Miriam Makeba

Zenzile Miriam Makeba was born on 4 March 1932 in a township near Johannesburg, South Africa, to a Xhosa teacher father, Caswell, and a Swazi mother, Christina, who worked as a domestic. Her father died when she was very young, and as a child she sang in church and choirs before joining township groups like the Manhattan Brothers and the all-woman Skylarks. By the late 1950s her voice — jazz, township songs, and traditional Xhosa music — had made her famous across South Africa.

A brief appearance in the anti-apartheid film Come Back, Africa (1959) carried her name overseas and won her the support of American star Harry Belafonte. Soon the world knew her songs: 'Pata Pata' became a worldwide hit, and 'Qongqothwane' — nicknamed the 'Click Song' by Westerners who could not pronounce its Xhosa name — let audiences everywhere hear the click consonants of her language. In 1966 she and Belafonte won a Grammy Award for an album that spoke openly about the suffering of Black South Africans.

But Makeba did not only sing. She testified before the United Nations against apartheid and called for the world to act. In return, the apartheid government banned her music, revoked her South African citizenship and refused to let her come home — she could not even attend her own mother's funeral. Stateless, she was given passports and honorary citizenship by other nations and lived in exile for about thirty-one years, in the United States, in Guinea, and beyond, singing for a free South Africa wherever she went.

When apartheid finally began to fall, Nelson Mandela invited her home in 1990, and Mama Africa stepped onto free South African soil once more. She kept singing and serving as a goodwill ambassador until 9 November 2008, when she suffered a heart attack after a concert in Castel Volturno, Italy — a concert held to support a writer standing up to organised crime. She had just finished singing 'Pata Pata'. To the end, her last act was a song against injustice.