Remembering Makeba: who is the next Mama Africa?

By Siphokazi Magadla

It has been almost 2 years since the death of Miriam Makena on November 10, 2008. To the world she was known as Mama Africa and the Empress of African Song. I saw Mama Makeba for the first time in 2004 performing at Rhodes University’s 100 years celebration. Despite the fact that Makeba was 75 years old at the time, we were all struggling to keep up with her as she jumped up and down performing her popular songs including Pata Pata and Qongqothwane (the click song). I often wondered in silence why one person would be known as the mother of the whole continent. But now I get it!

Makeba the global citizen, the global leader, was first and foremost the manifestation of pan-Africanism. She loved Africa; not a superficial kind of loving Africa which involves a tattoo of the African continent on your shoulder or a collection of books on Mandela, Lumumba, Nkrumah and others. I am talking about the kind of loving that Cornel West talks about, the kind of love that begins at home and spills over to the whole world. In Makeba you see this kind of love for Soweto in her song Pata Pata, but the love quickly spills over as this young girl became a woman, and a mother of the continent. As Mama Africa she demands Africa to come back- Mayibuye. This is the kind of love that led her to dedicate her whole life to telling the whole world that the African agenda of post-colonialism is not only good for the Africans themselves, but for the world as well.

In 1966, six years after she was refused entry to South Africa in 1960 to come bury her mother, a defiant Makeba stood proudly at Bern’s Salonger in Stockholm, Sweden singing Mayibuye (Come back Africa), Kilimanjaro and Mbube among others. At the time the bulk of the leaders of the liberation movements in South Africa had been successfully silenced by the South African government; tucked away in Robben Island. At the time of her death Makeba had been to all African countries with the exception of five. It was Makeba who reminded South Africans months before her passing that the xenophobic attacks of 2008 were an embarrassment to the country, especially because she, like most of the political leaders in South Africa had for decades depended on other Africans during the fight against Apartheid. But sadly, now she is gone.

Now I wonder, who is the next Mama Africa? Who among us can profess that kind of love for Africa? The kind of love that forces us to demand a lot more of ourselves and to put what Cornel West calls “loving pressure” that does not attempt to rationalize the terrible conditions of the marginalized in our communities. Do we have the kind of love that denies itself the luxury of saying “I deserve”, “I ought to have this and that” but instead says as Makeba sings in Chove Chuva “they say I will forget you, but I say I never will.”