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Miriam Makeba

Published Monday 1 December 2008 at 19:00 by Trevor Grundy

Miriam Makeba, the South African singer who helped stir the conscience of the world against the evil of apartheid, has died in Italy at the age of 76. She collapsed on stage after singing for half an hour at a concert in Naples for Roberto Saviano, a writer threatened with death by a criminal organisation in the region.

For Makeba, organised crime in the Mediterranean and racial segregation in her home country, South Africa, were much the same.

When he heard of her death on Monday, Nelson Mandela said: “Her haunting melodies gave voice to the pain of exile and dislocation which she felt for 31 years. At the same time, her music inspired a powerful sense of hope in all of us.”

Born Zenzile Makeba in Prospect township in Johannesburg on March 4, 1932, the woman who captured the hearts of millions of people around the world in a career that lasted almost six decades was the daughter of a Swazi mother and a Xhosa father.

After performing all over South Africa as a teenager and then as one of the stars of Todd Matshikiza’s King Kong, Makeba was spotted by Harry Belafonte.

She made appearances in Greenwich Village but went on to sing before President John Kennedy on his 45th birthday, the spark that lit her American career. Within months, she was playing in Las Vegas and other venues with her famous “Click” song. She became the first African woman to enter the US charts, the first black woman to win a Grammy.

She married two of the most famous black men of her age, the musician Hugh Masekela and then the Black Panther revolutionary, Stokely Carmichael.

Both marriages ended in divorce and she suffered from bouts of cancer as well as the loss of her beloved daughter in Guinea in 1985. But her spirits were lifted in 1990 when Mandela was freed. She returned home, free at last.

Makeba continued to record and perform until the end and made her final performance in Britain for Africa Day in Trafalgar Square in 2007.

Her body will be flown home and at her funeral, South Africa will for a few moments remember her and her wonderful songs.

One of her last wishes was for her ashes be scattered at sea “so that I can continue to travel around the world”.

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