The Southeast Cape Basin is flanked by the extensive Cape Town Slump at the foot of which is a widespread zone of erosion. Southward-dipping reflectors that intersect this surface of erosion are truncated and the surface itself contains channels up to 35 m deep and 2 km wide. An extensive moat, up to 100 m deep and over 20 km wide, runs along the northern edge of the subdued (< 1000 m relief) eastern section of the Agulhas Ridge. A pavement of well-exposed, large, spheroidal, botryoidal manganese nodules, embedded in sandy mud, was photographed and grab-sampled in a depth of 4517 m, south of the Cape Town Slump and southwest of the Argentina Seamount. The nodules are polynucleate and have increasing proportions of silicate detritus towards the outer edge. It is suggested that the inner layer may be of Early to Middle Pleistocene age because the nodules lie on a regional unconformity eroded into Palaeogene, Neogene and, in places, Early Pleistocene sediments. In contrast, the outer layer is probably Middle Pleistocene to Holocene and contains ice-rafted detritus. A camera-grab station in 4749 m near the major erosional channels revealed evidence of southeastward-flowing contour currents scouring a veneer of foraminiferal muddy sand draping a pavement of manganese nodules. More powerful bottom currents in the Agulhas Ridge Moat have formed westward-moving current ripples of glauconitic muddy sand. Small, friable, spheroidal iron nodules in the troughs between the ripples have nuclei of glauconitic sandy mud and are probably goethite-encrusted intraclasts derived from erosion of the underlying Early Pleistocene glauconitic pelagic clay.