Dr. Boitumelo Tlhoaele on The Jazz Standard with Brenda Sisane

For generations of Sowetans, the Jabulani Amphitheatre has been more than a performance venue. Built in 1952, it became a gathering place for music, sport, political debate, worship, mourning and celebration. Jazz musicians and touring international acts shared its stage; political organisations and trade unions used its stands; churches prayed there for healing and peace; and major public moments, including Zinzi Mandela’s reading of her father’s letter in 1985, unfolded within its walls. Yet despite this extraordinary history, the amphitheatre has remained largely absent from South Africa’s dominant cultural canon. Dr Boitumelo Tlhoaele’s research begins with that absence.

Working across newspaper collections, music archives, visual material, oral memory and digital platforms, she is reconstructing the Jabulani Amphitheatre as a cultural history in its own right. Her project, The Jabulani Amphitheatre: a history of a place through archive, fragments, sounds, asks what can be recovered when history is approached not only through official records, but also through scattered images, remembered performances, archival gaps and the sound of a place.