Join the JAZZ AGAINST APARTHEID international musicians Daniel Guggenheim, Claude Deppa, Christopher Dell, Christian Lillinger and publisher Elisabeth Ehrhorn on this artistic and skills transferring journey to South Africa : Johannesburg and Buffalo City. Discover the legacy of JAA founders, exile from Duncan Village Johnny Dyani and German concert organiser, Jürgen Leinhos. Help promote the contemporary movement of South African jazz and skills transfer to the future emerging artists across all musical genres and creative expressions. 

For this years event the international team of Jazz musicians will hold training and mentoring workshops at Johannesburg Holocaust Genocide Centre and Kromdraai Impact Hub NIROX and then in Buffalo City East London at Gompo Arts Centre and at the Steve Biko Centre in Qonce. 

The main aim is what Germans call Nachwuchsförderung which is a nationally recognised tradition and policy by which knowledge and skills are purposefully transferred from the current generation to the next. In this context these veteran free-jazz musicians hold capacity building and training jazz workshops directed at interested and upcoming youth from the townships. The events end with a big collaborative jazz concerts at Nirox Cradle of humankind in Johannesburg and Steve Biko Centre in Qonce. JAA as a cultural exchange holds the potential for long term and sustainable international music exchanges geared towards youth music education, mentoring and entrepreneurship.

The Anti-apartheid movement in in Germany included the work of South African’s in exile Peggy Luswazi and Vusi Mchunu and their German activist counterparts.

As a complete archive of 25 years of exile disseminating, preserving and promoting the significant legacy of Jazz Against Apartheid is the impact needed to help restore South Africa’s culture memory. 

This is the shared knowledge of South African cultural heritage that has been cultivated abroad for years during the time of political struggle in South Africa.

Such knowledge has the power to stimulate our self-discovery process and our intellectual and emotional connection to heritage.

By making an essential aspect of the buried cultural heritage accessible to a young generation of scholars, current and future professionals and the creative arts, research and activism careers who have grown up in the post-apartheid society, we are injecting the freshness of preservation to South African cultural legacy and practice.