African Celebrities: Miriam Makeba

Miriam Makeba was a Grammy Award - winning South African singer and civil rights activist. She was nicknamed Mama Africa. Miriam Makeba was born in Johannesburg on 4th March 1932 and died of a heart attack on 9th November 2008 after performing in a concert in Italy organised to support writer Roberto Saviano in his stand against the camorra, a mafia - like organisation local to the region of Campania.

Her professional career began in the 1950s when she was featured in the South African jazz group the Manhattan Brothers. As early as 1956, she released the single "Pata Pata" which was played on all the radio stations and made her name known throughout South Africa.

In the 1960s she was the first artist from Africa to popularize African music around the world. She is best known for the song "Pata Pata", first recorded in 1957 and released in the U.S. in 1967.

Miriam Makeba recorded and toured with many popular artists, such as Harry Belafonte, Paul Simon and her former husband Hugh Masekela.

Miriam Makeba campaigned against the South African system of apartheid. The South African government responded by revoking her passport in 1960 and her citizenship and right of return in 1963. As the apartheid system crumbled she returned home for the first time in June 1990, on her French passport.

In 1950 at the age of eighteen Miriam Makeba gave birth to her only child, Bongi Makeba, whose father was Makeba's first husband James Kubay.

Miriam Makeba had a short-lived marriage in 1959 to Sonny Pillay, a South African singer of Indian descent. In 1964, Makeba and Masekela were married, divorcing two years later. She got married to Trinidad - born civil rights activist, Black Panther, and student non-violent coordinating committee leader Stokely Carmichael in 1968. She divorced Stokely in 1978 and married an airline executive in 1980. After the death of her daughter Bongi in 1985, she decided to move to Brussels, Belgium.

In 1966, Miriam Makeba received the Grammy Award for Best Folk Recording together with Harry Belafonte for An Evening with Belafonte Makeba. The album dealt with the political plight of black South Africans under apartheid.

In 2001, she was awarded the Otto Hahn Peace Medal in Gold by the United Nations Association of Germany (DGVN) in Berlin, "for outstanding services to peace and international understanding.

On 16 October 1999, Miriam Makeba was nominated Goodwill Ambassador of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). She worked closely with Graca Machel - Mandela who at the time was the South African first lady, for children suffering from HIV/AIDS, child solders and the physically handicapped.

Miriam Makeba made a guest appearance in the episode "Olivia comes out of the closet" of The Cosby show. In 1992, she starred in the film Sarafina, and she portrayed the title character's mother, "Angelina".