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As we ruminate on the contribution of Miriam Makeba to African music, I wish to share this brief portrait of Mama Africa from the book by the journalist Bloke Modisane, Blame Me on History. The setting is Sophiatown, the township that preceded Soweto, in the 1950s. Here is the passage:

In the ’forties and before the ’fifties there was only the cinema, protest meetings, football matches and African jazz concerts, which were always dominated by the tsotsis. It was usual for the tsotsis to invade dances and concerts; at a Sunday afternoon jazz concert at the Odin Cinema in Sophiatown, which featured the Manhattan Brothers and their ‘nut brown baby’, Miriam Makeba, the tsotsis called the tunes and intimidated the artists.
‘Not that one,’ a tsotsi interrupted Miriam Makeba’s song. ‘Sing that other one.’
‘Which one?’ Miriam Makeba asked, feebly.
‘That one,’ the tsotsi said, waving an impatient gesture with his hand. ‘The other one. You know it.’
Miriam Makeba’s voice rose with the lyrics of Laku Tshona Ilanga, there was a slight vibrato in her voice and the tremulousness was perceptible in her otherwise electric movements.
‘Not that one. The other one.’
The tension in her body was by that moment clearly visible as her fingers metronomed the beat of the blues.
‘Not that one.’
And by going through her repertoire she finally realized that during the singing of Saduva a maddeningly pulsating rhythmic conversation of sensual gyrations and sound and motion in counterpoint between Miriam Makeba, in dazzling scarlet jeans, the Manhattan Brothers, and the audience, swinging and stomping, and sweating with desire to the throbbing of every sinew of the volatile, voluptuous body of Miriam Makeba, she was not interrupted. She smiled an acknowledgment that Saduva was in fact ‘that one’. They appreciated her gesture so genuinely that they requested ‘that one’ three more times before she was allowed to move on to the next song.
— from Bloke Modisane. Blame Me on History. New York: Simon & Schuster/Touchstone, 1986. p. 177.


Rest in Peace, Mama Africa
Dean


      

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