The Venues Keeping Johannesburg’s Nightlife Alive

For close to two decades, 81 De Korte Street has held a singular position in the Johannesburg creative economy. As the Puma Social Club, it hosted free Friday night parties that gave a mostly student market access to some of the most cutting edge acts of the early 2010s. It functioned as a cultural incubator, disbursing music knowledge, and as a pit stop into nights that more often than not stretched into the next day and spilled over into the rest of the weekend. Then came The Orbit, a beacon of modern South African jazz that presented improvised music with neither fear nor reverence for what was hot on the top ten. Between 2014 and 2019 it was the bridge, bringing along scores of live music purveyors who still sing its praises and wish for a return to olden days.

The changes came in quick succession after that, most of them COVID-induced. First the J&B Hive, a hub for entrepreneurs that doubled as a performance venue. Then Leano, which in theory sought to emulate the spirit of The Orbit. Following a few years of inactivity, the address reopened as Jozi Gold, a brewery and performance space where the programming centres live music and offers a snapshot of the scene as it stands. It is now also the home of Your Weekly Touch Up, a touchstone of the live music scene in the city and the country at large. "I love live music, especially on a Wednesday" has become a rallying call for audiences who routinely fill the venue to see their favourite acts, and to chat to friends and make a few acquaintances over a pint while at it.

Lwandile Nkanyuza, who performs as ByLwansta, has watched the event become an institution. For 150 weeks and counting the team has shown up, across three venues that have served as homes in Johannesburg. What happens in the room can only be experienced, because describing it almost defeats the point. Imagine stumbling into a venue because there is activity inside, or coming across a social media post advertising the night. It is free, so money is never an issue. Only the first four shows were ticketed, until Nkanyuza and his team thought to de-centre the number of tickets sold as a metric for success. Imagine staying because the emcee is engaging, then coming back weeks or months later for one more act.

This is how the event was built. It started as a residency for ByLwansta to perform regularly, at a time when bookings were not forthcoming. It has since grown to a point where he neither has to perform nor host. He speaks to OkayAfrica from a whole other city, having left the night to a team that includes the musicians Amongst The People I Know and the deejay and producer Al Da 3rd.

"We were just using relationships and being resourceful, keeping costs as low as possible. We haven't paid booking fees as such, but we were sending transport money, up until I went broke. We weren't able to sustain that part of it," he says.

"Mostly we assist with hospitality. But we got buy-in from the artists very early, because the first person to buy in was an artist. So it wasn't a promoter looking to host an event and make money. It was another artist looking for the same thing a lot of artists are looking for. We found each other in that. So everybody was always willing to play the event, and we'd help out where we could."

Increasingly, Your Weekly Touch Up serves as a stop for artists from around the country and the continent at large. Kenya's Njoki Karu made a pit stop during her tour of South Africa last year. Artists from Eswatini, among them Sarnilo and iYA, have made sure to visit when they are in the country.

"At its core, it's creating value. We're creating something people are going to gravitate towards, but it needs us to want to do that, and to commit to showing up every week," says Nkanyuza. "A lot of our peers thought it was overkill. Every week? It was confusing to them, because how much time do you spend on music then, outside of the studio? So we said, we're going to do this thing. We're going to do it every week, because for me personally, having a residency gave me a balance. I felt like a professional musician, a career musician, in that I clock in every Wednesday."

Across the bridge in Newtown, Niki's Oasis sits at the corner of Lilian Ngoyi and Miriam Makeba streets, a tour de force that continues to hold its ground as the precinct thins around it. It keeps company with the Market Theatre Laboratory, the Market Photo Workshop and Museum Africa. Owned by Simnikiwe Sondlo, who opened it in 1995, the venue remains a platform for the known and the unknown, a steady beat in a city that misses its step too often to the sound of shifting currents.

Niki's Oasis is one of the venues supported over the years by Concerts SA, whose venue programme enables musicians to be paid their fee irrespective of ticket sales, or of whether they are entitled to a cut at the bar. For more than a decade, Concerts SA has embedded itself in the live music ecosystem of Southern Africa, and has made mobility grants available to artists who wished to do national and regional tours. 

In June it was named winner of the 2026 Music Cities Award for Best Placemaking Initiative, alongside IKS Cultural Consulting, which administers the programme. The award was handed over at the Music Cities Convention in Kingston upon Hull, and recognises more than a decade of structural work building sustainable live music ecosystems and driving artistic mobility across South Africa and the wider region.

West of the city, the Afrikan Freedom Station spent its first years in a small shop facing an open parking lot. Steve Kwena Mokwena founded it in 2012 and ran it as a gallery, a cinema and a bandstand. You arrived and could see the little portal from the other side of the lot. Then the properties around it were bought and built into student accommodation, the parking lot disappeared, and the station closed. Mokwena and his business partner Coco Merckel had bought a plot in 2016. The station reopened at 29 Edward Street, on land they own.

"Young folk in my country need beautiful, safe, clean spaces to express themselves," Mokwena says. "Young artists have always created spaces in the city, from Newtown to Maboneng. But those spaces have not been conceived with them as the custodians, with them as the security, with them as the actual occupants."

Ownership tips the scale, and it’s something both Sondlo and Mokwena have got right at different junctures in their lives. "All we have done is increase the canvas upon which young artists can paint," Mokwena says. "The bandstand and its capacity, and even the amount of money that we're able to command. It's much better than when we were in the small shop."

Speaking to Andre Le Roux and Christine Msibi of IKS Cultural Consulting, one comes to understand that thriving music venues and music circuits are a public good, in that taking care of the venue is taking care of the surrounding environment. Le Roux, who has been with the programme since its beginnings under the SAMRO Foundation — the non-profit wing of the South African royalty collections society — struggles with the recognition. On one hand it is good to be seen for the work one does. On the other [hand], it is a paradox when that work is not seen at home. "Undervalued" is how he describes it. In Cape Town a few years ago he met the city's then deputy mayor, Ian Neilson, whose only interest was what the model could do for the city. Neilson did not care for the groundwork the organisation had laid across the Southern African region.

"I said, but isn't mobility a problem in this apartheid geographical city of yours," says Le Roux. "Artists who are far out and need to come into town. Aren't loading zones and transport a problem? And he said, I read about the night-time economy here. You want me to appoint a party animal in the city? I stopped dead in my tracks. I looked at his team. Yes, Mr Neilson, deputy mayor, I want you to appoint a party animal, someone who can leave the club at two or three in the morning."

The party animal would "notice that the street lights aren't working. They'll notice that the loading zones aren't functional. They'll notice that perhaps there are food issues and health issues here. And perhaps that morning they can walk into City Council and speak to the right people, and then get the right people to look at policing, at law enforcement, at loading zones, at mobility in the city. And maybe you'll be able to figure out that there's an economy here that isn't just regulation and policing and prostitution. So lobbying is difficult," he says.

Msibi came into the fold from an events organising background, putting together shows and tours for artists supported by Concerts SA.

"For the artists or the people who benefit from the work of Concerts SA, it does come with a financial component. However, from a global perspective, the people looking at Concerts SA see it differently," she says.

"They have a greater appreciation that subsidising artists to travel is a bigger deal than just giving people money. They recognise that something had to be unlocked somewhere along the line. And it may not have been with [the] government. Sadly, our Minister of Arts and Culture isn't the kind of person to whom a feat like this registers."

On Wednesday nights in Braamfontein, the room fills anyway.