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MIRIAM MAKEBA |
| Miriam Makeba (1932- ): It is arguable that Miriam Makeba is the most renowned South African singer in the world in the twentieth-century. Her peregrinations in exile from 1960 to 1990, throughout the Western world and Africa, singing of hope and affirming the greatness of Africa on world stages, was seen as representing the cultural ethos of the resiliency of the African Independence Movement. It was for this reason that Kwame Nkrumah (first President of Ghana), Jomo Kenyatta (first President of Kenya), Julius Nyerere (first President of Tanzania), Sekou Toure (first President of Guineau) and others, designated her as the ‘Voice of Mother Africa’. But before she was the Voice of Africa, she was the Voice of Sophiatown, the cultural voice, so to speak, of the Sophiatown Renaissance movement. She was the embodiment of the musical genius of this cultural moment in our intellectual history. Her voice came to be known throughout the world by means of Lionel Rogosin’s 1959 film Come Back Africa which won a prize at the Venice Film Festival of that year. Although the film was directed by the aforementioned American director, the screenplay was written together with two major Drum writers, Bloke Modisane and Lewis Nkosi. Miriam Makeba’s participation in Come Back Africa was placing herself at the center of the historical vision of the Drum writers, as well as locating herself at the center of the Sophiatown Renaissance cultural movement through being a soloist for a time of the Manhattan Brothers. All of this makes it all the more noteworthy the view the Drum writers or other major cultural figures of the 1950s had of her. In his Nite Life column on the Golden City Post, Bloke Modisane gave recognition to the originality of Makeba’s voice: “’African jazz’ has been scoring a nightly hit in Durban with a riotous medley of songs, dance and gags. Chockful of personality and a gushing , natural humour, Ben ‘Satchmo’ Masinga is vying with Durban’s popular and talented singer, Sonny Pillay, for the first place in the heart of the Durban audiences, especially white audiences. An addition of three new comers to ‘African Jazz’ has added glamour, talent, and vitality to the show. Miriam Makeba has made a personal triumph with her original style. Miriam has only a month’s contract with the show before she rejoins the Manhattan Brothers who plan a tour of the Belgian Congo next month” (“Miriam Knocks ‘Em Silly!”, July 28, 1957). Writing in the same Nite Life column two years earlier, Todd Matshikiza had this to say about this brilliant singer: “It’s as impossible for the Manhattan Brothers to split as it is to kiss your elbow. If it hadn’t been so, I wouldn’t have the chance to tell you the story,now of their greatest achievement in the history of black musicians in this country. The story includes a brilliant young composer and tenor sax man MacKay Davashe ‘Makwenkwe kwedini.’ You have probably heard one of their best recorded numbers, ‘Lakutshon’ Ilanga’ which Davashe composed. The number features the 23-year-old girl vocalist Miriam Makeba who arrived in Johannesburg from Riverside, Pretoria in 1951 and became an instant success with the Manhattans. This great African blues number was sent to America and when the head of an American recording studio and publishing house heard it, he got English words to be set to the tune, and the new title ‘Lovely Lies’ was given to the number. The new version came back to South Africa and for five months the Manhattan Brothers rehearsed polishing their diction, training, learning, preparing for the biggest break in their recording career. The result of the work, which took two days to record, is the most brilliant piece of work I’ve ever known from this great team. Nathan [Mdledle] and Miriam have set themselves a record which they themselves will find hard to surpass. Greater still, is the fact that this record will be issued throughout the world under its new English title, ‘Lovely Lies.’ This is the first time ever, that African artists have recorded for the local and overseas public a vocal in the English language. The original ‘Lakutshon’ Ilanga’ on Gallotone (GB 2007) is itself a fine performance, but its English version is a performance of all time, and the beginning, we hope, of many good things to come” (“Brothers Have A World Hit”, Golden City Post, August 7, 1955). The central position of Miriam Makeba in the making of Sophiatown Renaissance modernist culture was not only evident to the majority of Drum writers, it was also apparent to many of her follow musicians. Kippie Moeketsi, arguably one of the great jazz musicians South Africa has produced, was also enthralled with the way Miriam Makeba transformed herself into being the musical voice of this cultural generation. In his Autobiographical Essay, Moeketsi, remembering the moment when he had left the Harlem Swingsters and joined the Manhattan Brothers, made the following observations concerning her: “Dambuza Mdledle, leader of the Manhattans, one day said: ‘Hey, gents, there is a girl who is singing with the Cuban Brothers. I don’t know how I can remove her from them. . . ‘ I don’t how Dambuza solved that, but after a few days, we saw him come with this girl who was singing with the Cuban Brothers, Just like that. She had joined the Manhattan Brothers. Her name was Miriam Makeba. And it was with the Manhattans that shje began to be noticed. To tell the truth, the Manhattans made Miriam famous. In those days, the Manhattans and Inkspots were the best groups. When I say Miriam was made famous by the Manhattans, I don’t mean they taught her to sing. . . . Well, the three of us---me, mackay Davashe and herself, we used to sit down and practice---sometimes we would tell her how to use her voice; how to improve her vocal chords and all that jazz. And Miriam would listen attentively. Before she became the famous Miriam Makeba she is today. You know, I must admit, I never thought Miriam would become what she is now” (Kippie Moeketsi, “Kippie’s Memories”, Staffrider, November 1981). Learning together with Moeketsi and Davashe, thereby in the process being instructed by them, was one of the best musical education one could possibly have had in the Sophiatown of the 1950s. Miriam Makeba’s voice, which in actuality was forged like a jazz instrument, had an inestimable impact on the creative and critical imagination of many Drum writers. For instance, in his autobiography Modisane recalls at moments of despair and desperation due to white oppression in Sophiatown, her voice conveyed a sense of hope, fortitude, determination and resiliency: “Nothing in my life seemed to have any meaning, all around me there was the futility and the apathy, the dying of the children, the empty gestures of the life reflected in the seemingly meaningless destruction of that life, the demolition of Sophiatown; my life is like the penny whistle music spinning on eternally with the same repetitive persistency; it is deceptively happy, but all this is on the surface, like the melodic and the harmonic lines of the kwela played by the penny whistle, or the voice of Miriam Makeba, which bristle with a propelling joyousness. But contained in it is the sharp hint of pain---almost enjoyed in a sense---as is at times heard in the alto sax of Paul Desmond, the desperation of a man in search of God; beneath all this is the heavy storm-tropping rhythmic line, a jazzy knell tolling a structure of sadness into a pyramid of monotony; the sadness is a rhythm unchanging in its thematic structure, oppressive, dominating and regulating the tonality of the laughter and the joy. My life, like the kwela, has grown out of gutters of the slums, from among the swelling smells of the open drains, out of the pressure of political stress and the endlessness of frustration” (Blame Me On History [1963, 1986]). The instrumentalist nature of Miriam Makeba’s voice and its cultural representativeness of the historical experience of the Sophiatown Renaissance phenomenon was made all the more evident when she had one of the three major roles in the jazz opera, King Kong. This was a musical event that ecapsulated the cultural essence of the Sophiatown experience. The voice of Makeba was part of the artistic ferment that Lewis Nkosi saw represented by this musical drama. In one of his major essays, Nkosi recollects the making of this jazz opera, a musical-theatrical drama that was to represent the symbolic age of a particular cultural generation: “In the arts it was a time of great ferment. It was a time when the Eoun Group, a coloured opera company in Cape Town, was reaping far more laurels than any white company had ever done in South Africa. It was a time when in Johannesburg black and white artists were co-operating to form music and theatre groups such as the Union of South African Artists---a magnificent example of racial co-operation which resulted in the staging of Todd Matshikiza’s opera, King Kong; the finished product did not---could not have succeeded in mirroring half the conspiratorial excitement, the tremendous amount of underground planning, the rehearsals in a large Johannesburg warehouse for lack of non-segregated theatres, and finally the physical hazards to nusicians and actors nightly travelling home from the city to the crime-infested African townships---an easy prey to both thugs and the police. The Johannesburg police lay in wait for them at bus stops and roadsides, demanding to see curfew ‘passes’ which all Africans were compelled to carry after eleven at night. Once, in a gruesome turn of humour, the police seized a group of musicians after rehearsal, and in order to earn a reprieve the musicians were asked to entertain the sergeants at the police station. . . . An underground jazz music was simultaneously bursting the seams of apartheid. The New Jazz went to the universities, seminars were held to discuss in respectful academic tones where the new music was going” (“The Fabulous Fifties”, in Home and Exile and Other Selections, London [1965, 1983]). The New Jazz was an expression of South African modernity. It was an aspect of South African modernity that Miriam Makeba carried to United States to Africa, that respectively impressed Martin Luther King, Toni Morrison, Harry Belafonte, Sydney Poitier, Marlon Brando and others on the one hand, and on the other hand Tom Mboya, Wole Soyinka, Sekou Toure, Kwame Nkrumah and others. In effect, it was South African modernity that made Miriam Makeba the Voice of Africa and thereby becoming renowned all over the world. | |