Miriam Makeba Heroes: Princinples of African Greatness Medallion

Mama Africa, she was the voice of a continent struggling for—and winning—freedom and dignity.

Miriam Makeba
1932–2008, b. Prospect Township, Johannesburg, South Africa
Worked globally

I do not sing politics. I merely sing the truth.
—Miriam Makeba, as quoted in the documentary Mama Africa, 2011

• Raised in Sophiatown, a township on the outskirts of Johannesburg, Makeba rose to prominence singing in South Africa in the early 1950s. Her appearance in an anti-apartheid documentary caught the attention of Harry Belafonte, who invited her to the United States in 1959.
• In the U.S., Makeba recorded a large number of songs in Xhosa, Zulu, and English. She became a global celebrity and one of the continent’s most recognized faces and voices, bringing African music to many Western audiences for the first time. She was the first African artist to win a Grammy (1965) with Belafonte.
• The South African government refused her reentry to the country in 1960 and banned her records and revoked her passport in 1963. Makeba, meanwhile, became a vocal and highly visible critic of the apartheid regime, both in her songs and in her growing role as a civil rights activist.
• After marrying Black Panther leader Stokely Carmichael in 1968, Makeba and her husband left the U.S., first for Guinea. She would tour Europe and Africa in the decades that followed, performing at a number of new African nations’ independence celebrations.
• Nelson Mandela invited Makeba to return to South Africa in 1991—the freedom she had called for had finally come to her homeland. She was named a United Nations Goodwill Ambassador in 1999 and continued to speak out for humanitarian causes.