Miriam Makeba, South African singer known Mama Africa, dies

Miriam Makeba, South African singer known Mama Africa, dies
By DAVID HINCKLEY DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
Monday, November 10th 2008, 5:11 PM
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International music star Miriam Makeba during her last performance in Castelvolturno, near Naples on November 9, 2008.
Getty
By the time this picture taken on May 13, 1964, Makeba was exiled by the South African government for her anti-apartheid comments.
Miriam Makeba, the exiled South African singer who said her greatest triumph was to finally sing her way back home, died Sunday after collapsing on stage at a concert in Italy. She was 76.
Her friend Nelson Mandela led tributes to her Monday.
"She was South Africa's first lady of song," said Mandela, "and so richly deserved the title of 'Mama Africa.' She was a mother to our struggle and to the young nation of ours."
Makeba sang for more than 50 years, mixing sultry love ballads with sharp-edged songs of freedom. Her biggest mainstream hits were upbeat African-rooted songs that included, "Pata Pata" and "The Click Song."
She became a symbol of the South African liberation movement while spending more than three decades in enforced exile from the country where she was born in 1932.
South Africa refused to let her return in 1960, after she had left the country for a singing tour and spoken out against apartheid. After she repeated that criticism at the United Nations in 1963, the South African government also banned her music.
Makeba lived in New York for 10 years and recalled in a 2000 interview that, "I always enjoy coming back.… I have many friends there."
Among those friends were Harry Belafonte, with whom she often recorded and performed. They won a Grammy in 1965 for a live album of songs protesting apartheid.
But Makeba fell out of favor with some of her sympathizers when she married Black Panther leader Kwame Toure (Stokeley Carmichael) in 1968 and the couple moved to Guinea. She also spent time in Europe before finally returning to South Africa in the 1990s when Mandela was released from prison and apartheid began to collapse.
Makeba's final album, "Homeland," recorded in South Africa and released in 2000, celebrated her return to her home country.
"It's a record that says I am happy to be home," Makeba said then. "I always knew one day we would win, although I did not know if it would come in my lifetime. I'm so glad that it did."
Makeba noted that she was 60 when she cast her first vote in a free election, and said her passion in these later years was to advance peace and prosperity across the African continent.
"When I grew up, there was [apartheid] South Africa and Rhodesia and the Belgian Congo" she said. "Now we are more free, but there is so much poverty and suffering. We need medical supplies for people who are dying. We need food for people who are hungry.
"We also need to stop the wars. I personally would like to see no more wars in Africa. My people need to stop fighting each other. But to stop the wars, we also need to look at who is supplying the arms for those who fight. Those are the ones we need to stop."
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