Widely known as \u201cMama Africa,\u201d she made music to directly tackle the plight of Black South Africans. As her political activism grew (she made an impassioned speech before the United Nations in 1963), Makeba continued to use her stardom as a platform to call out injustice against Black people everywhere. This, however, came at a considerable price. Not only was she exiled from South Africa until apartheid\u2019s dissolution, but a year after she married civil rights activist Kwame Ture (nee Stokely Carmichael), she fled the United States and ultimately settled in Guinea.<\/p>\n
Makeba died of a heart attack after a concert in Italy in 2008 at the age of 76 but remains an inspiration to musicians, foremost among them the vocalist and songwriter Somi, who has made Makeba\u2019s work central to her creative output in 2022.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was constantly looking to her legacy as a blueprint and benchmark,\u201d Somi told The Washington Post. \u201cThis is how you want to show up in the world with so much generosity and commitment not only to your art but to your people. That inspired me to look closer.\u201d<\/p>\n
Somi pays homage to the late vocalist with her album \u201cZenzile,\u201d released on March 4, on what would have been Makeba\u2019s 90th birthday, and her musical \u201cDreaming Zenzile,\u201d which began its off-Broadway run at the New York Theatre Workshop on May 17. Through these works, Somi not only reclaims Makeba\u2019s given name (\u201cZenzile\u201d) but also deftly gives voice to what\u2019s unspoken, the internal struggle that perhaps Makeba could never express in her public persona.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was really curious about this idea of what she was carrying privately,\u201d Somi says. \u201cWhat was the intimacy of her heart, and how she was offering it to us in some ways, but it\u2019s always presented to us in this way.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Miriam Makeba was one of Africa\u2019s first global stars. Her debut in Lionel Rogosin\u2019s \u201cCome Back, Africa\u201d in 1959 garnered critical acclaim and top honors at the Venice Film Festival and brought worldwide attention to her and her native South Africa. Her eponymous release a year later also allowed Makeba to push African identity to the forefront of world music, from donning natural hairstyles to popularizing Xhosa with her rendition of \u201cQongqothwane (The Click Song).\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12963,"featured_media":8375,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,31],"tags":[7,14,32],"class_list":{"0":"post-8378","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"category-music","9":"tag-apie-project","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-music"},"yoast_head":"\n