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South Africa: Makeba Gave Hope in Times Darkness

Aubrey Matshiqi

14 November 2008

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opinion

Johannesburg — MIRIAM Makeba was more than a singer and musician. She was the voice of a people caged and chained by centuries of bondage by those who saw in them something less than human.

Miriam Makeba was the voice of freedom. Hers was a voice that soared supreme, symbolising a yearning for liberty by all who are the wretched of this earth.

I became aware of this longing when, as a small child, I got my first lesson in South African politics.

Until then I was blissfully unaware of the plight of black people in this country. I was oblivious to the existence of Robben Island and the fact that it was a place where this longing for freedom was incarcerated.

I thought it was natural for us as children to grow up in Soweto and go to a school where platooning seemed the most normal of things. I even wished that, like other children, I could go to school without shoes.

This was my view of life in SA until I heard the music of Miriam Makeba for the first time.

I do not remember how old I was exactly but I know that it was well before the June 1976 uprising.

All I remember is that there was a sense of expectation and excitement in the Matshiqi household because the day was quickly approaching when my father and mother would receive their copy of An Evening With Belafonte/Makeba.

A few days earlier, my parents had asked a cousin of my mother's - who became a pre-BEE mover and shaker in business - to smuggle this LP from Botswana because it had been banned by apartheid authorities.

The night it arrived we all sat listening, with my parents explaining the songs to my siblings and me. The stories ranged from liquor raids by the police in Sophiatown to why Nelson Mandela, Robert Sobukwe and Walter Sisulu were in jail for life.

That night, I learned about Hendrik Verwoerd and the policy of apartheid and vowed to myself that I would become a politician when I grew up. That night, the music of Miriam Makeba lit the flame of freedom in my soul.

HER music continued to inspire me as a young activist in the 1980s, together with the freedom songs of Bob Marley.

When I heard in the news that her mortal remains had been brought back home, I thought of her not as a dead singer but as a lark ascending to heaven.

I heard the melodious composition, A Lark Ascending, by Vaughan Williams, which he composed for the violinist Marie Hall in 1914. I heard the sweet sound of the violin mimicking a lark ascending. The sweetness of the music reminded me of the poem by George Meredith, which inspired the idyll by Vaughan Williams.

Of the lark, Meredith wrote thus:

"'Tis love of earth that he instils,

And ever winging up and up,

Our valley is his golden cup,

And he the wine which overflows

To lift us with him as he goes

'Til lost on his aerial rings

In light, and then the fancy sings."

The African lark sang her songs of freedom all over the world, spreading a message that found a home in the children of the coloniser and the colonised.

Her many years in exile were a recognition of the fact that freedom is universal. She knew that in foreign lands would be planted the seeds of hope and freedom that in time would be transplanted to grow on the ashes of apartheid side by side with the hopes of all South Africans.

Hers was the life of a phenomenal woman. Her essence is captured in the words of Maya Angelou when she says: "Now you understand/Just why my head's not bowed/I don't shout or jump about/Or have to talk real loud/When you see me passing/It ought to make you proud."

Lala ngoxolo, Mama Afrika.

Matshiqi is senior associate political analyst at the Centre for Policy Studies.

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