Music’s ‘Mama Africa’ Miriam Makeba dies

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa – She died just how she wanted to: singing on stage for a good cause. And her recorded songs wafted out of taxis and radios, as fellow Africans struggled with their grief at her passing.

Miriam Makeba, the “Mama Africa” whose sultry voice gave South Africans hope when the country was gripped by apartheid, died Monday of a heart attack after collapsing on stage in Italy. She was 76.

In her dazzling career, Makeba performed with musical legends from around the world – jazz maestros Nina Simone and Dizzy Gillespie, Harry Belafonte, Paul Simon – and sang for world leaders such as John F. Kennedy and Nelson Mandela.

Her distinctive style, which combined jazz, folk and South African township rhythms, managed to get her banned from South Africa for more than 30 years.

“Her haunting melodies gave voice to the pain of exile and dislocation which she felt for 31 long years. At the same time, her music inspired a powerful sense of hope in all of us,” Mandela said in a statement.

He said it was “fitting” that her last moments were spent on stage.

Makeba collapsed after singing one of her most famous hits, “Pata Pata,” her family said. Her grandson, Nelson Lumumba Lee, was with her as well as 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.

Makeba died at the Pineta Grande clinic in Castel Volturno, near the southern city of Naples, after singing at a concert in solidarity with six immigrants from Ghana who were shot to death in September. Investigators have blamed the attack on organized crime.

The death of “Mama Africa” sent shock waves through South Africa, where 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 neighborhood of Johannesburg that was a cultural hotspot in the 1950s before its black residents were forcibly removed by the apartheid government.

In 1963, Makeba appeared before the U.N. Special Committee on Apartheid to call for an international boycott of South Africa. The white-led South African government responded by banning her records.

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.”