Remembering African legend Miriam Makeba

A concert in New York last week was a powerful reminder of the legacy of Miriam Makeba, six years after the revered musicians died.

The show at the famous Canergie Hall featured songs from Makeba’s vast repertoire performed by Angelique Kidjo and other musicians and stars like actress Whoopi Goldberg. It was also an occasion to celebrate 20 years since the end of apartheid, a system that in many ways defined the life of the South African singer.

Since becoming a star in the 1950s, Makeba grew to be a representation of music from the continent that she was fondly called Mama Africa. Makeba suffered a heart attack after performing her signature song Pata Pata at a concert in support of Italian writer Roberto Saviano for his stand against the mafia.

It’s symbolic that her last appearance on stage was to sing for the freedoms she had championed all her life. Here was a township girl who had been introduced to traditional music by her parents and won her first singing contest at a missionary school at the age of 13. 

American singer and activist Harry Belafonte in his memoirs “Sing your song” published in 2011 writes about that moment in 1958 when he watched a Makeba appear in the anti apartheid documentary, ‘‘Come Back Africa’’.

“The singer, a young woman, was both gorgeous and gifted; her extraordinary voice seemed to capture all the hope and despair of black South Africa.”

Nightingale

With a voice that earned her the name the Nightingale, Makeba was already South Africa’s best-known female black singer having recording many gospel and jazz records with the all-girl group The Skylarks.

When she first arrived in New York, Makeba was singing jazz standards by Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan and others. Worried that her unique style would be lost if she remained an imitation of other singers, Belafonte told her:

“America didn’t need a South African Fitzgerald. It needed Makeba doing her own music.’ The decision to sing in Xhosa, Zulu, Sotho and even a smattering of Swahili, in a style only she could do, won her many admirers in US and the rest of the world while “Pata Pata” and ‘The Click Song” became part of her standard repertoire.

In Kenya

Belafonte, who Makeba called her big brother, became her mentor and together they worked for seven years, recording among other albums, the 1966 Grammy Award winning set, “An Evening with Belafonte and Makeba” that included their version of the song Malaika. The two stars performed in Kenya during the independence celebrations in 1963.

In 1963, she addressed the UN in an emotional appeal to world leaders to help end apartheid. When the South African government reacted to the speech by revoking her citizenship effectively rendering her stateless, no less than nine countries, including Guinea, Belgium and Ghana issued her passports in solidarity.

She also had a turbulent personal life. After the end of her marriage to trumpeter Hugh Masekela, who was also in exile in the US, she had relationships with two high profile members of the radical African American group, the Black Panthers.

First, it was Huey Newton, then Stockely Carmichael who she married in 1968. The couple moved to Guinea at the invitation of President Sekou Toure, with Stockely, who changed his name to Kwame Toure becoming the president’s aide and Makeba appointed the country’s Minister of Culture.

If there is a blemish in her life, then it is the role she is accused of having played as a power behind Toure’s throne, especially as the once respected statesman slid his country into an era of tyranny and repression. Though she admitted that the marriage to the deeply divisive Carmichael had alienated her from many fans especially in the US, the marriage lasted till 1973 when they divorced.

After 30 years in exile, she returned home to huge fanfare in 1991, but the reality is that there was a very different music scene and a new post-apartheid generation who had embraced new musical forms like kwaito and house music.

However, Makeba had a massive global following and even after announcing her retirement in 2005, she toured with a new band including her grand son Nelson Lumumba.