Miriam Makeba

Miriam Makeba was an incredible woman in South Africa, who wasn’t afraid of standing up for her rights, and fought against the white-minority government during the apartheid in Souh Africa.

Born into poverty in Johannesburg on the 4th of March in 1932, she spent the first six months of her life in prison, as her mother was caught selling homemade beer and the family couldn’t afford the small fee required to avoid jail. She found employment as a young child after the death of her father. She suffered an abusive marriage when she was 17, and a year later gave birth to a child while surviving breast cancer.

Her vocal talent began to be recognised, and she began singing professionally in the 50’s with the Cuban Brothers, the Manhattan Brothers, and an all woman group called the Skylarks. She performed a mixture of jazz, traditional African songs and popular Western music.

In 1959, she decided to take a stand, and had a role in the anti-apartheid film ‘Come Back, Africa’. This bought her attention from all over the world, and she was soon performing in Venice, London and New York City. After moving to New York, she recorded her first solo album in 1960, which became immediately popular.

When her mother died, later that year, she was prevented coming back to South Africa for the funeral by the country’s government.

She replied to this by saying, “I always wanted to leave home. I never knew they were going to stop me from coming back. Maybe, if I knew, I never would have left. It is kind of painful to be away from everything that you've ever known. Nobody will know the pain of exile until you are in exile. No matter where you go, there are times when people show you kindness and love, and there are times when they make you know that you are with them but not of them. That's when it hurts.”

Her career flourished in America, and in 1965, she was awarded a Grammy for her album, ‘An Evening with Belafonte/Makeba.’ When she found out that two of her family members were killed in the Sharpeville Killings, she gathered the courage to testify against the South African government at the United Nations and became involved in the civil rights movement.

When she married Stokley Carmichael, a leader of the Black Panther Party in 1968, she lost a lot of support among White Americans. While she was travelling abroad, the US government cancelled her visa, so her and Carmichael had to move to Guinea. She continued to perform music, though mainly in African countries.

Despite all those holding her back and threatening her, she started writing songs explicitly critical of the apartheid. The 1977 song, ‘Soweto Blues,’ was about the Soweto uprising.

When the apartheid dismantled in 1990, she was finally allowed back in South Africa. She was named a goodwill ambassador in 1999, and continued campaigning for humanitarian causes. She never stopped performing songs and acting in movies, but in 2008 she tragically died of a heart attack during a concert in Italy.

She was known as a symbol of anti-apartheid, and upon her death, former South African President Nelson Mandela said that, “her music inspired a powerful sense of hope in all of us.”

She inspires me so much because she never gave up or backed down. Rising from the slums, she defeated all odds and made dreams a reality. She had suffered so much at such a young age but that never stopped her. She knew what it was like to be hungry, to be persecuted, to be beaten, to be scared. She knew the feeling of hopelessness and understood the traps of poverty. Miriam Makeba never turned her back on her people, even when they turned away from her. She had spirit until the day she died, and she was a true warrior.