Mama Africa is Dead

Mama Africa is dead. One of the continent’s most extraordinary voices will never sing again, even as her voice will be heard for generations to come. But if Miriam Makeba is remembered chiefly for 'Pata Pata'  and 'Qongqothwane', otherwise known as The Click Song (famously, “because the English cannot say Qongqothwane”), it will be a tragedy greater than any of the tragedies that the singer endured during her richly lived life. And if you’re only familiar with those two songs and a few of her greatest hits, you owe it to both yourself and to one of the twentieth century’s greatest female vocalists to check out her diverse and powerful back catalogue. From the Sophiatown swing of her two albums with the Skylarks to the moving love of The Promise to the gentle but driven protest of Welela, Makeba’s recorded career covers a vast landscape of musical style and social and personal concerns, infused with a timeless resonance that transcends labels and categories.

While it is the matriarchal figure of Mama Africa that seems mostly likely to represent Makeba’s posthumous star – and it was an appellation whose sturdiness and weight offended her – the Miriam I want most to remember is the one that existed before I was born. The Miriam who sat so coyly and so beautifully next to journalist and writer Can Themba. The Miriam who lead the Skylarks through some of the most beautiful music known to humankind. The Miriam whose sweet young voice could spin the very moonlight into music and then make it roar. The Miriam whose beauty was so tangibly moving that, combined with her astounding presence and vocal gifts, she made the world fall in love with her.

While Makeba sat with equality in the international album charts of the fifties and sixties – before the invention of the World Music ghetto which her genre-jumping career helped to invent – her star easily ascended beyond the world of mere entertainment. Like Nina Simone and Hugh Masekela, she rose above the currents of history, her talent keeping her afloat even when it seemed that the world and her personal life was lost. And like Simone, she surfed the music, her voice not a crowning layer on top of the instruments but the very thing that keeps it altogether, a centrifugal force of elemental human passion.

Makeba in her youth seemed to represent irrepressible innocence in the face of irrefutable brutality. And that shimmering innocence was one of South Africa’s most powerful expressions of protest, precisely because it didn’t preclude the expression of pain. More specifically, her voice carried the resonance of the pain of the innocent, and it carried it around the world long before the anti-apartheid movement established itself.

All of this is not to be dismissive of the older Makeba and her always illustrious output. She may have lost her innocence but she never lost her shine; her talent never faltered. I think, at some point, though, her heart broke. It may have been the relentlessness of her desire for Africa to be free, or it may have been the string of unworkable relationships that haunted her. Or it may have simply been the gradual evaporation of youth that happens to nearly all of us. But at some point that innocence died, even as the stridency and the passion stayed strong.

My favourite Miriam moment involves someone else’s memory, and takes place at the car boot market in Durban’s Greyville. I was armed with a bunch of records that I’d picked up, including a couple of Miriam records. A woman named Cindi, who sells coats and hot dogs, asked me if I could find a particular song on vinyl that had previously been banned. I didn’t recognise the Xhosa title but Cindi sang a few bars of the song. One of the two men present, who like Cindi, was probably a decade or two older than me, said quietly, “Hey...They were hard times”. And the other man’s eyes watered, just this side of tears.

And in the glisten of those eyes, I saw all the pain and all the joy and all the beauty of Miriam Makeba, how she carried the burden of an entire country in her soul, in her music. And how millions of people carried her with them.