Miriam Makeba

Zenzile Miriam Makeba was born in Johannesburg on the fourth of March 1932, the daughter of a Xhosa father and Swazi mother. She began singing professionally in 1953 with the Manhattan Brothers and the Skylarks. She appeared in the 1959 anti-apartheid documentary Come Back, Africa; the appearance got her a visa to the Venice Film Festival and a passport revocation from the South African government on her return attempt. She was thirty-one. She would not be permitted to set foot in South Africa for the next thirty years.

In exile she became the first African artist to win a Grammy (1966, with Harry Belafonte for An Evening with Belafonte/Makeba) and the first African artist to perform at the Royal Albert Hall and Carnegie Hall on solo bills. President Kwame Nkrumah granted her Ghanaian citizenship; subsequently she would hold passports from nine African nations.

Her testimony before the United Nations General Assembly in 1963 against apartheid prompted South Africa to revoke not only her passport but her right to attend her own mother's funeral. Her marriage to Stokely Carmichael in 1968 cost her her American visa and recording contracts. She moved to Guinea and lived for fifteen years under the personal patronage of Sékou Touré.

She returned to South Africa for the first time in 1990, at the invitation of Nelson Mandela following his release from prison. The continent had come to call her Mama Africa.

She collapsed during a concert at Castel Volturno, Italy, on the ninth of November 2008 — performing a benefit for the writer Roberto Saviano — and died of a heart attack. She was seventy-six.

She is honored here as the singer of African exile, mother of the continent in song.