Miriam Makeba

Zenzile Miriam Makeba was born on March 4, 1932, in the Prospect Township area of Johannesburg. Her mother, Christina, was a Swazi domestic worker and a sangoma, a traditional healer, while her father, Caswell, a Xhosa teacher and clerk, died when Miriam was a young child ^[1]. Only days after Miriam's birth, her mother was arrested for brewing and selling umqombothi, a home-made beer, to supplement the family income. Unable to pay the fine, Christina served a six-month sentence, and the infant Miriam spent those months in jail with her ^[2].

Makeba grew up moving between Johannesburg and the Transvaal town of Riverside, near Pretoria, where relatives helped raise her. She sang from childhood, first in the choir of the Kilnerton Training Institute, a Methodist school she attended for eight years ^[1]. Money was scarce after her father's death, and as a teenager she took domestic work, the occupation open to most Black South African women under the segregated economy that preceded and then hardened into formal apartheid after 1948.

Music surrounded her at home and at church. She absorbed Xhosa and Zulu song traditions from her mother's side alongside the American jazz and swing records that circulated in the townships, a mixture that later defined her style. Anyone asking who was Miriam Makeba before fame finds a young woman singing at weddings and community events in Johannesburg while working to support her family ^[2].

Makeba's professional career began in the early 1950s when she joined the Cuban Brothers, a Johannesburg group, before moving in 1954 to the Manhattan Brothers, one of South Africa's most popular vocal outfits. With them she recorded and toured, and her voice on the 1956 hit Lovely Lies brought her a measure of national fame ^[1]. She then fronted an all-female group, the Skylarks, whose blend of jazz harmony and traditional melody produced a string of successful records in the late 1950s ^[3].

Two breaks changed her trajectory. In 1959 she took the female lead in King Kong, a jazz opera about a South African boxer that became a landmark of Black South African theatre. The same year she appeared in Come Back, Africa, an anti-apartheid documentary filmed covertly by the American director Lionel Rogosin. When the film screened at the Venice Film Festival, Rogosin arranged for Makeba to attend, and her brief on-screen performance drew international attention ^[2].

From Venice she travelled to London, where she met Harry Belafonte, who became her mentor and helped her settle in the United States. Appearances on the Steve Allen Show and an extended engagement at the Village Vanguard in New York introduced her to American audiences in late 1959, and critics responded to a singer whose repertoire, delivered in Xhosa, Zulu, Sotho, and English, sounded like nothing else in the clubs ^[3]. In 1960, when she tried to return home for her mother's funeral, the South African government revoked her passport. She would not stand on South African soil again for thirty years ^[1].

Any account of Miriam Makeba achievements begins with her recordings. Her self-titled 1960 debut album for RCA Victor included Qongqothwane, known to Western listeners as The Click Song for the distinctive click consonants of Xhosa, and established her as an international star ^[3]. In 1967 she released Pata Pata, a song she had first recorded in South Africa in the 1950s. The new version reached the Billboard Top 20 in the United States and became her signature, covered and sampled for decades afterward ^[2].

Recognition followed quickly. In 1966 Makeba and Harry Belafonte shared the Grammy Award for Best Folk Recording for An Evening with Belafonte/Makeba, an album of songs addressing the lives of Black South Africans under apartheid. She was the first African woman to win a Grammy ^[1]. The award confirmed what her concert schedule already showed: she was the first African performer to command a truly global popular audience, singing for President John F. Kennedy at Madison Square Garden in 1962 and at independence celebrations across the decolonizing continent ^[4].

Her platform was political as well as musical. In 1963 she testified before the United Nations Special Committee Against Apartheid, describing conditions in South Africa and calling for sanctions. Pretoria answered by banning her records and revoking her citizenship ^[2]. She addressed the UN again in 1975 as a delegate for Guinea, the West African nation that had given her a home and a diplomatic passport. Few artists of any era have matched that combination of chart success and formal political standing, one of the more striking Miriam Makeba facts ^[4].

Makeba married five times. Her first marriage, at seventeen, to James Kubay, produced her only child, Bongi, born in 1950, but the relationship was abusive and short-lived. During the same period she survived breast cancer ^[2]. A brief marriage to the singer Sonny Pillay ended in 1960, and in 1964 she married the trumpeter and fellow South African exile Hugh Masekela; they divorced two years later but remained lifelong friends and collaborators ^[1].

Her 1968 marriage to Stokely Carmichael, the Trinidadian-American civil rights leader and Black Power advocate, transformed her American career overnight. Concert bookings evaporated, record deals were cancelled, and the couple, feeling unwelcome in the United States, moved to Guinea at the invitation of President Ahmed Sékou Touré ^[4]. They divorced in the late 1970s. A final marriage, to an airline executive, also ended in divorce.

The hardest blow of her private life came in 1985, when her daughter Bongi, herself a singer and songwriter, died at the age of thirty-six following complications in childbirth. Makeba, who had raised Bongi largely alone in exile, buried her in Guinea and later wrote about the loss with unguarded grief in her autobiography ^[2].

Guinea remained Makeba's base through the 1970s and much of the 1980s. She performed across Africa, recorded for European labels, and served the Guinean government in diplomatic roles, while her music stayed banned in the country of her birth ^[4]. In 1987 Paul Simon invited her to join the Graceland tour, which brought South African musicians to stadium audiences worldwide. The tour was controversial among some anti-apartheid campaigners because of the cultural boycott, but it returned Makeba to prominence in the West and introduced her to a new generation ^[3].

In 1988 she published her autobiography, Makeba: My Story, written with James Hall, a frank account of poverty, fame, exile, and loss ^[2]. Then history turned. Nelson Mandela was released from prison in February 1990, and he personally urged Makeba to come home. In June 1990 she landed in Johannesburg on a French passport, ending three decades of exile ^[1].

She kept working almost to the end. There were new albums, a role in the 1992 film Sarafina!, appointment as a goodwill ambassador for the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization in 1999, and South Africa's Order of Ikhamanga ^[4]. On November 9, 2008, after singing at a concert in Castel Volturno, Italy, held in support of the writer Roberto Saviano, who had received death threats from the Camorra crime organization, Makeba suffered a heart attack and died at the age of seventy-six ^[5].

Makeba's death drew tributes from across the world, led by Nelson Mandela, who said her music had carried the pain and hope of South Africa through the darkest years of apartheid ^[5]. The name by which millions knew her, Mama Africa, captured her standing as a symbol of the continent's dignity during decolonization and of resistance to racial oppression. She had asked to sing about home when home was forbidden to her, and she turned that predicament into a career of rare moral weight.

Musically, she opened doors. Later African stars, from Angelique Kidjo to Youssou N'Dour, have named her as the artist who proved African music could reach the largest global stages without abandoning its languages or forms ^[3]. Pata Pata continues to be reissued, remixed, and streamed, and The Click Song still serves as many listeners' first encounter with Xhosa. In 2020, on what would have been her birthday, Google marked her life with a dedicated Doodle, a small sign of her continuing recognition ^[4].

Any Miriam Makeba biography must weigh the cost of her stand: thirty years barred from her country, her records banned, her citizenship stripped. She paid it without retreating from either her music or her politics, and South Africa's democratic government honored her among its national heroes. Museums, documentaries, and university courses on protest music keep her story in circulation, and her recordings remain the most durable archive of all ^[1].