MUMBAI: Google doodle marked 81st birthday of ‘Mama Africa’ aka Miriam Makeba, a Grammy-award winning South African singer and civil rights activist. She is best known for the song ‘Pata Pata’ and her fight against apartheid in South Africa.
She is one African woman who actively campaigned against South Africa’s racist apartheid government. As a result, her South African passport was cancelled in 1960 and the South African government revoked her citizenship and right of return in 1963. This move came from the government after she testified before the United Nations, against apartheid in South Africa. It was in 1990 that she finally returned home after the apartheid system fall apart. Guinea, Belgium and Ghana came to her support and issued her international passports. In her life, she held nine passports, and was granted honorary citizenship in ten countries.
Born as Zenzile Miriam Makeba in Johannesburg on 4 March, she had difficult childhood with her father’s death when she was just six years. When she was just eighteen days old, her mother who was a Swazi sangoma (traditional healer-herbalist), was arrested for selling umqombothi, an African homemade beer brewed from malt and cornmeal. Her mother was sentenced to a six-month prison term, so Makeba spent her first six months in jail.
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Like most of the kids, she also sang in the choir of the Kilmerton Training Institute in Pretoria, a primary school that she attended for eight years. At the age of eighteen, Makeba gave birth to her only child, Bongi Makeba.
In 1950’s her professional career began after she featured with South African jazz group the Manhattan Brothers, and appeared for the first time on a poster. She quit Manhattan Brothers to record with her all-woman group.
South Africa enjoyed her voice through her famous single Pata Pata which was released in early 1956; it was played on all the radio stations then.
Her guest appearance in Come Back, Africa, an anti-apartheid documentary produced and directed by American independent filmmaker Lionel Rogosin, received critical appreciation . Makeba has also sung for the Broadway-inspired South African musical King Kong. She made her US debut on 1 November 1959 on The Steve Allen Show.
In 1966, Makeba received the Grammy Award for Best Folk Recording together with Harry Belafonte for An Evening with Belafonte/ Makeba. In 1968, she married Stokely Carmichael in Guinea and lived there for next 15 years.
She breathe her last on 9 November 2008, due to an attack, at age of 76. Miriam Makeba was among the several popular artists that took part in the Nelson Mandela 70th birthday tribute festival in 1988.
