Miriam Makeba
1932 – 2008 · South Africa
Known for: Mama Africa: the singer who carried South Africa through exile to the world
“Mama Africa, who carried her country in her voice through thirty years of exile and sang it home.”
Biography
Miriam Makeba was born Zenzile Miriam Makeba on 4 March 1932 in Prospect, a black township near Johannesburg. When she was eighteen days old her mother was sentenced to six months in prison for selling homemade beer, a fine the family could not afford, and the infant went to jail with her. Her father, a teacher, died when she was six, and she was raised largely by her grandmother in a township outside Pretoria while her mother worked in white households in the city. For eight years she sang in the choir of a Methodist school in Pretoria, in English and in Xhosa, Sotho and Zulu; she later said she had learned to sing in English before she could speak it. She left school to work, married at seventeen, and had her only child, Bongi, in 1950.
Her professional career began with the Cuban Brothers, went on to the Manhattan Brothers, and included the Skylarks, an all woman group whose repertoire mixed jazz, traditional African melody and Western popular song. A small part in the 1959 anti-apartheid film Come Back, Africa carried her out of the country, to Venice, London and New York; in London she met Harry Belafonte, who became her mentor, and by 1960 she was recording in the United States. That same year the South African government refused to let her return for her mother's funeral, and her right to come home was gone. She sang Pata Pata, won a Grammy with Belafonte for their album of 1965, testified against the apartheid government at the United Nations, and in 1968 married the Black Panther leader Stokely Carmichael, after which American bookings dried up and her visa was revoked while she was abroad.
Exile took her to Guinea, and from there she performed across Africa, at independence celebrations and in songs that named apartheid outright, among them Soweto Blues, written for her by Hugh Masekela after the uprising of 1976. She came home in 1990, after thirty years away and after the dismantling of apartheid had begun, and kept working: an album with Nina Simone and Dizzy Gillespie in 1991, the film Sarafina! in 1992, a Goodwill Ambassadorship for the Food and Agriculture Organization from 1999, and years of humanitarian campaigning. On 9 November 2008 she collapsed after a concert in Italy and died of a heart attack. She had been among the first African musicians the whole world heard, and Nelson Mandela said after her death that her music inspired a powerful sense of hope in all of us.