Miriam Makeba, the South African singer known to fans worldwide as "Mama Africa" who became an international symbol of the anti-apartheid struggle, died early Monday after performing a concert in southern Italy, a hospital said. She was 76.
An emergency room official at the Pineta Grande Clinic, a private facility in Castel Volturno, said the singer died after being taken there.
Makeba collapsed after singing one of her most famous hits Pata Pata, during a concert to express solidarity with six immigrants from Ghana who were shot to death in September in Naples, her family said.
Her grandson, Nelson Lumumba Lee, was with her as was her longtime friend, Italian promoter Roberto Meglioli.
"Whilst this great lady was alive she would say, ’I will sing until the last day of my life,’" the family statement said, adding it was fitting that she died while doing what she loved.
Makeba, often called "Mama Africa" and "the Empress of African Song," left South Africa in 1959. She tried to return in 1960 for the funeral of her mother, but her passport was revoked and she was not allowed to enter the country.
She lived in exile for 31 years in the United States, France, Guinea in West Africa and Belgium before having an emotional homecoming in Johannesburg in 1990, when many long-exiled South Africans returned under reforms instituted by then president F.W. de Klerk.
"I never understood why I couldn’t come home," Makeba said upon her return. "I never committed any crime."
In 1963, Makeba appeared before the UN Special Committee on Apartheid to call for an international boycott of South Africa. The white-led South African government responded by banning her records, including hits like Pata Pata, The Click Song (Qongqothwane in Xhosa) and Malaika.
Makeba insisted, however, that her songs were not deliberately political.
"I’m not a political singer," she insisted in an interview with Britain’s Guardian newspaper earlier this year. "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."
Performed with legends
During her dazzling career, Makeba performed with musical legends from around the world: jazz maestros Nina Simone and Dizzy Gillespie, Harry Belafonte and Paul Simon.
Her distinctive style combined jazz, folk and South African township rhythms.
In a tribute on Monday, anti-apartheid leader Nelson Mandela called her "South Africa’s first lady of song."
"Despite her tremendous sacrifice and the pain she felt to leave behind her beloved family and her country when she went into exile, she continued to make us proud as she used her worldwide fame to focus attention on the abomination of apartheid," Mandela said in his tribute.
"Her haunting melodies gave voice to the pain of exile and dislocation which she felt for 31 long years," he said, recalling the pleasure he got from hearing her music.
In South Africa, callers flooded local radio stations with their recollections of her. In Guinea, where Makeba lived most of her decades in exile, radio and television stations played mournful music and tributes to their adopted icon.
The first African to win a Grammy award, Makeba started singing in Sophiatown, a cosmopolitan neighbourhood of Johannesburg that was a cultural hotspot in the 1950s before its black residents were forcibly removed by the apartheid government.
She then teamed up with South African jazz trumpeter Hugh Masekela - later her first husband - and her rise to international prominence started in 1959 when she starred in the anti-apartheid documentaryCome Back, Africa.
Makeba received the Grammy Award for best folk recording in 1966 together with Belafonte for An Evening With Belafonte/Makeba.
The album dealt with the political plight of black South Africans under apartheid.
She fell briefly out of favour in the U.S. when she married black power activist Stokely Carmichael - later known as Kwame Ture - and moved to Guinea in the late 1960s.
She also appeared with Paul Simon at his Graceland concert in Zimbabwe in 1987.
After three decades abroad, Makeba was invited back to South Africa by Mandela shortly after his release from prison in 1990 as white racist rule crumbled.
"It was like a revival," she said about going home. "My music having been banned for so long, that people still felt the same way about me was too much for me. I just went home and I cried."
Makeba announced her retirement three years ago but, despite a series of farewell concerts, she never stopped performing. When she turned 75 last year, she said she would sing for as long as possible.
Makeba is survived by her grandchildren, Nelson Lumumba Lee and Zenzi Monique Lee, and her great-grandchildren Lindelani, Ayanda and Kwame. A funeral will be held in South Africa, but details have not yet been announced.
Credit: cbc.ca
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