Miriam Makeba
Banned from her own country for three decades, she sang South Africa to the world from exile
Zenzile Miriam Makeba was eighteen days old when her mother was jailed for brewing beer to sell, and she spent the first six months of her life in prison with her. She grew up in the townships around Johannesburg, worked as a domestic servant and sang at weddings, then with the Manhattan Brothers and an all-woman group, the Skylarks, on records that sold well in South Africa and paid almost nothing.
A small part in an anti-apartheid documentary, Come Back, Africa, took her to the Venice Film Festival in 1959. In London she met Harry Belafonte, who helped her get to New York. When her mother died the next year and she tried to fly home for the funeral, she found her passport had been revoked. She would not set foot in South Africa again for thirty-one years.
In America she became famous fast: television, a Grammy with Belafonte in 1966, the hit Pata Pata. In 1963 she addressed the United Nations about apartheid, and South Africa banned her records. Then in 1968 she married the Black Power activist Stokely Carmichael, her American bookings vanished almost overnight, and she moved to Guinea. She lost her only daughter, Bongi, in 1985.
She returned in 1990 after Mandela\'s release and sang until the end. In 2008, aged 76, she collapsed after a concert in Italy held in support of a writer threatened by the Camorra, and died that night.