Mama Africa took township song worldwide
Zenzile Miriam Makeba, born 4 March 1932 near Johannesburg, carried South African styles onto global stages while opposing apartheid from exile. Pata Pata (1967) became her calling card; an earlier Belafonte project earned a Grammy for folk recording. She died 9 November 2008 as Mama Africa.
Her Xhosa father, a teacher, died when she was six; her Swazi mother did domestic work. When Miriam was eighteen days old her mother was jailed for six months for selling homemade umqombothi beer because the family could not pay the fine, so the baby spent her first half-year in prison too. She sang for eight years in the choir at Kilnerton in Pretoria, learning songs in English before she could speak it, while an elder brother's Ellington and Ella Fitzgerald records filled the house.
At seventeen she married a trainee policeman who reportedly beat her; their daughter Bongi was born in 1950, and he left after she was diagnosed with breast cancer. She sang with the Cuban Brothers, then as the only woman in the Manhattan Brothers, recording her first hit in 1953, and joined the all-female Skylarks in 1956. Lovely Lies, an English remake that swapped a Xhosa lyric about searching jails for a bland love line, became the first South African record on the US Billboard Top 100.
A four-minute cameo in the clandestinely filmed Come Back, Africa took her to Venice, then London, where Harry Belafonte became her mentor. Her American debut on The Steve Allen Show on 1 November 1959 reached some 60 million viewers, and Miles Davis and Duke Ellington heard her at the Village Vanguard. Pata Pata, recorded early and released in 1967, became her signature, though she called it one of her slightest songs.
She testified against apartheid at the United Nations. Marrying Black Panther leader Stokely Carmichael in 1968 cost her white American fans, and after her US visa was revoked the couple moved to Guinea. She returned home only after apartheid began to be dismantled in 1990.
Source: Miriam Makeba
