/ 14 November 2008

Makeba’s song of truth

Miriam “Zenzi” Makeba was born in Prospect township in Johannesburg. Her father, Caswell, was Xhosa; her mother, Christina, was Swazi. The name Zenzi (from the Xhosa Uzenzile, meaning “you have no one to blame but yourself”), was a traditional name intended to provide support through life’s difficulties.

Later the family moved north, where Caswell worked as a clerk for Shell. Her mother was a spiritual healer who also took jobs as a housemaid. After the early death of her father, Miriam was forced to work, and for a short spell she also did housework. But she had already noticed that “music was a type of magic” that could elevate her from the poverty that surrounded her. As a young girl her singing had been praised at the Methodist training school in Pretoria, but what should have been the highlight of her amateur career turned to disappointment. She had been due to sing What a Sad Life for a Black Man for the visit of King George VI, but after the children had stood waiting in the rain, the royal visitor drove by without stopping to hear them.

When apartheid was introduced to South Africa in 1948, Makeba was old enough to grasp the consequences and to see the limitations placed on the career of her mentor, Dolly Rathebe, her senior by four years. Makeba gave birth to her daughter Bongi at the age of 17 and was then diagnosed with breast cancer, which was treated unconventionally, but successfully, by her mother. The first of her five husbands left her shortly after.

Her musical career progressed more smoothly. Since the turn of the century American jazz and ragtime had been absorbed into South Africa and transposed into local forms. Combined with Anglican church hymnody, this led to the distinctive vocal harmonic style known as mbube, practised in many communities by “evening” or “night” choirs of enthusiastic amateurs. Following a period with the Cuban Brothers, Makeba’s big break came in 1954 when she joined the Manhattan Brothers, a top band whose vocal harmonies were modelled on the American Mills Brothers and the Ink Spots.

Initially, when the Manhattans travelled abroad Makeba joined a female group called the Sunbeams, who became better known as the Skylarks. They recorded more than 100 songs, many of which became big hits, with Miriam singing alongside Abigail Kubeka, Mummy Girl Nketle, Mary Rabatobi and sometimes with Dorothy Masuka, who brought songs from her homeland of Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia).

Eventually Makeba went on tour with the Manhattans, getting her first taste of the outside world by visiting Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) and Congo. Playing at home she also experienced some of the most heartless and shameful aspects of the apartheid system, which she later recalled in her autobiography, Makeba: My Story (1988), written with James Hall.

The key to her international success was a small singing part in the film Come Back Africa, a dramatised documentary on black life directed covertly by Lionel Rogosin. Makeba played herself, singing two songs in a shebeen. When the film was finished Rogosin invited her to attend a screening at the 1959 Venice film festival, where she became an instant celebrity. She was flown, via London, to New York, where she appeared on television and played at the Village Vanguard jazz club.

The calypsonian Harry Belafonte took her under his wing and guided her through her first solo recordings. African standards such as Patha Patha and the Click Song, which she first performed with the Skylarks, formed the basis of her repertoire and remained the most popular songs throughout her career. Shortly after the Sharpeville massacre in 1960 Miriam heard that her mother had died, but her own South African passport had been revoked and she was prevented from returning home for the funeral. Thus began 30 years of exile.

Her first return to the continent of Africa came with a visit to Kenya in 1962. The following year she gave the first of several addresses to the UN special committee on apartheid, and South Africa reciprocated by banning her records. Shortly afterwards, she was the only performer to be invited by the Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie to perform in Addis Ababa at the inauguration of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU).

A second marriage, in 1959, proved short-lived. In 1964 Hugh Masekela became her third husband and she went to perform in Algeria and at the OAU conference in Accra, Ghana. Backstage at a show in San Francisco, a Kenyan student taught her a song that would become part of her standard repertoire. Called Malaika, it is a Swahili love song that she was wrongly informed was a traditional composition. In 1966 she earned a Grammy award with Belafonte.

Increasingly involved in, and identified with, black consciousness, Miriam became associated with radical activity not just against apartheid but also in the civil rights movement and then black power. In 1967, while in Guinea, she met the Black Panther leader Stokely Carmichael, who became her next husband the following year.

Carmichael changed his name to Kwame Toure and she returned with him to his own place of exile in Guinea, the West African Marxist state whose leader, Sekou Toure, gave sanctuary to enemies of the capitalist West.

After that fourth marriage ended in divorce in 1978, she turned down a proposal by the president, but two years later married an airline executive and moved to Brussels. During her time in Guinea Makeba became a double exile, unable to return home and unwelcome in many Western countries (she was banned from France), although she collected a sheaf of diplomatic passports from sympathetic African states and enlivened several independence celebrations. She recruited a pan-African squad of top musicians who were on call to accompany her on frequent foreign trips.

She also endured some bizarre showbusiness episodes. In Denmark, a country where she had solid support, she once failed to appear for a show. She returned some years later only to be jailed for a night until the outstanding financial penalty had been paid on her behalf. There was also controversy in Tanzania over the provenance of Malaika, which several East Africans had claimed to have written.

When Makeba played at the Royal Festival Hall, London, in 1985, it was her first appearance in Britain for 11 years and also her 53rd birthday. There she replied to the criticism that she had turned her back on the West and had gratuitously insulted white people, notably some unfortunate teachers in Jamaica who had suffered an unjustified personal attack while watching her perform: “People have accused me of being a racist, but I am just a person for justice and humanity. People say I sing politics, but what I sing is not politics, it is the truth. I’m going to go on singing, telling the truth.”

When her daughter Bongi died after a traumatic miscarriage that year, Miriam succumbed to a kind of “spiritual madness” that she believed she had inherited from her mother. The following year she was awarded the Dag Hammarskjold peace prize for her campaigning efforts.

She always took time to endorse the cultural boycott of South Africa, of which she was a figurehead. As the apartheid barriers showed signs of crumbling she was embroiled in another strange episode, which saw ANC supporters boycotting her show at the Royal Albert Hall. She was accused of breaking the boycott by collaborating with Paul Simon on his controversial Graceland project, with an album in 1986 and concerts, including one in Zimbabwe the following year.

To much of the world Makeba had reached a level of statesmanship that verged on saintliness. She was the first-choice performer at festivals as euphoria built up before and after the release of Nelson Mandela in February 1990 and the realisation that apartheid was almost over. After 30 years away Miriam returned to South Africa to a respectful reception and performed sporadically. But the music business had moved on and, despite working with the hotshot producer and multi-instrumentalist Sipho Mabuse, the opportunities for giving concerts had diminished.

When she announced her retirement in 2005 she found that she was still popular abroad: “Everyone keeps calling me and saying ‘You have not come to say goodbye to us!'”

So the farewell tours continued until her death in Naples, where she collapsed on stage after singing in a concert in memory of six immigrants from Ghana shot dead last September, an attack blamed on the city’s organised crime. When she was in Britain last May with her much younger eight-piece band, led by her grandson Nelson Lumumba Lee, John L Walters found her in “confident, clear-voiced form”, defying the limitations placed on her mobility by osteoarthritis.

She is survived by Nelson and her granddaughter, Zenzi Monique Lee. — Graeme Ewens