Front Page

Miriam Makeba’s last song

Miriam Makeba, a file picture. — AFP

PARIS: South Africa is in mourning. Mariam Makeba, better known as Mamma Africa or the Songbird of Africa, is no more.

The South African singer who, along with Nelson Mandela, came to be identified with her country's struggle against apartheid rule and whose songs became a rallying cry for black freedom, died in Italy early on Monday after performing at a protest concert. She was 76.

She had been singing at a concert protesting Mafia rule in Italy and in support of Roberto Saviano, an author who has received death threats since writing about organised crime. She collapsed as she was leaving the stage and died of a heart attack shortly after she was taken to a hospital near Naples.

Although arthritis had weakened her once agile limbs and age had dimmed her vision, nothing had diminished her powerful voice or affected her resolve to fight for justice. She died as she had lived, fighting for truth and justice through her songs. She shot to international fame with titles such as "Pata Pata," which was her first world hit.

In South Africa she was seen as an everlasting symbol of the pain and humiliation suffered by black people under the apartheid system of racial segregation that only ended with the release from prison of Nelson Mandela in 1990.

After the South African regime cancelled her passport in 1960, Mariam Makeba spent 31 years in exile, living in France, Guinea and Belgium, and the United States. She was prevented from attending her mother's funeral after touring in the U.S. He music was banned on stateowned South African radio and television after she condemned the racist South African regime at the U.N. headquarters in 1976.

"I never understood why I couldn't come home," Makeba said at an emotional homecoming in Johannesburg in 1990 as the apartheid system began to crumble. "I never committed any crime."

She wrote in her memoirs: "I kept my culture. I kept the music of my roots. Through my music I became this voice and image of Africa, and the people, without even realising."

In an interview in 2008, she said: "I'm not a political singer. I don't know what the word means. People think I consciously decided to tell the world what was happening in South Africa. No! I was singing about my life, and in South Africa we always sang about what was happening to us - especially the things that hurt us."

Mandela's tribute