Home is where the music is
M.S. PRABHAKARA
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An icon of the South African liberation struggle, Miriam Makeba died on a concert tour of Italy in support of an Italian writer under threat from the mafia for writing against organised crime
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IN IT Miriam Makeba gave voice to the pain of exile and dislocation
Miriam Makeba (March 4, 1932 to November 10, 2008), like so many other South African musicians of her generation, was a magical personality. Musicians like Abdullah Ibrahim and Hugh Masakela (she was once married to the latter) who shared many common experiences, at some points of their lives shared common vices too of which the deprived and the talented are always susceptible. Throughout their lives they had to constantly redefine and reinvent themselves, but without compromising on the core of their creative personality, their music. They also received abundantly the love of the people.
Miriam Makeba was popularly known as Mama Afrika, a sobriquet acknowledged and defined so in A Dictionary of South African English on Historical Principles (OUP, Oxford, 1996). The Dictionary says she was given that name “because of her importance as a political and cultural figure”, discreetly omitting to mention that her importance as a political and cultural figure was part of the struggle of the South African masses across the race and colour spectrum, against the evil system of Apartheid and everything that emanated from it.
Appropriately for such an icon of the South African liberation struggle, she died while on a concert tour of Italy, in support of an Italian writer under threat from the mafia for writing against organised crime. Describing her as the “mother of our struggle”, Nelson Mandela who nowadays hardly ever makes a public statement — he has remained scrupulously silent about the ongoing struggles in the African National Congress — issued a moving statement: “Her haunting melodies gave voice to the pain of exile and dislocation which she felt for 31 long years”. She was unable to return to her country after a concert tour because of her deposition before a UN Committee in the wake of the Sharpeville massacre. She could return only in 1991.
Miriam Makeba with her Indian husband Sonny Pillay
‘Haunting melodies’, giving voice to the pain of exile and dislocation, is the most appropriate description of Miriam Makeba’s music. Her melodies haunted as one listened to her live; and continues to haunt as one listens to them in an environment shorn of the glitz and commerce of an organised concert. Consider her song, “Tailor Man”, about a young girl window-shopping when she is accosted by ‘the tailor man’ who, with a wink and a smile, asks her: “Lady, what will it be?” This leads to a wistful remembrance of that casual encounter at the end of which this stranger took away the singer’s time, heart, love, and, indeed, life.
The words are simple; but the melody is haunting, and lingers. The melody and the music are reminiscent of the more explicitly political “Colonial Man”, by Hugh Masekela — perhaps not surprising because the composition is partly credited to Masakela. But she has also sung explicitly political songs like “A Luta Continua”, the anthem of the Mozambican revolution adopted by South Africa during the anti-Apartheid struggle and in the wake of the transition to democracy.
Many of her songs are in Xhosa. The articulation of this language, like that of other Nguni languages, is characterised by the unique click sound adopted from the Khoisan group of languages. Two of these songs are justly famous: “The Click Song” (Qongqothwane), and “Pata Pata”. The latter has just two lines, but the appeal of the lilt and melody of the human voice, like that of all great music, transcends literal understanding. Miriam Makeba gave voice to the pain of exile and dislocation, which she personally experienced, along with the heart-wrenching loss of her only child. One of her most famous songs, “Africa is where my heart lies”, composed in 2000, ends with the words: “Africa is the birthplace of my heart”. And yet she, like so many others, did not allow exile and dislocation to isolate her. Inasmuch as Africa is where her heart lies, her home is also the broader world, where her music will for ever resonate.
Finally, Miriam Makeba had an intimate Indian connection. Married five times, her second husband was Sonny Pillay, a singer from Durban to whom she was married briefly in 1959. Apart from her first marriage contracted when she was in her late teens, she married three more times. Two of these husbands were Hugh Masekela (1964-66), Stokley Carmichael, he of the Black Power fame who took on the name of Kwame Torre and made a home in Guinea (1968-73). I have no details of her fifth husband.
Go well, Mama, go in peace.
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