Miriam Makeba’s song “Pata Pata” is a jubilant anthem of spatial insurgency. The song emerged in Johannesburg’s Sophiatown, a neighbourhood later razed under the Group Areas Act. Apartheid reshaped urban and rural areas through racial segregation, extreme violence, bulldozers and blueprints, displacing entire communities into standardised housing blocks like those in Soweto and Langa. These so-called “model townships” were designed not as homes but as instruments of surveillance and control: stripped of amenities, and meant to restrict the possibilities of life. Within this geography of enforced order, shebeens — informal bars where music and interactions flourished — became sites of resistance. “Pata Pata,” with its infectious call to dance, translated this subversive energy into sound: a cartography of pleasure, mapped against the rigidity of apartheid planning.