/ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT/MUSIC-SOUTH AFRICA: Legendary Singer now Cultural Diplomat

By James Hall Reprint | | Print |

James Hall

PRETORIA, Apr 2 2002 (IPS) - Miriam Makeba, the legendary South African singer whose zest for life infuses her songs and make them seem eternally youthful, turned 70 last month, a fact that seems to astound her.

“Where has the time gone?” wonders Zenzi, as friends and family know Makeba.

Where the past two years have gone has been to diplomatic service. The administration of President Thabo Mbeki made Makeba South Africa’s Cultural Ambassador in 2000. This was a reward for her work in exile to overcome the apartheid regime that once oppressed her native land, and in recognition of the favourable image she has given to South Africa, as she exported its music to the world for five decades.

“I am not a diplomat, I am a singer,” she told the press at the time of her appointment. “But sometimes it is the artists who can speak to all the people through their art.”

Her current official duties are wedged between an ongoing schedule of concert tours, recording sessions, and odd jobs like television commercials that trade on her celebrity.

Makeba will give a performance in Europe, around which visits to diplomatic missions, cultural events and goodwill appearances revolve.

“Time has been funny to me,” Makeba said as she turned 70. “I was an ‘old’ woman in terms of my Xhosa tribal culture when I was 36, when I became a grandmother for the first time. My city friends asked me, ‘Why do you let your daughter’s children call you ‘granny’? It makes you sound old!’ I told them, ‘But I am their granny!’ But even today I feel young, and the make-up technicians keep me looking youthful!” she laughs.

Makeba’s biography is a litany of accomplishments interspersed with tragedy. Born in 1932 in rural South Africa, her singing talents were discovered early, and as a teenager she was performing as lead singer with the Manhattan Brothers, the top pop group in South Africa in the 1950s.

A lead role in a hit musical and an appearance in a South African film that received international distribution brought her an invitation to sing in Britain. It was there that Harry Bellefonte, the American singing star, heard Makeba perform her first international hit, “Back of the Moon”, and invited her to tour with him in the United States.

America, where Makeba’s daughter Bongi came to live with her, brought further fame, a Grammy Award for an album with Bellefonte, and an opportunity to address a United Nations special committee on apartheid. That was 1963, and when the soft-spoken singer condemned Pretoria’s racist regime and called for international sanctions on South Africa to end apartheid, her home nation’s authorities invalidated her passport.

She began a 28-year exile, not returning to South Africa until 1991, when Nelson Mandela had been released from prison and the transition to democracy was underway.

1963 was also the year she was diagnosed with cancer, which was conquered through extensive surgery. She has been in two severe car crashes, and a passenger aircraft crash in Guinea, but returned to live in that country in 1968 until she repatriated to South Africa.

Her daughter Bongi died in Guinea, and one of the condolence-notes Makeba received was from another anti-apartheid activist, Winnie Mandela.

After Winnie’s husband Nelson Mandela was liberated from prison after 27 years, in 1990, she and Makeba toured the United States in what was to prove Makeba’s first taste of diplomatic work.

In concert, Makeba often performs with South African trumpeter Hugh Masekela, to whom she was married for two years in the sixties. “Brother Hugh was my third husband,” she recalls. “We were friends who should have remained friends, so after things did not work out as man and wife we went back to being friends again.”

Makeba’s first husband, a South African police officer who impregnated her when she was 17, physically abused her and her baby, and she fled from him. The experience gave her empathy for other victims of abuse, a problem she speaks of on her journeys and diplomatic missions.

Her second husband was a popular South African Indian singer, but the union occurred at a time of strict racial segregation, and the pressures on the couple from families and society proved insurmountable.

Following Masekela, whom she wed in New York, she married the late African-American black power activist Stockley Carmichael, a Jamaican who became ‘persona non grata’ in the United States.

Makeba left with her husband, and settled in Africa. Carmichael’s infidelity ended that union after five years, and Makeba met her current husband, a Guinean airline executive to whom she is still married.

From her first appearance outside South Africa, at the Cannes Film Festival where a film she acted in debuted, Makeba has personified her continent, and has earned the name “Mama Africa”.

“I used to not like that name, because it made me sound so old, and big!” she tells audiences with a smile. “But now that I am old, and have grown round, I suppose I should accept the honour gracefully. I am certainly grateful, because Africa is my wonderful home.”

Her grandson Lumumba produces her records that incorporate the latest sound and music innovations. She frequently records with popular younger singing stars, who were influenced by her. They occupy a musical world that has been significantly formed by Makeba and with extraordinary luck and endurance may perform as long as she has. That would be an accomplishment.

At 70, the singer turned cultural diplomat who is Miriam Makeba is one of the most continuously performing stars on earth.