Mannenberg

Recorded in June 1974 in Cape Town and produced by Rashid Vally, the piece began with Ibrahim improvising at a piano with thumbtacks on its hammers. He asked the band to join in, and Ibrahim recalled in 2014 that it took one take. Robbie Jansen said the band recorded eight albums' worth of material that week and played every song once. The title refers to the township of Manenberg, and Ibrahim said it symbolized the removal of people from District Six. Basil Coetzee, who took the nickname Manenberg from his tenor saxophone solo, had grown up there. The cover shows Gladys Williams, once housekeeper to the musician Morris Goldberg, and Ibrahim told the band that the music made him think of an elderly woman walking through a township.

It has no lyrics. The historian John Edwin Mason described it as an unfamiliar combination of familiar ingredients: a marabi groove, a beat like ticky-draai, langarm saxophones and a jazz aesthetic. Vally played it outside his shop before release, sold 5,000 copies in its first week and signed a deal with Gallo for national distribution. Some have said it resembles Jackpot, a mbaqanga tune from around 1960. Ibrahim later said that it captured the mood of the people.

Anthem

Coetzee and Jansen played it at rallies against the apartheid government through the 1980s, with Jansen speaking about pride in one's culture. It has been called an unofficial national anthem of South Africa. Ibrahim said that in 1980 the record was smuggled into Robben Island, played over the prison loudspeakers, and that Mandela remarked on hearing it, Liberation is near. It was played at Zohran Mamdani's inauguration as mayor of New York in January 2026. A shorter version, Mannenberg Revisited, is on Water From An Ancient Well.