In 1960 the writer Bessie Head—yet to publish the novels that would make her a leading figure in South African and Batswana literature—interviewed a young Cape Town pianist named Adolf Johannes Brand, who went by Dollar Brand. In her manuscript, which never appeared in print but resurfaced in 1995, she called him “a most surprising phenomenon of South African life.” The country, she insisted, was little but “a desert of gold mines” and “an advertiser’s paradise” with “no tradition of serious thought or culture.” The few exceptions were “independent spirits” like Brand, “a powerful, vitally alive and creative man” who stood out like “a complete and perfect flower in this desert”: “He hurls a challenge at you; disturbs you; teaches and expects perfection from you.”¹

Brand was twenty-six. The year before, he had formed the Jazz Epistles, a six-piece band that quickly developed a reputation in and around Cape Town’s vibrant music scene and briefly in Johannesburg, playing American-influenced hard bop to sold-out audiences at hotels and small concert venues. At a time when apartheid was intensifying and South African music mostly imitated American pop, the Epistles were a kind of countercultural force. Two months before Head interviewed him, they became the first all-black group in South Africa to release a jazz album.

One of the Epistles, Hugh Masekela, described their sound in his autobiography as a fusion of “tireless energy, complex arrangements, tight ensemble play, languid slow ballads, and heart-melting, hymn-like dirges.”² The music itself remained close to American bebop, but some of the song titles hinted that the group was also hoping to develop a distinctly South African jazz idiom: one was in the Zulu language; another made references to slavery (which for at least 170 years had been the country’s dominant economic system) and Islam (which had been brought to South Africa by enslaved believers). Some of the references were more direct: in “Blues for Hughie,” dedicated to Masekela, listeners could detect what the liner notes called the “deep winging rhythm” of the Pedi people, from whom the pianist Kippie Moeketsi, another crucial member, descended.

All the Jazz Epistles would have success to varying degrees, but it was Brand who would become the single most visible representative of black South African jazz cosmopolitanism. The group’s influence stayed with him as he moved on to Europe and then to the US, changed his name to Abdullah Ibrahim, and established himself as perhaps South Africa’s greatest musical innovator and composer of the twentieth century, not to mention one of its most successful cultural exports. Nelson Mandela once called him “our Mozart.” When in 2019 the US National Endowment for the Arts named Ibrahim a “Jazz Master,” he became the only such honoree born in Africa.

Ibrahim’s genius—documented in the nearly one hundred albums, including rereleases, that he issued as a bandleader or solo performer between 1960 and the first half of the 2020s—has been to imbibe the musical cultures of South Africa in general and his home city in particular, give them a cutting-edge form, and translate them to the broader world. He built his own, lasting sound out of the church music of his grandmother, the film music his mother played, the music he heard in the city’s shebeens, the songs of dance bands and carnival troupes, the pieces he learned from schoolteachers, and the techniques he learned by collaborating with leading American jazz musicians. The cornerstone of his style is his delicate, lyrical touch at the piano. The critic Kevin Whitehead once observed that Ibrahim’s left hand often seems hypnotized, freeing his right hand to move independently, “as if two pianos shared one keyboard.”

His playing rarely relies on force; instead it creates soundscapes of reflection. Both on record and in his marathon solo live performances, he sequences his songs into a single extended meditation, punctuated by murmured phrases or the occasional grunt for emphasis. Now and then he interjects a surprising burst of swing or rumbling bass when the mood strikes him, but for the most part his playing is understated. The overall effect is one of intimacy and reverence. Steve Ellman, a veteran jazz broadcaster, likens it to a “warm bath of sound.”

Ibrahim’s music spans several periods in South Africa’s history. He came of age during segregation and apartheid, as the black majority suffered forced removals, censorship, political repression, and exile but also engaged in continuous political struggle. Later decades brought the transition to democracy, followed by the uneven realities of freedom. His compositions are themselves documents of this arc, not just in their abiding spirit of resistance and optimism but in their specific points of reference. The American influence is noticeable, particularly that of Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk. And yet Ibrahim’s work also carries the echoes of church hymns, Islamic devotional chants, and township dance rhythms: goema, marabi, kwela.

These influences at once give Ibrahim’s music its depth and bounce and ground it in a collective black South African experience. His most famous piece, “Mannenberg” (1974), epitomizes this synthesis. A blend of pensive lyricism and playful swing, it became a song of defiance against the depression and drudgery of apartheid. Many South Africans still consider it the country’s unofficial second national anthem, embodying their creativity and their enduring connection to the wider world despite the white regime’s efforts to isolate and break their spirit.  

Ibrahim turned ninety-one in October 2025. For the last few years he had primarily performed either solo or as part of his Ekaya trio, with the flutist Cleave Guyton Jr. and the bassist Noah Jackson, and in recent performances he had appeared frail and gaunt. At a Lincoln Center concert that same month, billed as celebrating the “life of a legend,” Terence Blanchard (trumpet), Kenny Garrett (alto and soprano saxophone), and Cecil McBee (bass) joined Ibrahim’s larger version of Ekaya, which includes drums, cello, trombone, and two more saxophonists. Surrounded by musicians performing his compositions, Ibrahim did not play with them. Instead, at regular intervals, the band would sit at the rear of the stage and listen as he offered a series of extended, improvisational solo sketches, interweaving fragments of his own pieces with echoes of his beloved Ellington and Monk, bringing together the US and South Africa, past and present, jazz and gospel, New York City and Cape Town.

*

Abdullah Ibrahim was born Adolf Johannes Brand in 1934. He grew up in Kensington, a working-class neighborhood on the northern edge of Cape Town’s inner city inhabited largely by “coloured” residents—a catch-all racial category peculiar to Southern Africa that denotes descendants of enslaved people from Southeast Africa and the Indian Ocean; people born of mixed relationships between whites and blacks; aboriginal peoples like the Khoi, San, and Griqua; and anyone that the racist regimes had a hard time classifying. His mother, Rachel, and grandmother, Margaret, both coloured, belonged to the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, a black American mission church with branches across the continent. They had a major part in Ibrahim’s early musical education, arranging for his first piano lessons at seven and taking him to church services. The historian John Edwin Mason has suggested that “the stately chord progressions of the AME hymnal have provided much of the harmonic foundation for his music ever since.”³

Ibrahim’s father, Sentso, a house painter of Sotho descent, was shot dead when Ibrahim was four years old; the family never discovered who was responsible. Ibrahim later suggested that the killing might have been racially motivated: some coloured neighbors objected to his mother dating a black man. As a teenager Ibrahim clashed with his stepfather, and when he was around seventeen he ran away from home and befriended a group of thieves, burglars, and other petty criminals. He was briefly homeless.

At the same time he was enjoying growing musical success. Like many of his peers, he got his first paid gigs at “langarm” (literally “long arm”) dance parties, popular among coloureds. From the 1930s onward couples at these parties—usually held in community halls or local hotel ballrooms—would dance while facing each other, hands clasped, arms extended horizontally, moving around the floor. The musicians, mostly craftsmen and laborers by day, drew on square dance rhythms, waltz, country, and polka, with some versions resembling white “boeremusiek.” Around this time Ibrahim earned the nickname “Dollar” for buying LPs from visiting American sailors who docked in the city.

In 1954 he made his first recordings with the swing big band Tuxedo Slickers and started touring with vaudeville-style groups and musicals. Before apartheid strictly policed racial boundaries, these bands moved fluidly between coloured and black African communities. Vincent Kolbe, a pianist and later music archivist, told an interviewer that Ibrahim “grew up in a place that was next door to a black settlement, so from an early age he picked up the black rhythms…. We would never produce another Abdullah Ibrahim after that because people were so segregated.”⁴

Not long after he was rejected from the music program at the overwhelmingly white University of Cape Town because of his race, Ibrahim left for Johannesburg, where he immersed himself in a range of modern black South African musical traditions associated with the country’s north and northeast, including marabi and mbaqanga. It was here that he met several crucial collaborators—among them the pianist Todd Matshikiza and the saxophonist Mackay Davashe—and started playing with Moeketsi, who at thirty-five was his elder by a decade; Ibrahim already knew Moeketsi’s reputation as a talent who ranked alongside Charlie Parker. Soon the two men recruited Hugh Masekela, considered a prodigy, as well as Masekela’s former high school classmate, the trombonist Jonas Gwangwa. Back in Cape Town, Ibrahim added the bassist Johnny Gertze and the drummer Makaya Ntshoko. There is some debate over who started the Jazz Epistles, but it was clear that Ibrahim—still going as Brand—and Moeketsi were its leaders.

The Epistles gave Ibrahim his first major opportunity to fuse the forms he had discovered in Johannesburg with Cape Town’s own local musical genres—popularized by descendants of enslaved people—and religious choral music from the AME and langarm. The white-owned record label Gallo only pressed five hundred LPs of the group’s lone record, Jazz Epistle, Verse 1, and the release occasioned little notice in the local press. But it reached critics and other jazz artists abroad: when Ibrahim later moved to New York, he told the Village Voice in 2017, Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry sung its praises. Its eight original compositions show how firmly the group was rooted in American hard bop.

The album’s standout track is also its most forthrightly political: Moeketsi’s “Scullery Department,” named after the room where black musicians, barred from eating or mingling with white patrons, were often forced to get dressed or take their meals. “It was like a code,” Ibrahim later explained to the jazz journalist Michael West. “The people knew it was about segregation.” Sonically the song conveys a harried energy, driven by a series of ensemble passages that alternate with brisk solos by Moeketsi, Masekela, and Gwangwa.

“Scullery Department” reflected the band’s restlessness and depression over the state of South African politics. In the years since the formal imposition of apartheid rule in 1948, a series of laws had segregated schools and neighborhoods, restricted political organizing, and taken away what limited rights blacks, coloureds, and Indians had enjoyed. So-called “pass” laws, first introduced at the end of slavery in the Cape Colony but now only applied to black Africans, required them to get a signature from their white employers to move between their homes and work and mandated how long at a time they were allowed in white “group areas.”

Apartheid divided people into rigid categories: whites, coloureds, “Indians” (descended from indentured laborers and, later, migrants from South Asia), and “Natives” or “Bantus,” as black Africans were labeled by the state. The government was obsessed not just with separating whites from blacks but also with dividing the subject races from one another. This was, in practice, impossible: despite the state’s best efforts, Cape Town and other major cities were characterized by extensive “mixing of the races.” When the liner notes of Verse 1 celebrated the Jazz Epistles as having “firmly established themselves as the most progressive of all African Jazz Combinations,” it was a reference not only to the band’s musical style but also to their racial hybridity: three of the Jazz Epistles were “African” while Ibrahim and Gertze were coloured. 

In February 1960, less than two weeks after the session that produced Verse 1, Ibrahim, Ntshoko, and Gertze recorded an LP as a trio called The Dollar Brand Trio Plays Sphere Jazz, which at once paid tribute to Thelonius Monk and reaffirmed Ibrahim’s deep appreciation for local musical culture.⁵ It includes tracks composed by two luminaries of the Johannesburg scene: Matshikiza’s “King Kong,” the title track of a popular jazz opera that had opened the year before and would soon tour overseas, and Davashe’s “Khumbula Jane.” Davashe was by then a local celebrity, having arranged the music for King Kong with Moeketsi and having written “Lakutshona Ilanga,” a bluesy Xhosa-language jazz ballad that Miriam Makeba sang in the 1959 anti-apartheid film Come Back Africa. In Ibrahim’s rendition of “Khumbula Jane” his piano takes the leading part; the understated bass and drums give the song a contemplative tone.

By the time he recorded The Dollar Brand Trio Plays Sphere Jazz, Brand was in a serious relationship with the jazz singer Beatrice (“Bea”) Benjamin. She too came from a coloured family in Cape Town with roots in Saint Helena in the Atlantic Ocean. Having toured variety shows around the country, she won local fame for her collaborations with musicians like the pianists Henry February and Tony Schilder. On the record Ibrahim included a tribute to her, a short piano composition that occasionally slides off the beat. He called it “Blues for B.”

*

The Dollar Brand Trio Plays Sphere Jazz didn’t come out for another two years, by which point the country’s political climate had changed for the worse. On March 21, 1960, unarmed black demonstrators gathered in Sharpeville, south of Johannesburg, to oppose the intensification of the pass laws. White police murdered ninety-one of the protesters and injured many more; after the massacre the government declared a state of emergency, arresting activists and outlawing meetings of more than twelve people. (One effect of these new rules was to essentially bar the Jazz Epistles from playing in front of crowds.) Within two years the leading black opposition movements had resorted to guerrilla war, and their exiled wings had started working to isolate South Africa internationally.

By then the Jazz Epistles had broken up. Many of its members left South Africa, joining a wider exodus of the country’s black jazz musicians. The first to go, in 1960, was Masekela, who, after a brief stint in London, enrolled at the Manhattan School of Music in New York City. Of all the alumni of the Jazz Epistles he had the quickest route to fame, releasing eleven commercially successful albums over the next decade and charting two singles on commercial US radio. Among the musicians who stayed was Moeketsi, who kept performing but never became a headliner, hemmed in by a racist, segregated society. (The government broadcaster, for instance, rarely played music by black musicians or hired them to perform.) He died in 1983 at fifty-seven, drinking heavily and depressed.

In 1962 the Dollar Brand Trio—Ibrahim, Gertze, and Ntshoko—secured a residency at the Africana Club in Zurich. The deal was that the trio would play at the club for four and a half months a year for very low wages, sometimes with Benjamin on vocals; the other seven and a half months they’d tour around Europe. Zurich in the early 1960s was a hub for modern jazz, with various venues presenting daily jazz programs and regularly hosting American jazz musicians on tour. One night Duke Ellington passed through town. Knowing that Ellington was then serving as an artist representative for Frank Sinatra’s label, Reprise Records, Benjamin approached him at one of his concerts and asked him to come hear her boyfriend’s trio. When he did, he promptly invited them to Paris, where they recorded a pair of albums two days later.

The first, an album of songs by Benjamin called A Morning in Paris, was shelved. In Musical Echoes, a frank memoir she coauthored in 2011 with the music historian Carol Ann Muller, Benjamin, who was relatively light-skinned and often mistaken for white, suggested that some American music executives deemed her music insufficiently commercial, “African,” or exotic to appeal to US audiences.⁶ The record was long thought lost. Then, in 1996, a copy made by the album’s recording engineer reemerged in a Paris studio. When A Morning in Paris finally appeared, critics responded enthusiastically: “Benjamin interprets jazz song as a kind of chant,” wrote Will Friedwald in The Village Voice. “The effect is mesmerizing.” The album came to be known as an early milestone in cross-continental jazz collaborations.

The second album, Duke Ellington Presents the Dollar Brand Trio, effectively introduced the group to the European and American markets when it appeared in Fall 1964. The second track is called “Kippi,” in honor of their colleague back home. The harmonies, phrasings, and rhythms, however, didn’t veer far from American bebop and post-bop—more Harlem than District Six.

The group took gigs around Europe and spent time in London, where Ibrahim and Benjamin married in February 1965. They also found themselves entangled in the period’s cold war politics. London’s “most significant site for South African musicians, artists, and writers,” Muller writes, was the Transcription Center, a CIA front that sought to turn artists and intellectuals from the Third World away from communism by producing interviews with writers and musicians for distribution on African radio stations, organizing concerts, and publishing explainers about African culture. The connection to the CIA was always obscured, and most artists and writers didn’t know of the US ties. Ibrahim briefly served as the organization’s musical director, and he recorded interviews there for broadcast on African radio stations—a connection he and Benjamin were loath to discuss later.

In the aftermath of the record’s critical success, Ellington encouraged Ibrahim and Benjamin to relocate to New York City. He arranged for Langston Hughes to write a letter supporting their application for residency permits, asked his sister, Ruth, to help find them an apartment, and secured them a spot on the program of the Newport Jazz Festival. Finally, in early summer 1965, the couple made the move.

Ibrahim had no shortage of opportunities in New York. That first year alone he recorded three albums as a leader; he also learned the cello and other new instruments at Juilliard on a scholarship from the Rockefeller Foundation, substituted for Ellington in his orchestra when Ellington went to work on film scores in Hollywood, and joined the band of John Coltrane’s former drummer Elvin Jones on their 1967 album Midnight Walk. And yet he was also suffering from a personal and artistic crisis, drinking heavily and unsure of his musical direction. “It was time,” he later told the bassist Alyn Shipton, “for me to return to my roots, to who I was.”⁷

Then, in June 1967, he gave his third performance at Carnegie Hall. “The first notes I struck even jarred me,” he remembered in a column he wrote a year later:

But after the first minute…everything flooded back. I played through District Six, up Hanover Street, Doug Arendse’s little place in Caledon Street, the Coon Carnival, Windermere, children’s songs, up Table Mountain, through the hills of Pondoland, my mother, father, sisters, brothers, everything.

These were all references to Cape Town’s inner city, and further afield to rural black South Africa. No recording survives of the performance, but the next day the New York Times reviewer John S. Wilson noted that, while one could detect echoes of Ellington and Monk in Ibrahim’s choice of melodies and chords, he “kept getting back to the insistent rhythms, the dancing figures, and the chantlike melodic lines that derive from Africa.”

If musically he was returning to his source, spiritually he was pivoting toward Islam. Ibrahim grew up Christian but would have certainly encountered Muslims in Cape Town, where Islam had arrived with enslaved people from Indonesia and Southeast Africa in the seventeenth century. The Dutch also banished politically troublesome clerics, royals, and other figures to the Cape Colony, further shaping the city’s religious landscape. What emerged was an unmistakably local Islam, Sunni mainly in its liturgy but infused with Sufi elements, which surely had an effect on Ibrahim. Just as decisive may have been his encounters with American jazz musicians who had embraced Islam under the influence of immigrant South Asian communities. In 1968, several years before going on the hajj, he adopted his name, meaning “servant of God” and “father of many.” Bea, too, took a new first name. It began as the bassist Johnny Dyani’s name for her in the early 1970s: Sathima, “someone with a kind heart.”

*

In 1968 Ibrahim and Benjamin left New York. After three nomadic years, during which they moved between South Africa, the US, Europe, and Swaziland, they settled in Cape Town. They found the city changed: in the intervening years it had grown more strictly segregated, its black and coloured residents expelled from the inner city and certain suburbs under racist laws defining “group areas.”

Ibrahim still toured outside South Africa and collaborated with a range of international musicians (among them Don Cherry, Max Roach, Gato Barbieri, John Tchicai, and Carlos Ward), but Cape Town—with its history of slavery, its carnival cultures, its working-class traditions, and its port economy—became his center of gravity. In “The World of Dollar,” the column he wrote for the Cape Herald, he regularly celebrated South Africa’s folk culture. He wanted to perform the music he remembered his mother playing on the church organ during his childhood, along with the workers’ songs and the waltzes and foxtrots and carnival (“klops”) music he had heard and played in dance bands throughout his youth. He called it “the tradition.”

At his concerts, his unhurried tempo, his decision not to announce or explain songs, and his deliberate touch at the piano created a devotional atmosphere, as if each note carried some universal secret. To listeners both in and outside South Africa, Ibrahim came to represent a wide range of political and spiritual aspirations. “He embodies…the spirit and the dignity of his black brothers,” the German music critic Dita von Szadkowski wrote in 1983, “or rather all his brothers who are of this spirit and fight for it.”⁸

Perhaps nothing did more to transform Ibrahim’s music during this period than his participation in the national jazz scene. In 1971 he started making albums for a new label called Soultown, founded the previous year by Rashid Vally, a music producer of Indian Muslim descent who ran the small operation out of the back of Kohinoor, a record and clothing store he owned in Johannesburg. Ibrahim recruited the drummer Nelson Magwaza and the bassist Victor Ntoni, two mainstays of the Johannesburg jazz circuit. Soon he would also reunite with Moeketsi, who joined them on a 1973 album, Dollar Brand + 3. Meanwhile he was a regular presence at weekend gigs in Cape Town, performing alongside a group of coloured musicians: the flutist and alto saxophonist Robbie Jansen, the tenor saxophonist Basil Coetzee, and the drummers Nazier Kapdi and Monty Weber. The first three were part of the group Oswietie, which was helping to shape what would become known as “Cape Jazz.”

The music he recorded during these years reconnected Ibrahim to two distinct sounds. Kohinoor was one of the few public places in Johannesburg where people of different races could still comfortably mix and exchange musical ideas, and his work with Magwaza, Moeketsi, and Ntoni channeled the city’s marabi beats. Meanwhile his collaborations with Oswietie brought out a newfound appreciation for Cape Town’s folk music. Heavily percussive and closely associated with carnival, Cape Jazz was driven by the ghoema, a rhythm named after the wooden, barrel-shaped drum brought to the Cape by Indian Ocean slaves. Sometimes, especially in Cape Town, audiences didn’t think it was jazz at all and walked out. These influences are most clear on Ibrahim’s 1974 album Underground in Africa, on which the Oswietie musicians provide the backup.

All this music was recorded against a backdrop of rising political dissent. After a lull during the 1960s, by the mid-1970s black South Africans were once again in open revolt, radicalized by a labor uprising in 1973, the coup in Portugal that brought about the independence of Angola and Mozambique, the rise of Black Consciousness (led by the brilliant, charismatic Steve Biko), and, in 1976, a student rebellion over the imposition of Afrikaans as the instruction language and the quality of education in black schools and universities.

Ibrahim had not yet explicitly declared himself for “the struggle,” but he was clearly inclining in its direction. One day he was in the studio with a group of Cape Town musicians workshopping tracks for his next album on Vally’s label, which he had convinced the producer to rename As-Shams (“The Sun”). Then Ibrahim spotted an upright piano with drawing pins attached to the hammerheads, which gave it a harpsichord-like sound. As Vally recalled in a 2022 profile of Ibrahim in Wax Poetics, Ibrahim sat down and started playing the simple two-chord harmony that would form the basis of “Mannenberg.”

Manenberg—Ibrahim added the extra letter—was one of the new townships where the apartheid regime had forcibly relocated coloured communities. But Ibrahim transformed its name into a symbol of defiance and joy. The cover of Mannenberg—‘Is Where It’s Happening,’ the LP that paired “Mannenberg” with the introspective “The Pilgrim” on the B-side, shows an older, working-class coloured woman staring confidently into the camera.⁹ A group of boys, standing in front of a washed-out apartment building wall, smiles behind her. The music itself was at once melancholic and uplifting, driven by the ghoema rhythm, with Coetzee’s saxophone adding a warm, soulful groove.

For the country’s black majority, the record struck a deep chord. With very little promotion, it sold 43,000 copies in its first seven months. In the 1980s Basil Coetzee would make “Mannenberg” famous at political rallies and marches, including the 1983 launch of the country’s most significant pro-democracy movement since the 1950s, the United Democratic Front. At the end of the song, Ibrahim speaks in Afrikaans—perhaps one of the few instances of his home language appearing on one of his records. “Julle kan ma’ New York toe gan. Ons bly hie’ innie Manenberg,” he says: You can all go to New York. We’ll stay here in Manenberg.

*

And yet by the end of 1976 Ibrahim and Benjamin had again been forced back to the US. In 1975 Ibrahim performed at Mozambique’s independence celebrations, and the Soweto revolt of June 1976 convinced him to be still more open about his political positions; in the following months he performed at an illegal ANC gathering in South Africa. Benjamin, too, had political reasons for wanting to move: “I didn’t want Tsakwe to go to school in South Africa with all the racism,” she told Muller. “When I had Tsidi, I said I didn’t want to raise her there either. Abdullah reluctantly agreed.” After they left Cape Town for Manhattan, the apartheid government forbade them from coming back.¹⁰

The couple spent most of the following two decades living in the Chelsea Hotel. (Benjamin stayed there until she left New York City in 2011.) Their output remained steady. In 1976, before she left, Benjamin, newly rededicated to her own music, had released African Songbird, her debut LP of original compositions, on As-Shams. In New York she resolved to build her own career. In 1979 she started her own label and publishing company, Ekapa, on which she would go on to release eight albums of her music, including the Grammy-nominated Dedications (1982), along with numerous records of Ibrahim’s. “If they weren’t going to release my music, then I had to do it myself,” she later told a South African journalist. “So I did.”

All but one of the songs on Benjamin’s long-lost 1963 album had been American jazz standards, but now she started singing original compositions that returned again and again to thoughts of exile, identity, and political struggle. She recorded tributes to the anti-apartheid movement (“Winnie Mandela, Beloved Heroine,” “Children of Soweto”), as well as reflections on a post-apartheid future. On “Nations in Me—New Nation A’Coming,” from Memories and Dreams (1986), she anticipated that new era: “There’ll be no talk about colour/We won’t be concerned about race/For we’re building a new nation/with just one beautiful face.” Benjamin’s voice has a pure, almost vintage quality; she counted Billie Holiday among her musical heroes. Her occasionally off-key touches only enhance her distinctive, clear delivery. In these records, the historian Robin D.G. Kelley has written, Benjamin “found her voice—or at least found a way to project her voice amid the din of the jazz police and the African purists.”¹¹

She was also raising two children essentially alone. Ibrahim was constantly on tour, and Benjamin’s marriage to him was troubled. In his old age, most explicitly in Ciro Cappelari’s film Abdullah Ibrahim, A Struggle for Love (2005), Ibrahim acknowledges that he “made many mistakes in terms of my relationship with my family.” Benjamin, too, spoke publicly about their complicated, often conflictual, relationship: “Our story started like a fairy tale, and there’ve been some really gorgeous, overwhelmingly beautiful moments,” she tells Cappelari. “But his personality is strong. Mine is strong too. And sometimes we just don’t agree on certain things, sometimes very important things, like where to live and what to do…but I know his kindness, and I know his generosity.”

Their daughter Tsidi, who now goes by Jean Grae, is less forgiving. In a 2025 memoir, In My Remaining Years, she calls her father “an abusive narcissist.”¹² Speaking with NPR about the book, she described Ibrahim and Benjamin’s relationship as “abusive and codependent” and confessed that she hoped that Ibrahim would die before her memoir was published, “so I could say the things that I really wanted to say.” Eventually she decided not to hold back anyway: now, she said, at least he would face some accountability.

*

In New York the couple came to identify openly with the South African struggle. “When we left,” Ibrahim told Graham Lock in a 1984 interview for The Wire, “the ANC asked us to play a more vocal role, and we accepted.” In more recent years Ibrahim has played down his political involvement: in 2024, explaining why he never became a card-carrying member of the ANC, he told a reporter from the Philadelphia Inquirer that “I don’t even belong to a football club.” He was perhaps reflecting an unease with the ANC’s current corruption, venality, and electoral decline. But during this earlier period his explicit connection with the movement was central to his artistic life.

Perhaps none of his work epitomizes that change more clearly than The Kalahari Liberation Opera, which Ibrahim premiered at the Vienna Festival in June 1982.¹³ It consisted of nine songs commemorating famous historical battles and figures, from the Basotho people’s successful defense of Thaba Bosiu against Boer settlers in 1865 and 1866 and the nineteenth-century campaigns of King Shaka to the struggle of the ANC and Nelson Mandela, recently moved to a new prison after eighteen years on Robben Island. The later songs in particular show Ibrahim in an openly revolutionary mood. “Everything has been said,” the choir sings in “Hour of the Fight,” one of several songs in support of the armed struggle the ANC’s military wing had been waging since the early 1960s. “Now guns are talking.” 

Two weeks after The Kalahari Liberation Opera premiered, the ANC organized a cultural festival in Botswana, on South Africa’s northern border, to which many politically engaged artists had fled. Ibrahim flew in to attend. He opened his first of two stagings with a vocal performance eulogizing Solomon Mahlangu, an ANC guerrilla whom the apartheid government had hanged in 1979 for killing two white warehouse employees while fleeing the police. In an interview with ANC media, Ibrahim called the festival “a de-programming center intended to get rid of the century of junk with which imperialist culture has filled your mind.”

It was a brave decision to show up. At the time the apartheid regime was killing the ANC’s leaders and supporters in frontline states like Botswana, Lesotho, Zimbabwe, and Swaziland, even targeting some of them in Europe. Later that year government agents blew up Ruth First—a leading white Jewish communist whose husband, Joe Slovo, led the ANC’s armed wing—in Mozambique. Ibrahim and Benjamin traveled there, too, to perform in her memory.

Stories keep emerging about how Ibrahim’s music helped ANC members endure the long nightmare of apartheid. In his 2024 autobiography, Soul of a Nation, Oyama Mabandla relates that, at seventeen, he and another comrade fled the country after the 1976 uprisings to join the exiled ANC in Lesotho. After a perilous journey across the border, they finally arrived in Maseru, the capital of Lesotho, and went to meet the ANC commander Chris Hani in his house. There, he wrote, they found Hani with students who had been exiled after boycotting their classes at Fort Hare University earlier that year, “listening to Abdullah Ibrahim’s ‘Woza Mntwana.’” Ibrahim would later claim that Mandela’s lawyer had smuggled “Mannenberg” onto Robben Island, where Mandela heard it and apparently called it “a sign that liberation is near.”

*

At the start of 1990 the apartheid government announced that it was freeing long-term political prisoners like Mandela and unbanning political organizations like the ANC, the Communist Party, and black consciousness groups. Along with most black South Africans of his generation, Ibrahim got caught up in the resulting euphoric years of political negotiations. He didn’t abandon New York City: Benjamin still lived there, as did his now-adolescent children. But he started spending more of his time in South Africa, where he founded a music school and bought a farm in the Northern Cape province on which he built an artist retreat. He got a hero’s welcome, receiving honorary doctorates from three universities and playing at Mandela’s presidential inauguration. He later claimed that Mandela had, in the 1980s, regularly convinced the personnel on Robben Island to play Ibrahim’s composition “Salaam (Peace)” over the prison’s loudspeakers.

In the late 1980s Benjamin and Ibrahim had drifted apart. Their divorce was finalized in 2011, at which point she moved back to Cape Town and began performing on the city’s stages again. Local jazz enthusiasts couldn’t believe their luck. In the summer of 2013, a month before Benjamin died, the British label Matsuli Music reissued African Songbird and the Cape Town music community organized a series of events in her honor. One night she performed at Mahogany Room, a storied jazz club—now closed—owned by the drummer Kesivan Naidoo. After the show she stayed to “hang out until midnight,” the music journalist and DJ Atiyyah Khan recalled, signing her album covers for fans with “generous, beautiful paragraphs.” 

Ibrahim, for his part, has maintained a more aloof, mysterious public profile. He regularly agrees to give interviews but tends to frustrate reporters with cryptic or parable-like answers. “People can stand on a soapbox at a press conference,” he told Dan Ouellette in 2004. “But the proof is on the stage, in the headphones. Everything else is peripheral.”

Occasionally he drops the mask. In 2024 the Cape Town radio journalist Lester Kiewit, who has developed a rapport with Ibrahim, interviewed him for the local news channel EWN. For much of the conversation Kiewit’s polite probing led nowhere. Then he asked Ibrahim why he named many of his songs after women: “Nisa,” “Joan,” “Song for Sathima,” “Moniebah,” and so on. Ibrahim started to give a boilerplate answer about women being the repository for memory, but after a pause he took a more personal turn. The name on his original government ID, he said, is Adolf Johannes Brand. “Where did I get this name from?” he asked. “It is not me. My name is Sentso; my father is MoSotho.” It was his grandmother, he went on, “who gave me this identity, so that I could have an easier passage [in life].”

What Ibrahim was describing was his identity as a coloured person. Under apartheid coloured South Africans faced deep discrimination—forced removals, job restrictions, loss of political rights, and daily segregation—but escaped the harshest controls imposed on Africans, such as pass laws or exile to “tribal homelands.” Ibrahim’s grandmother, he seemed to be implying, had given him a coloured name to spare him the worst of the regime’s oppression.

A coloured identity came with complexities of its own. Colouredness has historically been clouded in sexualized shame and freighted with stereotypes—immorality, promiscuity, illegitimacy, impurity, and criminality—left behind from colonial-era pseudoscience and the eugenic theories of the apartheid years. These ideas hold among most whites but also among some other black South Africans. Since the 1970s, when the Black Consciousness Movement reimagined “Black” as a political identity that could unite all of South Africa’s oppressed groups, many people marked as coloured have reconciled the two affiliations; others have preferred to be black alone. In recent years this dynamic has been further complicated by a resurgence of exclusively coloured identity politics that often has reactionary, antiblack political implications, suggesting that coloureds are the country’s “real” or “first” indigenous community—to the exclusion of other black people—and aligning with right-wing white political formations.

Ibrahim, for his part, has always refused to choose one identity over the other. For more than half a century he has engaged with aspects of coloured identity in his music (Christianity, Islam, carnival, Afrikaans song names), while combining it with other aspects of black culture (marabi, kwela, Xhosa hymns). When he invoked his grandmother in his conversation with Kiewit, it was not a moment of tension but an opening—a glimpse into how he makes sense of who he is.

On April 26 and 27, 2024—thirty years after South Africans voted in a democratic election for the first time—Harlem Stage hosted an event curated by the pianist Jason Moran called “Pianos for Duke Reimagined.” Over two nights, six pianists took turns paying homage to Ellington’s music and legacy. The night I attended, the last performer in the lineup, six months away from his ninetieth birthday, was Ibrahim.

The evening got off to a delay because of technical difficulties, and it was late by the time Ibrahim took the bandstand, but for the next half hour he had the audience entirely under his command. He moved briskly from one theme and fragment to another, weaving among Ellington (“In a Sentimental Mood”), Monk, and Coltrane phrases, and passages from his own compositions. Before you could settle into a tune he was already moving on. But nothing felt forced or haphazard. Each melody—gospel tunes, South African classics, blues rhythms, American jazz standards—came out effortlessly, evolving into the next, as if they were all part of a unified soundscape.

When Ibrahim finally seemed finished, his partner, Marina, stepped forward to help him up. But instead of returning to his seat offstage, he leaned on the piano with his left hand, cupped his ear with his right, and started an a cappella song that he lately often performs in concert. It appears briefly on the opening track of his 2013 LP Mukashi—Once Upon a Time and again under the title “Trance-Mission” on his last record, a live album called 3 (2024). Here, as on that recording, he gave it a raw, unaccompanied delivery, his voice hoarse and weary, singing about exile and homecoming: “Welcome home/There’s no one to welcome me home/My slave ship swings and sways/I see the harbor lights/Africa far, far away.” He kept repeating the song’s last line even as he walked out, with Marina holding him steady: “I hope I’ll see my home again someday.”