Miriam Makeba

Zenzile Miriam Makeba was born on 4 March 1932 in Johannesburg, South Africa. Her mother was briefly imprisoned for selling homemade beer to support the family shortly after Makeba's birth, meaning the infant Makeba spent her first six months of life in prison alongside her. She grew up amid the poverty and legal restrictions imposed on Black South Africans, and began singing in church choirs as a child, developing the powerful voice that would later carry her worldwide.

Makeba began her professional singing career in the 1950s with South African vocal groups, including the Manhattan Brothers and later her own group, the Skylarks, blending jazz, traditional South African music, and Western pop influences. Her international breakthrough came through her appearance in the 1959 anti-apartheid documentary film Come Back, Africa, which was smuggled out of South Africa to screen at international film festivals, bringing Makeba to global attention as both a performer and a symbol of resistance to apartheid.

In 1959, Makeba travelled to Europe and then the United States, where she was mentored and championed by Harry Belafonte, who helped introduce her to American audiences. When she attempted to return to South Africa in 1960 for her mother's funeral, the apartheid government revoked her passport, beginning an exile from her homeland that would last thirty years. She testified before the United Nations Special Committee against Apartheid in 1963, using her growing international platform to describe conditions under the regime directly to a global audience.

Makeba's music career flourished despite — and partly because of — her exile. Her 1965 album 'An Evening with Belafonte/Makeba,' recorded with Harry Belafonte, won the Grammy Award for Best Folk Recording, making her the first African artist to win a Grammy. Her songs, including 'Pata Pata' and 'The Click Song' (Qongqothwane), introduced South African music and the isiXhosa language's distinctive click consonants to global pop audiences for the first time.

Her political engagement deepened through her marriage to Stokely Carmichael, a leader of the American Black Power movement, a union that led several American venues and record labels to distance themselves from her amid Cold War-era political pressure, forcing Makeba to relocate to Guinea, where President Ahmed Sékou Touré offered her sanctuary. She continued performing and advocating internationally throughout the 1970s and 1980s, becoming closely associated with African liberation movements broadly, not only South Africa's.

Following Nelson Mandela's release from prison in 1990, Makeba returned to South Africa at his personal invitation, ending her thirty-year exile. She continued performing into her final years, and died on 9 November 2008, shortly after collapsing on stage during a concert in Italy performed in solidarity with a journalist who had received death threats for reporting on organised crime — a fittingly activist final performance for an artist whose career had been inseparable from her politics throughout.