May 1956 Night Life The Manhattan Brothers on Tour
May 1956 Night Life The Manhattan Brothers on Tour with Miriam Makeba in Bloemfontein. For a period of some fifteen years in the 1940s and 50s, The Manhattan Brothers stood at the very apex of African entertainment in South Africa. Their music was heard everywhere: on the radio, behind the closed doors of suburban servants quarters, pouring out of township back yards and shebeens, and shaking a circuit of jam-packed halls and theatres. Photographs of the group and accounts of their latest activities occupied the pages of all the African newspapers and pictorial magazines. An entire generation of predominantly male, young Africans modelled themselves on the group's dress, speech, attitude and lifestyle. In fact, the Manhattan Brothers were South Africa's first superstars. In 1957, the group conducted another tour through central Africa that took them as far north as Leopoldville (Kinshasa) in what was then the Belgium Congo. (Pho
