MAMA AFRICA AND THE SONGS OF HOPE

Miriam Makeba and the Voice Against Apartheid

von Karl Russell

114 Seiten, Taschenbuch

Kurzbeschreibung des Verlags

She was eighteen days old when the iron gate closed behind her.Her mother had been sentenced to six months of hard labor for brewing traditional beer - a crime the apartheid state had only just invented - and there was no one else to care for the infant. So Miriam Makeba spent the first six months of her life inside a South African prison cell, breathing air that had already decided, before she could speak a single word, how much freedom the world outside intended to allow her.She would grow up to sing before kings, presidents, and the full General Assembly of the United Nations. She would become the first African artist ever to win a Grammy. And in 1963, she would stand before the world and call her own homeland "a huge prison" - a truth her government answered by revoking her citizenship entirely and stamping her passport Invalid.What followed was thirty-one years of exile: a stateless woman carrying passports from nine different countries, building a global career out of the very silence her country tried to impose on her. Pata Pata topped charts on continents she'd never performed in. The Click Song carried her language - the one her own government tried to erase - into homes across the world. She married a Black Power leader and watched an entire American career vanish overnight. She built a new life in Guinea, addressed the UN as another nation's delegate, and lost her only daughter thousands of miles from the soil that had shaped them both.Then, in 1990, Nelson Mandela walked free - and asked her to come home.This is the story of the woman the world came to call Mama Africa: a voice apartheid spent six decades trying to silence, and never once succeeded.

• Reihe: Independently published
• ISBN: 9798175501378
• Sprache: Englisch
• Erscheinungsdatum: 19.09.2026
• Größe: 229 x 152 mm
• Verlag: Independently published