Africa Is a Country

How The Mighty Have Fallen

Africa Is a Country Podcast
African Five-a-Side Podcast

How The Mighty Have Fallen

By
Sean Jacobs

Two of South Africa’s most talented musicians of the last 30 years, Robbie Jansen (1949-2010), sax and flute player who was in a band with Abdullah Ibrahim, and Nana Coyote (1955-2010), who made his name as a vocalist with the soul music outfit Stimela (led by Ray Phiri), passed this week.

Of these two, Jansen, was probably the more influential.

Jansen, known as the “Cape Doctor,” helped define what became “Cape Jazz.”

He passed away on Tuesday night in Kuils River, Cape Town. Music journalist Gwen Ansell:

… His family say his passing was ‘peaceful’ and he had just returned from what was by all accounts a beautiful performance at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown.

Coyote (real name Tsietsi Daniel Matijoane), who started his career with another great band, Sankomota, passed away in a hospital in Johannesburg.

Both men were known for their strong political commitment. As my friend Ebrahim Fakir summed up the impact of their passing:

… Two more soldiers of soul, conscience and beauty have fallen. A generation is passing, and soon we may have few icons of this nature and stature to look up to anymore. Few to move us emotionally and cerebrally to our past, present and future. I feel really sad! Mostly, [because] both gave millions joy, received a lot of adulation but died relatively poor, struggling all their lives. I feel really sad.

.

The video, above, is of a live performance of Jansen (made by a fan), whose music evoked the spirit of working class Cape Town. Jansen was also the subject of the documentary, “Casa de la Música,” by Jonathan de Vries and Jack Lewis, in which Jansen travels to Cuba to explore the connections between the music of Havana and Cape Town.

* Remember my post about pianist Hilton Schilder who is very ill in hospital. A benefit is being held for him in Cape Town tomorrow, Friday at Casa LittleBrazil in the Sea Point Civic Centre. If you’re in Cape Town, go support it.

Further Reading

Redrawing liberation

From Gaza to Africa, colonial cartography has turned land into property and people into populations to be managed. True liberation means dismantling this order, not redrawing its lines.

Who deserves the city?

Colonial urbanism cast African neighborhoods as chaotic, unplanned, and undesirable. In postcolonial Dar es Salaam, that legacy still shapes who builds, who belongs, and what the middle class fears the city becoming.

Djinns in Berlin

At the 13th Berlin Biennale, works from Zambia and beyond summon unseen forces to ask whether solidarity can withstand the gaze of surveillance.

Colonize then, deport now

Trump’s deportation regime revives a colonial blueprint first drafted by the American Colonization Society, when Black lives were exiled to Africa to safeguard a white republic.

On Safari

On our annual publishing break, Gaza’s genocide continues to unfold in real time yet slips from public grasp. This is not just a crisis of politics, but of how reality is mediated—and why we must build spaces where meaning can still take root.

The battle over the frame

As Hollywood recycles pro-war propaganda for Gen Z, Youssef Chahine’s ‘Djamila, the Algerian’ reminds us that anti-colonial cinema once turned imperial film language against its makers—and still can.

Fictions of freedom

K. Sello Duiker’s ‘The Quiet Violence of Dreams’ still haunts Cape Town, a city whose beauty masks its brutal exclusions. Two decades later, in the shadow of Amazon’s new development, its truths are more urgent than ever.

When things fall apart

Against a backdrop of global collapse, one exhibition used Chinua Achebe’s classic to hold space for voices from the Global South—and asked who gets to imagine the future.

The General sleeps

As former Nigerian president Muhammadu Buhari’s death is mourned with official reverence, a generation remembers the eight years that drove them out.