Miriam Makeba: An Appreciation (1932-2008)

by

Ntongela Masilela

The years from 2005 to 2008 have been the time period in which many members of the Sophiatown Renaissance (1951-1960) have departed from ‘the kingdom of this world’, as the great novella about the Haitian Revolution by the great Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier is entitled. In all probability such a three-year span in the history of the New African intellectuals is unique in the annals of the New African Movement. It began with departure of Dolly Rathebe in 2005 and seems to have concluded with the departure of Miriam Makeba a few days ago just after completing a performance in Italy. Between these two dates marked by the last moments of these legendary musicians, there has been an exodus of artists, intellectuals and political leaders: in 2006 Matthew Nkoana, the foremost ideologue of the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), particularly during the exile period, and the equal of Robert Sobukwe himself in matters of intellectual engagement, left the national stage; in 2008 Noni Jabavu, with her two books Drawn in Colour: African Contrasts (1960) and The Ochre People (1963) that are brilliant and fascinating by any measure but unfortunately underappreciated because of particular controversies regarding their articulation of the idea of Africanness, and Ezekiel (E’skia) Mphahlele, the ‘Dean’ of Drum writers and intellectuals. All of them preceded Miriam Makeba. Given that the Sophiatown Renaissance of the 1950s was the last intellectual constellation of New African Movement, which was crushed by the apartheid state in the aftermath of the Sharpeville Massacre in 1960 and scattered into the winds of exile, the passing away of these outstanding individuals represents the beginning of the complete disappearance of the New African Movement as embodied in the lived experience of particular representatives.

Although there are still a few living acolytes of the New African Movement such as Lewis Nkosi, Sylvester Stein, Alf Khumalo and Nadine Gordimer, this intellectual and cultural moment is becoming more and more definitively a process of the past. This is not to be lamented since the New African intellectual and political culture of the New African Movement that was articulated through particular newspapers such Ilanga lase Natal, The Bantu World, Umteteli wa Bantu, has been or is being replaced by the emergent Public Intellectual culture and politics being shepherded by newspapers and magazines such as Sunday Times (edited by Mondli Makhanya), The Afropolitan: Inhaling Freedom, Celebrating Life (edited by Tiisetso Makube), Baobab: South African Journal of New Writing (edited by Sandile Ngidi), Wordsetc: South African Literary Journal (edited by Phakama Mbonambi), Empire: Media, Arts, Culture (Phillip de Wet, Kevin Bloom, and Branko Brkic). The departure of Miriam Makeba is a symbolic marker of the historical line between these two historical moments. That Miriam Makeba was a protean figure to her last days witness her influence on the new singers who have emerged simultaneously with the making of this new political culture in the early years of the twenty first century. Much as Miriam Makeba provided some of the most interesting sound track to the last decade of New African intellectual and political culture, Thandiswa Lahlumlenze Mazwayi, Simphiwe Dana and Kelly Khumalo are doing likewise concerning the new Public Intellectual culture and politics; and Skwatta Kamp with their extraordinary song “Umoya” is part of this spectacular phenomenon.

I feel absolutely privileged that I can speak of this great woman partly in personal terms. I knew her voice before knowing of the woman to whom it belonged when I was about ten to twelve years old in the 1959 to 1961 when it was blasted at Orlando Stadium before soccer matches that involved teams such as Orlando Pirates, Moroka Swallows, Kronstad Shemrocks, Alexander Hungry Lions, Durban Bushbacks, Mzimhlophe Aces, the Orlando East Secondary School team with the very young King Kaizer before joining the Orlando Pirates, and other teams. Although I was from Orlando West, I despised the Orlando Pirates from Orlando East because I considered it at that young age as a team for ‘ruffians’ and ‘hooligans’, preferring the Moroka Swallows that I fanatically supported as a team for well-behaved ladies and gentlemen. No doubt my preferences were being determined by the New African middle class culture I was undergoing at that age living as I did on the same street as Ezekiel Mphahlele, my family’s next door neighbors was Joe Matthews’ family, three streets below being Nelson Mandela family, one street opposite the main road lived Zephania Mothopeng, and about four streets away Phomolong lived the Walter Sisulu family. It is only about forty five years later in Los Angeles when Professor Isabel Balseiro (originally from Spain), a colleague of mine here at the Claremont Colleges and a prominent figure in South African Studies, gave me a gift of a three CD set of the Skylarks I recognized the voice that had mesmerized me in those distant days belonged to Miriam Makeba.

Miriam Makeba has had a profound impact on my personal life in very unexpected ways. My family (my Mother and three younger brothers) left South Africa in 1962 to join my father in United States who was in the process of completing a doctoral degree in industrial psychology at the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA). On my arrival in Los Angeles I was thirteen years old. My father was the President of the African Student Association for the western part of United States. At this time UCLA and Northwestern University in Evanston (a suburb of Chicago) were the two leading American universities specializing in area studies concerning Africa. Both institutions had premier African Studies Centers in the country staffed with some of the leading scholars on Africa. The African Studies Center at Northwestern University was founded by Melville Herskovits, and the one at UCLA had A. C. Jordan and Leo Kuper (eminent South African scholars) as associates, who were then prominent South African intellectuals, one a major Xhosa novelist and literary historian and the other a renowned sociologist. At this time most probably UCLA had the largest contingent of African students in the country. So, UCLA was the center of African intellectual and cultural activities in United States.

It was as a hub of African political and cultural activities that made UCLA so attractive to Miriam Makeba. Whenever she was making a national concert tour with Harry Belafone, performing at the Coconut Grove or the Greek Theater, both them located in the Hollywood, she would by herself give a special concert on UCLA campus performing at Royce Hall. The performances she gave at UCLA were in support of a scholarship fund she had established for African students. A substantial number of African students, some of whom became ministers or presidential advisers in their countries during the early days of independence in Africa, benefited from the scholarship. This explains why all the presidential palaces in Africa were opened to Miriam Makeba: from Sekou Toure in Guinea to Julius Nyerere in Tanzania, from Jomo Kenyatta in Kenya to Kenneth Kaunda in Zambia.

It was in this context and because of these reasons that Africa invented for her the sobriquet of “Mother Africa” in appreciation of what she was doing and had done for the African Independence Movement of the 1960s. It should be mentioned here that in its early years of exile in 1960s the major offices of the African National Congress (ANC) in London (manned by the great poet Mazisi Kunene as a representative for the whole of Europe and North America) and at the United Nations were partially financed personally by Miriam Makeba. Because of her modesty Miriam Makeba did not mention in her two autobiographies her contributions to the African Independence Movement and to the liberation struggles in Southern Africa: Makeba: My Story (New York, 1988);  and Makeba: The Miriam Makeba Story (Johannesburg, 2004). What Miriam Makeba was modest about is what other people found attractive and fascinating about her. Two examples will suffice. It was because of her political passions, besides her obvious enormous artistic talent that Marlon Brando, arguably the greatest America actor of the twentieth century, found her endlessly fascinating. It is in all likelihood because of Brando’s connection to Makeba that the America actor in the 1960s gave a representative of the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), specifically to A. B. Ngcobo, as Hugh Masekela mentioned in his autobiography Still Grazing: The Musical Journey of Hugh Masekela (New York, 2003), $100,000 for a feasibility study of freeing Nelson Mandela from Robben Island. As Hugh Masekela ruefully wrote, the money disappeared into thin air. The other prominent figure who found Miriam Makeba irresistible was Stokely Carmichael, the prominent spokesperson of the Black Power Movement of the 1960s, who married her, and both subsequently moved to Guineau when living in United States became politically and culturally untenable. In Conakry Miriam Makeba interacted with Amilcar Cabral, the African Marxist revolutionary leader from Guineau-Bissau, and Kwame Nkrumah, the father of Pan  Africanism in Africa. When on his release from twenty-seven year imprisonment in 1990 Nelson Mandela requested Miriam Makeba to return home from exile, the reasons for his plea are clear.

I should also mention that my own undergraduate study at UCLA in the late 1960s and in the early 1970s was partially financed by the scholarship endowed by Miriam Makeba. When she came to give her concerts at UCLA, she would sometimes come and visit my family and invariably joined us for dinner. At age thirteen or fourteen I was already familiar with her name. But at this time her name was closely associated with that of Harry Belafonte. And it was much later, in fact twenty years later, that I began to have inkling of her prominent importance in the South African cultural history of the 1950s. It was in a film studies class that I audited while doing post-doctoral work at the Berlin Technical University (TU, in West Berlin) in the late 1980s that I saw Come Back Africa (1959) directed by Lionel Rogosin. In arguably the most important scene in the film, Miriam Makeba sang the famous song of the 1950s “Lalishoni Ilanga” (Onset of the Sunset) in a shebeen with Drum magazine journalists and writers listening to her while drinking. Among those captured in this scene were Lewis Nkosi, Can Themba, Bloke Modisane. It was on seeing this film that I began to recognize that Drum had initiated a major cultural regeneration of the country in the 1950s. The publication of many books in the 1980s that were nostalgic about the 1950s was paradoxical in a sense since the tumultuous decade of the 1980s was seeking to put an end to the historical and political conditions of oppression that the 1950s so profoundly exemplified.

On reflection, I think it was both the discovery of the name of H. I. E. Dhlomo, the great Zulu intellectual, and my becoming aware of the importance of Miriam Makeba in South African cultural history, during the West Berlin days of the 1980s, that surely but slowly propelled me unknowingly toward constructing this New African Movement website, a project that I was to initiate in the second half of the 1990s in Los Angeles.

In this total sense, I owe so much to this great woman, not only for funding my undergraduate degree at UCLA in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but also for partly inspiring my life-long project on the New African Movement in 1980s in West Berlin. Concerning what a group us South African exiles did in West Berlin in those incredible days, including Vusi Mchunu, who launched and edited two journals, Awa-Finnaba and Isivivane, and Mbukeni Hebert Mnguni (author of Education as a Social Institution and Ideological Process, 1999), is something culturally fascinating that elsewhere it will be necessary to say something extensive about.

I would like to conclude this appreciation by mentioning a fact that is not so well known and recognized as it deserves to be but will undoubtedly preoccupy future cultural historians in South Africa: Miriam Makeba was one of the founders of World Music, a notion that was invented in United States in the 1960s. Although this monumental achievement has not been mentioned in many obituaries that have appeared in many parts of the world since her passing on November 9th (Sunday), this may explain the extraordinary tributes that appeared in United States within a matter of days of her departure. For example, The New York Times published an obituary (Alan Cowell, “Miriam Makeba, Singer of Freedom, Dies at 76”, Tuesday, November 11, 2008) and an appraisal (Jon Pareles, “Taking Africa With Her to All the World”, Tuesday, November 11, 2008); and the Los Angeles Times printed a stirring obituary tribute (“Miriam Makeba, 1932-2008: South African Singer was an Outspoken Foe of Apartheid”, Tuesday, November 11, 2008).

Concluding on a personal note: I would not be who I’m today, educationally and intellectually, without the astonishing intervention of this woman in my life.

 
Claremont [Los Angeles], November 18, 2008.