In 1960, Miriam Makeba tried to fly home to South Africa for her mother’s funeral. The apartheid government had cancelled her passport. She would not live in South Africa again for more than thirty years.
Makeba had left the country the year before, after appearing in the anti-apartheid documentary Come Back, Africa. The film was shown at the Venice Film Festival in 1959, and its success took her to Europe and then to the United States. When she tried to return, the government made sure she could not.
Belafonte and America
In the United States, Harry Belafonte became her mentor and champion. He brought her onto American stages and television, and her performances of South African songs, including the Xhosa “click song”, “Qongqothwane”, introduced American audiences to music they had never heard. In 1966, she and Belafonte won the Grammy for Best Folk Recording for An Evening with Belafonte/Makeba, making her the first African woman to win a Grammy.
In 1967 she released “Pata Pata”, a song she had first recorded in South Africa years earlier. It became a hit in the United States and around the world, and it remains the song most people know her by.
At the United Nations
In 1963, Makeba testified before the United Nations Special Committee against Apartheid, describing life under the system and calling for action. The South African government responded by banning her records. From then on, she was as much a political figure as a musician, and she became known across the continent as Mama Africa.
The cost of marriage
In 1968 she married Stokely Carmichael, the Black Power activist. The marriage cost her dearly in America: concerts and record deals were cancelled, and the couple faced surveillance and pressure. They moved to Guinea, where Makeba lived for much of the following years and served as a Guinean delegate to the United Nations. She performed across Africa and was a regular guest at independence celebrations and state events, singing at the opening of the Organisation of African Unity in 1963 and at Kenya’s independence celebrations that year.
Return
After Nelson Mandela’s release in 1990, Makeba returned to South Africa. She kept touring and recording, and she worked with Paul Simon on the Graceland tour in the late 1980s, bringing her voice to a new generation of Western listeners.
She died on 10 November 2008 in Castel Volturno, Italy, shortly after performing at a concert in support of the writer Roberto Saviano, who had exposed the Camorra crime syndicate. She had collapsed after singing “Pata Pata”.
The passport South Africa took from her in 1960 kept her away for three decades. The last song she sang, in a small Italian town, was one she had first recorded at home.
