Obakeng Tsimane

The townships of South Africa have long been the birthplace of significant symbols in art and popular culture. Emerging from systems of migrant labour, the township was designed to restrict and control the expansion of communities of colour, confining them to dense, segregated urban peripheries. Out of this environment arose an urban Black class that played a pivotal role in pioneering the internationally celebrated South African jazz scene.

This music thrived in spaces of constraint, often taking root in kitchens and backrooms before spilling into the shebeen, which grew into a vital social hub for performance, debate, and collective relief. As the appetite for dedicated cultural spaces grew, iconic venues such as the Lily Cinema in Meadowlands, the Eyethu Theatre in Orlando, and Club  Pelican in Soweto provided stages where jazz became inseparable from township life.

Today, only fragments of this cultural infrastructure remain. This study situates these venues in their contemporary contexts, tracing how they were shaped by social, economic, and spatial forces, and how they in turn shaped the township. Issues such as illegal dumping, inadequate service delivery, and housing shortages have transformed the environments that once nurtured jazz & performance, placing them at the centre of ongoing urban transformation.

Through the lenses of memory, urban decay, and historical layering, this research analyses how jazz inhabited and adapted its built environments. Focusing on Club Pelican in Orlando West, it explores how a once thriving musical landscape has shifted into an artisanal one, where woodworking and making have replaced performance as  the dominant spatial activity. By considering factors such as declining reliance on rail travel and changing community needs, the study highlights how township life continues to reconfigure the places where culture lives, breathes, and 

sustains itself.