Makeba: The good life is one lived among the people
Miriam Makeba died of a heart attack while performing on stage in southern Italy last week.
It was almost a month after my grandmother Mariam Wangui Mathenge was similarly felled as she fed cows on her farm in Nyeri.
They were agemates but Mariam never flew on a plane or received a Grammy Award.
She was a member of PCEA Mukuri Church Woman’s Guild which on the day of her funeral sang for her and carried her to the grave.
Many hundreds of eulogies will be written for Makeba; only a few speeches were said for cucu.
But no matter the differing numbers, the essential question all of them try answering is whether the life that has ended was a good one.
A member of the guild read Mariam’s official eulogy.
It would perhaps be more exact to call it a panegyric (a speech ‘fit for a general assembly’) in how it dispensed with sentimental attachment or misty-eyed remembrance by dividing Mariam’s life into sharply defined parts: family, education, work and faith.
We were told that she was a mother, a wife and a daughter — names were given; that she had been a farmer all her life — the farm’s location was identified; and that she had served as a deacon at Mukuri Church and was a founding member of the guild.
These things we were made to understand by implication were what had made her life laudable.
The telling took all of 15 minutes and it was left to her daughter, my mother, to add some flesh to those bones.
She remembered how Mariam rose early everyday to light a fire so that the house would be warm by the time her children woke up.
They were punished if they threw off their blankets before the morning chill on the slopes of Mount Kenya had been banished from the room.
The many other details of her life — her loves, her ambitions, her disappointments — were left unsaid. But they were carried in the emotion in my mother’s voice and the welling up of those seated beside me.
That lonely story of a morning routine remembered half a century later animated the dry-sounding facts of the official oration and drew us deep into Mariam’s character.
I think that this is the case with Makeba as well.
The official plaudits will overflow as they should but her character, the depths of her love for us, is what will remain with us.
My most vivid recent memory of Mama Afrika is the brief showing of her performing Amampondo in the Oscar-winning Leon Gast documentary of the 1974 championship fight between Muhammed Ali and George Foreman in Kinshasa.
She gasps again and again, not pausing to take a breath, guttural moans issue from deep in her throat, her mouth almost touching the microphone, her eyes bulging.
The film does not show the rest of the show when she sings in Xhosa.
Gast’s interest is in juxtaposing that initial part of the song with the famous comment by George Plimpton the writer that a “woman with trembling hands,” a “succubus”, would bewitch Foreman and cause him to lose the fight.
Makeba is depicted as this enchanter and destroyer of men by dark and secret arts.
Obviously this portrayal is untruthful and unfair but it is also located close to the mysterious power that her work held for the larger part of her audience that did not understand the languages she sang in.
Watch the live 1966 performance of Amampondo in a clip available on YouTube.
The Xhosa words, the moans, the gasps, they blend into a sound that I think carries in it the excitement of that famous fight in Kinshasa’s heat; the knowledge that a great power had been defeated in Vietnam; our optimism in our newly-won independence; and the steady rise of the deadening, deadly Mobutuism that took its place.
It matters little that I cannot translate the words because their sound, their feel tells me that Makeba is taking our pain into herself and redirecting it back at us and for us.
She absorbed our incoherent moans and gasps of pain and turned them into songs of our beauty, our demands for justice, and our need for dignity. She never accepted that what she was doing in her campaigns was political; it was truth she sang she would insist.
On the afro, she said, “I see other black women imitate my style, which is no style at all, but just letting our hair be itself...” To her, the truth of our lives, our desperate desire to hold on to our the human possibilities denied us by colonialism and ripped from our breast by slavery was not a posing, it was not mere ideological affectation, it was undeniable fact.
I shall sing my song, sing my song
Be it right, be it wrong
In the night, in the day
Anyhow, anyway
Her song was our song.
For those who were to become Kenyans, as British colonialism entered its final days, she comforted the jailed Jomo Kenyatta.
“Pole mzee,” she sang in Kiswahili, repeating the phrase again and again, almost like a lullaby that sent comfort to him for suffering in our name.
She too suffered. Poverty when her record deals and tours were cancelled for her cleaving too close to the Black Power movement in America.
Abusive marriages to brilliant but flawed men.
The revoking of her citizenship in a South Africa where she was a third-class citizen so that she could not attend her mother’s funeral. Thirty-one years in exile, yet she still sang her love for us.
When she collapsed on a stage in Castelvolturno, Italy, she was singing in a concert held in support of a writer who has written a damaging expose of the region’s Mafia which was threatening his life and was responsible for the murder of six African immigrants in September.
The show went ahead in the town square where an anti-Mafia businessman was shot dead last year. She went on stage despite being unwell and needing the aid of a stick to stand.
Because Makeba was singing the truth, nothing was allowed to stand in the way.
The importance of her life, of her songs, is captured in James Baldwin’s tribute to jazz and the blues (which were part of her repertory).
The song, he writes, tells of “how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph... it always must be heard.
There isn’t any other tale to tell, it’s the only light we’ve got in all this darkness.”
In this hour when Barack Obama shines so brightly and even former colonialists and supporters of apartheid line up to praise Makeba, it should not be forgotten that her light was struggling to reach millions of us well before the darkness lifted.
My cucu lit up smaller precincts but her life was no less a triumph for it.
She served her community well and lit a fire every morning to warm her children.
If there is a lesson that has come to me powerfully in this past month of deaths and the election of Obama in America, it is that the struggle to be a good person is not isolated in our heads and hearts or arrived at instinctively. Rather, it is a social struggle.
The good life is lived in the world, among people.
It is in the final instalment a struggle to love my neighbour, to take care of him, to shield him from the storms that batter his house.
By this measure, Makeba lived a good life.
She used her breath, her health, her voice and finally her overworked heart to sound our cry for freedom.
She sang till she died because she was desperate that we should hear her and thus see ourselves clearly enough to understand our beauty and our oppressed power.
