Miriam Makeba
Mama Africa, exiled for thirty-one years.
Full detail, evidence and debate
Miriam Makeba carried South African music to the world for three decades of exile after her passport was revoked for testifying against apartheid at the United Nations. She was a major recording artist, the first African woman to win a Grammy, and a political figure whose career was repeatedly damaged by the positions she refused to abandon.
- Lived
- 1932 – 2008
- Exiled
- Passport revoked 1960; returned to South Africa 1990
- UN testimony
- Special Committee against Apartheid, 1963 and later
- Grammy
- 1966, with Harry Belafonte — a first for an African woman
- Best known songs
- 'Pata Pata', 'Qongqothwane', 'Malaika'
- Died
- 2008, after a concert in Italy for Roberto Saviano
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Beginnings
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Makeba was born in Johannesburg in 1932 and spent her first six months in prison with her mother, who had been jailed for brewing beer to make ends meet. She sang in choirs, joined the Cuban Brothers, then the Manhattan Brothers, and formed the Skylarks, whose recordings blended close-harmony jazz with Xhosa and Zulu material. She appeared in the anti-apartheid documentary Come Back, Africa in 1959 and in the musical King Kong, and travelled to the Venice Film Festival for the film's screening. Harry Belafonte took an interest, brought her to the United States, and she appeared on American television in 1959 to immediate acclaim.
Exile
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When she tried to return to South Africa in 1960 for her mother's funeral, her passport was cancelled. She would not see the country again for thirty-one years. Her citizenship was later revoked, her records banned at home, and she spent the exile carrying passports from a succession of countries — nine at one point — and travelling on a UN laissez-passer. Exile is the central fact of her career: it made her an international artist and it removed her from the audience she had come from, and she wrote and spoke about that cost with unusual directness.
Testimony
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In 1963 she appeared before the United Nations Special Committee against Apartheid and described pass laws, forced removals, the destruction of Sophiatown and the daily operation of the system to an international audience at a moment when the South African government was investing heavily in controlling how it was seen abroad. She asked for an arms embargo and for economic pressure. South Africa's response was immediate and total: her music was banned and her citizenship stripped. She testified again in later years and became one of the most visible faces of the anti-apartheid case, which is not the same job as being a singer and cost her a great deal of work.
The music
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Her repertoire drew on Xhosa and Zulu traditional song, Sotho material, marabi and mbaqanga from the townships, and American jazz phrasing, and she was fluent enough across all of it that none of it sounded like a novelty. 'Pata Pata', recorded in 1957 and re-recorded in 1967, became a worldwide hit. 'Qongqothwane', known abroad as 'The Click Song' because English-speaking audiences could not pronounce the title, made the Xhosa click consonants familiar to listeners who had never heard the language. She sang 'Malaika' in Swahili, recorded with Belafonte, with Hugh Masekela, whom she married, and later with Paul Simon on the Graceland tour. Her insistence on singing in African languages to international audiences, rather than translating everything into English, was itself a position.
The cost of her politics
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In 1968 she married Stokely Carmichael, the Black Power leader. American promoters cancelled her contracts, her recording deal was dropped, and the FBI took an interest; a career at its peak in the United States effectively ended within months. The couple moved to Guinea, where she lived for fifteen years under Sékou Touré's patronage, served as Guinea's delegate to the United Nations, and continued to tour Africa and Europe. She lost her daughter Bongi in 1985. Her life was, by any measure, harder than the celebratory obituaries suggested, and much of the hardship followed directly from choices she made in public.
How we know
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Two autobiographies — Makeba: My Story with James Hall, and Makeba: The Miriam Makeba Story with Nomsa Mwamuka — give her own account. The UN records preserve her testimony verbatim. South African security police files, released after 1994, document the state's response to her. Her recorded catalogue spans five decades, and the documentary and concert footage, including Come Back, Africa and the Graceland tour films, is extensive. Historians of the cultural boycott and of anti-apartheid solidarity treat her as a primary case study.
Return and death
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Nelson Mandela persuaded her to come home in 1990, shortly after his release, and she returned to a country she had last seen as a young woman. She performed at his inauguration in 1994, worked with the UN Food and Agriculture Organization as a goodwill ambassador, and set up a centre for girls in Johannesburg. She died in November 2008 in Castel Volturno, Italy, after collapsing at the end of a concert staged in support of the writer Roberto Saviano, who was under threat from the Camorra — she was seventy-six and had been performing a farewell tour for years without finishing it.
Legacy
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Makeba is the reason a great deal of the world first heard South African music, and she did it without diluting the material. The title 'Mama Africa' stuck because she functioned as a representative of a continent rather than a country, particularly during the years when her own country would not have her. Her influence runs through Angélique Kidjo, Yvonne Chaka Chaka, Thandiswa Mazwai and a long line of African women singers who cite her as the precedent for touring internationally on their own terms. She is also the standing example of what the cultural boycott of apartheid cost the artists who supported it.
Where to go next
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The apartheid entry covers the system she testified against and Nelson Mandela the negotiation that ended it. The Afrobeats and amapiano entries follow South African and West African popular music into the present, and the South Africa country profile covers the state.
Sources
- General History of Africa, Volumes IX–XI (ongoing)African source
UNESCO · 2013–
https://www.unesco.org/en/general-history-africa
Follow the thread
Apartheid
Racial hierarchy written into statute.
For forty-six years South Africa ran a legal system that classified every person by race and used that classification to control where they could live, work, study, travel, love and be buried. It was bureaucratic, deliberate, meticulously recorded by its own administrators — and it was resisted continuously, from mass campaigns and strikes to armed struggle and global sanctions, until it fell in 1994.
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Lawyer, saboteur, prisoner, negotiator, president.
Nelson Mandela spent twenty-seven years in prison for leading the armed wing of the African National Congress, walked out in 1990 to negotiate with the government that jailed him, and served a single term as South Africa's first democratically elected president. The settlement he brokered averted the civil war most observers expected and deferred the economic questions that dominate South African politics today.
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