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Photograph: Bloke Modisane and the cast of his radio play “The Quarter Million Boys”, with producer Charles Lefeaux in London 1969
Every Wednesday evening we broadcast a piece from our sound library that relates to ongoing or previous research. This week we listen to a 1965 radio programme on “the history of jazz” produced and presented by South African pianist, composer and bandleader Abdullah Ibrahim.
While in exile in London in the mid-1960s with his partner, the singer and composer Sathima Bea Benjamin, Abdullah Ibrahim worked as musical director at the Transcription Centre – a production house founded in 1962 by former colonial administrator, journalist and Africana impresario Dennis Duerden. Set up to record and transcribe radio programmes for the BBC Africa Service and radio stations across the continent, the Centre quickly became a hub for visiting and exiled artists, playwrights, musicians, writers and hangers-on. Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, Efua Sutherland, Tayeb Salih, Dorothy Masuka, Ibrahim El-Salahi, Ngugi wa Thiongo, The Blue Notes, James Baldwin and many more luminaries were frequent visitors. Lewis Nkosi, Robert Serumaga, Alex La Guma and Maxine McGregor were on staff.
Unbeknown to them, the Centre was also a front of the “cultural Cold War”, fully funded by the CIA to counter the tide of socialism sweeping the continent post-independence. A programme that extended to the funding of festivals, conferences and literary magazines in Africa and beyond. After the scandal broke in 1967, Soyinka famously quipped “if we’d known it was CIA money we would have asked for more!”
While curating music performances and recordings at the Centre, Ibrahim presented four “illustrated” lectures on jazz – discussing the music’s roots in struggle in the US and its emergence in SA, selecting records, reciting poems and occasionally performing original music with Sathima and members of the Blue Notes (mostly Dudu Pukwana). With typical wit, he opens the programme thus: “Joey had the biggest feet, so he played tenor – this is one example of my many humble attempts to write poetry”
Wednesday, 31 March 2026 from 7pm
Live on the Pan African Space Station
Tune in!