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Adieu Miriam Makeba

Death of the great south-african singer


Paris 

10/11/2008 - 

On 9th November, Miriam Makeba suffered a fatal heart attack after a performance in Italy. She was 76 years old. "Mama Africa", as she was sometimes known, was the first female African singer to gain international renown. Miriam Makeba was also politically committed, and used her fame to promote her convictions across the entire planet.

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Miriam Makeba goes down in music history on two levels. Makeba, who scored a huge global hit with Pata Pata, was not only the first African singer to make it big on the international scene, playing to enthusiastic audiences around the world for almost four decades. But “Mama Africa”, as she became known to millions of fans, was also a lifelong symbol of the anti-apartheid campaign. In her 1988 autobiography, Makeba My Story, the singer wrote that, “My life, my career, every song I sing and every concert I perform are linked to the destiny of my people.” Every time the opportunity arose, the black South African star used her celebrity status to speak out against the system of racial segregation in her homeland.

Fans flocked from far and near to hear the voice of the African “songbird”, but they also came to listen to the fiery lyrics of a tireless activist who was banned from her homeland for many long years. Makeba advocated a free and independent Africa, calling on her compatriots to come together in pan-African unity. And she fully assumed her role of "Mama Africa", winning numerous awards for her campaigning work, including the Dag Hammarskjöld Peace Prize and the UNESCO Grand Prix du Conseil international de la Musique. In 2002, the French president Jacques Chirac presented the South African star with a prestigious ‘Légion d’honneur.’ At the age of 73, Makeba announced her imminent retirement from live performance, but before she quit the stage she insisted on bowing out in every country where she had ever performed. The veteran diva launched her official farewell tour in September 2005 and spent a full fourteen months on the road, her end-of-career tour proving to be almost as globe-trotting as her life had been up to that point.

Soweto

Born in Soweto on 4 March 1932, Miriam Makeba came to public attention at the age of 22, performing as a vocalist with the Manhattan Brothers, a popular vocal ensemble back in the days when 'township jazz' (a mix of swing and traditional South African melodies) was all the rage. Miriam eventually left the Manhattan Brothers to record with her own all-female quartet, The Skylarks, while touring the country with impresario Alf Herberts' African Jazz & Variety (a review which launched the careers of many black artists). Miriam's big break came when the American director Lionel Rogosin invited her to perform two of her songs in his anti-apartheid documentary Come Back, Africa (co-written by the novelist and essayist Lewis Nkosi). In 1959, the singer attended the premiere of Rogosin’s documentary at the Venice Film Festival. At the time she had no inkling of the repercussions that her involvement in the film were to have on her life and career.

Makeba went on to make her name performing a series of dates in the United States. But just a few months after the Venice Film Festival, while she was in the midst of her U.S. tour, the South African embassy confiscated her passport, preventing her from returning home for her mother's funeral. The government in Pretoria had issued a clear warning, but Makeba refused to buckle under pressure. In 1963, she appeared before the UN Special Committee on Decolonisation, urging the international community to take urgent action against apartheid. In her hardhitting speech, the singer made reference to the "crazed rulers" of apartheid and talked about how her homeland had been transformed "into one huge prison." In retaliation, P.W. Botha’s government stripped the singer of her South African nationality and banned her records from being sold in stores or broadcast on the nation’s airwaves.

Exile

This government-imposed exile added a whole new dimension to Miriam Makeba, especially as her American career was already well underway by this point. Her debut eponymous album was released on RCA in 1960, featuring musicians who usually worked with Harry Belafonte (who had adopted Makeba as his protégé). A second album, entitled The Many Voices of Miriam Makeba, soon followed. Makeba’s celebrity status in the U.S. was confirmed when she was asked to sing at President Kennedy’s birthday salute in 1961. Her next album, The World of Miriam Makeba, was produced by Hugo Peretti and Luigi Creatore, the duo who had created an English adaptation of the South African classic Mbube. As The Lion Sleeps Tonight, the song became a huge hit for The Tokens. Peretti and Creatore attempted to introduce Makeba’s songs - in Zulu, Xhosa, English, Spanish and Portuguese - into the same niche with great success. Miriam Makeba not only broke into the American market, her 1965 album An Evening With Harry Belafonte & Miriam Makeba went on to win a coveted Grammy Award (in the traditional/folk category).

The following year, Makeba went on to score a huge hit with Pata Pata. Indeed, the song became such a classic that it often came close to overshadowing the rest of her repertoire. Pata Pata has inspired countless cover versions by a huge range of artists including Tito Puente, Manu Dibango and the French ‘yéyé’ idol Sylvie Vartan (who recorded Makeba’s original as Tape tape in 1967). Makeba’s international celebrity status meant she regularly ended up as the guest of African leaders and heads of state and enjoyed friendly relations with a number of these (a fact which sometimes brought her public criticism). The South African star was invited to perform at the inauguration of the O.A.U. (Organisation of African Unity) in Addis Ababa in 1963.

President Sékou Touré subsequently invited Makeba to live in Guinea and the singer accepted his offer in 1969, making a timely exit from the U.S. where life had become increasingly difficult for her. After her divorce from the South African saxophonist Hugh Masekela, Makeba had married the Black Panthers leader Stokely Carmichael. The couple had been kept under close surveillance by the FBI and a number of Makeba’s galas in the U.S. had been mysteriously cancelled. While Makeba continued her hectic concert schedule worldwide - famously performing in Kinshasa at the legendary boxing match between Mohammed Ali and George Foreman - her return to Africa marked the beginning of a less prolific period in her artistic life.

After arriving in Guinea, Makeba went on to record some thirty songs for the national Guinean label Sylliphone, and she also made two albums there: her 1971 live album L’Appel à l’Afrique, recorded at the People’s Palace in Conakry, and the 1975 Miriam & Bongi, on which she sang with her daughter and which included a cover of Jeux interdits and L’Enfant et La Gazelle (previously sung by Nana Mouskouri). In the late 1980s, the veteran South African diva re-emerged in the spotlight to take part in Paul Simon’s Graceland tour. She also returned to the studio to make Sangoma, an album of traditional Xhosa music.

Back in South Africa

Meanwhile, back in South Africa the end of apartheid drew ever closer. Four months after the ANC leader Nelson Mandela was freed from jail, Makeba finally set foot on the soil of her native land once again after a painful exile lasting over thirty years. Her compatriots, who had never forgotten her, rushed out to greet her and turned out in force when she performed her homecoming concert in 1991. Makeba vowed she would spend time with her family on her return, but she also remained committed to the idea of defending the ‘new South Africa’ she had dreamt of for so long. In 1992, Makeba starred alongside the American actress Whoopi Goldberg in Sarafina, a film based on the Soweto uprising in 1976. And, needless to say, she regularly reappeared in the music news.

Makeba went on to perform a series of concerts after the release of Homeland, her last album released in 2000 (which included two compositions by Lokua Kanza). At these concerts she was accompanied by her orchestra that she fondly referred to as her own "little OAU", an ensemble which included musicians from Cameroon, Madagascar, Mozambique and Senegal. Pan-African in her soul, pioneering in her spirit, Miriam Makeba remained the most militant of singers right to the end of her life. Loved and respected as an artist, she was also a worldwide ambassadress who campaigned tirelessly not only for South Africa, but for the African continent as a whole.


 Listen to an extract from Pata Pata

Bertrand  Lavaine