In 1974, a group of musicians gathered in a small studio in Cape Town and recorded a long, slow jazz piece. They named it after a township on the Cape Flats. “Mannenberg” became the sound of resistance.
Abdullah Ibrahim was born Adolph Johannes Brand in Cape Town in 1934. He grew up hearing church hymns, marabi, jazz and the music of the Cape Malay community. As a young pianist he was known as Dollar Brand. He played with the Jazz Epistles, alongside Hugh Masekela and Kippie Moeketsi, the first black South African jazz group to record an album.
Exile and Ellington
In the early 1960s, as apartheid tightened, Brand left South Africa for Europe. In Zurich, Duke Ellington heard him play and helped him record and perform in Europe and the United States. He converted to Islam in the late 1960s and took the name Abdullah Ibrahim.
Mannenberg
On a return visit to Cape Town in 1974, Ibrahim recorded “Mannenberg” with the saxophonist Basil Coetzee and other local musicians. Named after the Manenberg township, where many coloured families had been forcibly moved under apartheid’s Group Areas Act, the piece combined a gospel-like melody with a slow, rolling marabi rhythm.
The recording lasted about fourteen minutes. It had no lyrics, but its spirit of dignity and hope made it an anthem. It was played at meetings, rallies and funerals, and many South Africans remember where they were when they first heard it.
Exile again
Ibrahim left South Africa again in 1976, after the Soweto uprising, and lived in exile, mainly in the United States, until the end of apartheid. He supported the African National Congress and performed around the world. In 1983 he formed the band Ekaya, and albums such as African Marketplace kept the sound of Cape Town alive abroad.
Return
Ibrahim returned to South Africa in the 1990s and played at Nelson Mandela’s inauguration in 1994. He founded music education projects and continued to record and tour into his eighties and nineties.
His sound
Ibrahim’s piano style is spacious and meditative, drawing on hymns, Ellington and the rhythms of the Cape. He calls his music a form of spiritual practice.
“Mannenberg” had no words. It did not need them. Everyone who heard it in 1974 knew what it was saying.
