capetonians for this rapacious world of late-twentieth-century and early-twentyfirst-century global urban capitalism.

Today’s Cape Town — a sprawling metropolitan region containing nearly 4 million people — is much larger, more complex and diverse than in its previous incarnations. Administratively, it is larger, because the post-apartheid settlement merged two dozen racially segregated municipalities together with nearly seventy decision-making authorities to form a single unit. Eventually, in December 2000, the Cape Town “Unicity” came into being, unifying the metropolitan region for the first time. As elsewhere around the world, municipal services were increasingly privatized, leading to marked inequality in their distribution.

Simultaneously, others came to see the possibility of a future that might be more progressive than the city’s past. From this perspective, the seeds of a more hopeful future can be found in Cape Town’s embrace of diversity—albeit an uneasy one. Such trends are evident in various efforts to reinvigorate the local jazz scene.

Many prominent South African musicians in exile required time to overcome skepticism about the changes taking place at home. Such decisions about whether and when to return were personal. A number of prominent jazz musicians began returning to South Africa in the months immediately surrounding Mandela’s release. Hugh Masekela, in contrast, took some time before he was willing to commit to the new South Africa. Others, including the drummer Louis Moholo, who

had established careers abroad, chose to remain in exile. Significantly, several prominent musicians — such as Abdullah Ibrahim, Miriam Makeba and Caiphus Semenya — enthusiastically returned to nurture a renewed music scene.

Once back in South Africa, they found a growing number of venues, including prominent clubs that had desegregated voluntarily (e.g., Kippie’s in Johannesburg, Bassline in Melville, and Rosie’s and Mannenberg in Cape Town). As everywhere, jazz often proved to be a difficult product to market to mainstream audiences. A pervasive atmosphere of violence that affected urban South Africa often reduced audiences. Yet, by the late 1990s, a national and even local Cape Town circuit of venues sympathetic to jazz had come into existence.

Jazz is an apprenticeship genre that requires a multiplicity of places where a knowledgeable audience can listen to and encourage a mix of younger and older musicians moving the music forward. In other words, it requires players and places for them to play. The microenvironment that had made the first Cape Town jazz wave at mid-century recreated itself as the twentieth century turned into the twenty-first. Old masters, such as the returning Ibrahim and Winston Mamkunku Ngozi, held forth, along with exciting new musicians, such as the pianist Moses Taiwa Molelekwa (who died in 2001), and the saxophonist Zim Ngqawana (who died in 2011). Very quickly, a growing roster of players — such as Khaya Mahlangu, Sidney Mnisi, Zim Ngqawana, Andile Yenana, Marcus Wyatt, Feya Faku, Herb Tsoedi, Fana Zulu, Lulu Gontsana, Louis Moholo and many others — formed a vibrant community.

The success of the Cape Town jazz scene, and the local music community more generally, has depended on its ability to leverage engagement with the global to create the space for the local. Globalization in Cape Town has often seemed hollow and dispiriting, in a city of stark economic and social inequity tied to skin color. In music, however, the city’s deep local traditions have sustained a performance culture that remains significantly local even as it has become global.

The city’s history, from the moment Jan Van Reibeeck led his motley band of Dutch East India Company employees to shore, has been marked by all the crimes, injustices and indignities that a human mind can conjure to commit against those who are somehow different. Humans seemingly are capable of developing endless criteria for asserting differences, so the city’s past and present have contained far more stories of villainy than decency. Even the tiniest of tears in the stunningly beautiful surface visions of Table Mountain and Table Bay tossed up by tourism promoters expose human cruelty in all its multitudinous forms.

Yet the incredibly rich history of Capetonian music reveals a different story, one of improbable beauty and

inventiveness. This is a town that has been home to an opulent multiplicity of humankind, each seeking solace and meaning in the creation and performance of song and dance. The intermingling of indigenous African and imported European and Asian instruments; the two-century-long absorption, adaptation and reinvention of American musical forms that continues until today; and the stunning integration of Islamic, Christian and African vocal forms all speak to an uncommon Capetonian capacity to create aural beauty.

Cape Town has become one of the most musically inventive places on the planet precisely because it has been one of the most dastardly innovators for thinking about how to divide humankind into rigid, allegedly immutable categories. Both inclinations emerge from the realities of having thousands and thousands of people who are different in every conceivable way live on top of one another in the intimate relationships of shared destinies.

Capetonians did not just create music. They fashioned a very special kind of music. Their sound defies easy categorization by merging different traditions together in fresh and new ways. The musicians of Cape Town, whether fathers or mothers, brothers or sisters, uncles or aunts, or foreign cousins, have created a distinctive Cape Town sound, one that is a celebration of syncretistic, sweeping diversity. To paraphrase local music commentator Jeremy Cronin in his article “Creole Cape Town,” Cape Town’s musical subconscious has always understood that we are all the bearers of the same mixed-up cultural bredie (stew). 2