Alex Smith

Suffice it to say at this stage, you have to watch it to fully experience the catharsis. Long winding story short, the then US supreme and appeals state court, eventually, ruled in favour of the Africans upholding their claim to being “free men and women”, after an initial legal set-back, and ordered their immediate repatriation to mainland Africa. In the ensuing days and weeks thereafter I, on separate occasions, desperately scoured the Baltimore eastern harbour points in the hopes I could pick out the docking place and locate what monumental plaque has been put up to mark and serve as reminder of this momentous occasion in history, but to no avail. I was to later learn that this point – at Fort McHenry – was a little farther east and towards the open Atlantic waters, quite a-ways from Baltimore. Together with the Virginias and Carolinas, this part of Maryland, drained by the history drenched Potomac River [incomparable, like nowhere near, to our majestic (Kasamba-bezi) Zambezi, sort of nearing middle ground between our (Kahuwe) Kafue and Luangwa, and more like, actually, a stricken Limpopo] reaching for the Atlantic right through Washington DC, adorns on either side terrestrial scars of the American civil war: battle fronts like Gettysburg, encampment points, confederate and union army escape and pursuit routes, George Washington’s rest and safe wooden huts along the Potomac, at Cumberland for one, all marks festooned with a certain element of national self-pride in today’s united America’s merit badges. For it was at the Fort McHenry seafront that the army of the union of states, then the gone-rogue English Crown colonies, with able help from their French naval counterparts, fired the most fatal shots cannoning the final nail to put paid any further English Imperial interests in the area. The result of which gave later emergence to a united America and a state named Delaware, which was to ominously initiate and provide experiential fodder inspiring the reflective lyrics of a then one inconsequential teenager Robert Nesta Marley, or as he more famously has come to rule our globes social psyche at equity via the reggae musical scene, Bob Marley, in his “Crazy Baldheads” poignant elegy: “I and I built the cabin, I and I plant the corn; Didn’t my people before me, slave for this country? Now you look me with the scorn, then you eat up all my corn… Build your penitentiaries, we build your schools; Brainwash education, to make us the fools; Hatred your reward for our love, telling us of your God above…”
Much too much a digression perhaps this, but in a situation such as I’ve just described, in moments like that, one always found solace and oomph in turning to Mama Afrika and her own near hypnotic array of captivating musically relayed tales. Such were the markings all along her long vast road. Little wonder then when that African global musical whirlwind, the studious Angelique Kidjo compiled her “Best of…” album, it had to include one of Mama Afrika’s personal specials, “Malaika”. An angel indeed, for through it all – be it her ostracism by US authorities and subsequent banishment from public performances in the country, due to her increased outspokenness against a repressive segregationist regime back home in South Africa and her marriage, for one, to Stokely Carmichael a.k.a Kwame Toure of the Black Panthers fame of the America of those most overtly tumultuous paradoxical times, in that “America could see Red but could not see Black”, a part ‘witch-hunting’ hobbyhorse of Senator Joseph McCarthy “during those cold-war days of madness” as many a progressive and freethinking type will recall, and her open association with others considered of the pesky-ilk – and through it all, Makeba, using and in her musical artistry, cum-work cum-activism, was able to keep in touch with the essence of her humanity nestled at the inner core of self.
And she came through, and in as admirable a manner deserving of comparison to what Vladimir Posner says of his characterization of a real-life influence of his in “Parting With Illusions”, about one “Hendrikdje”, as being “pure as gold”, in remarking on congenial traits of global human authenticity and undesirable self-willed convenient national morality. Vladimir Posner himself has been something of a “separate traveler”. Of mixed Polish-Russian Jew paternal and French maternal parentage, Posner was born in Parisian France, had his early childhood upbringing in the typically American of places, Brooklyn, New York. Just getting into his early teens, his family then obligingly decamped to Paris, and then East Berlin in a still split and sore post-WWII Germany, then finally to a supposedly brooding Soviet-Moscow. Being fluent in English, French, German and Russian, though a trained Biologist and a journeyman of sorts, Posner went on to find his forte in poetry, writing, media and broadcasting. Writing about his father-figure and personal hero Hendrikdje, Posner says of this Russian man living in the Soviet-era, in-spite of life having thrown the worst of situations his way, “a crucible of hell”, having been repeatedly gulaged, and eventually exiled away to Siberia, his youthful life and young family thus decimated – just about every imaginable life and soul sucking circumstance – he Hendrikdje still was able in the aftermath of it all to show a zest for living, harboured and exhibited no trace of ill will towards his would have been perpetrator, authority and individual alike, continually gave off an exceeding warmth in personality, patience of mind and never did spend a moment fretting about any … “lost time”.
Writing an email to a circle of friends at hearing the news of her passing, I said this of Mama Afrika: “I could not have asked for a more symbolic manner for her crossing over… giving in to a heart attack a few moments of her leaving stage after having performed at a musical concert organized in a southern Italian town, in a show of solidarity and support against increased spates of organized-crime related violence and xenophobic attacks targeting immigrant groups and vulnerable communities… a true warrior of light, to the end”. Her self-proclaimed protégé, Zambia’s own Anna Mwale, in a mix of English and Nyanja – the latter her mother tongue, a sort of lingua franca combining a hotchpotch of eastern Zambia’s indigenous tongues – could not have put it better when years ago she sang: “Take me home, ooh Afrikan song, show me the way, my way home… Kaimba, kaimba nyimbo kaimba, nyimbo kaimba, nyimbo dza kwatu”! And when you hear, “I’ve been away for so long that I wonder, if the sound of the drum still has its power…” Angelique Kidjo’s words these – what, quiet frankly, ought to be the right reaction at a line like that? What sort of runaway imagination is triggered and how far back in time do you find yourself reaching into? A place to want to spread oneself in? Moments to want to wrap up close? Clouds to have to, literally, float away by?
But, wonder not at all “Mama Afrika”, for having all the while been carrying you in our hands, in our hearts, mind and soul you, we’ll now forever carry – true to the spirit embodied in the title of your farewell compilation to cap your at once enigmatic and enlightening musical career; indeed, as that album cover reads, “Miriam Makeba – Forever”. Who would forget the lines: “Leading the struggle with nothing in the hands, can bring confusion in the family… I miss those days of jubilation, when we’d sit around the fire, oh we-mama we… I wanna thank you mama, thank you, thank you for everything you have done for me…”, breaking into the mini-duet as she did playing Leleti Khumalo’s mother in “Sarafina”, Leleti then playing the rebellious, headstrong teenage daughter in that self-titled much acclaimed feature by Bongeni Ngema, an adaptation of his theatrical stage musical inspired by the Sharpeville Youth Massacre of ’76…
I am in no doubt Mama Afrika’s path lead back home to her Afrikan Xhosa roots, and was lit then and always will be, by the kindred spirit and sense of belonging at once exuded and imbued in all these compelling lyrics above.
That you could never stop the tears from welling up, and eventually winding down your face being held high in a show of a mix of equal defiance and resilience, as if in a final parting message you’re saying to Mama Afrika, “Oh yaw, this baton here you’ve just passed onto to me, oh yaw, it’s in good hands… go on to the other side knowing you’ve left it in good, able hands…” Which is why in the final analysis, the atmosphere ought to be one with celebration, a celebration of the eternal gift that is Mama Afrika, for her final triumphant as sounded is indeed this, that Afrika and the Afrikan, no less than the trees and the stars up in the heavens above, the heavens about and in us, you too Afrika are a child of this universe, and you too Afrika have a right to be here, there, and everywhere…
Listen to Tu Nokwe, and you’ll hear “Kobanje – Africa celebrate”, the pledge and understanding that “Nobody can do it alone, I say no Man is an island – we knew that a long time ago; Women were building house, while men went out to hunt – everybody working together; Now we have a bigger task, to rebuild this nation – men and women, working together; In my Afrikan family, we do things together – our secret is caring, our wealth is our sharing; We want to tell you now, we’re not giving up, till everybody is OK, we building this nation… Halala ma-Afrika, halala!” A conviction I share and echoed by Sibong’ile Khumalo in “Under the cover of darkness” from her Immortal Secrets wherein she further asserts that “no condition is permanent…” Further listening, looking and learning from a multitude of others of Mama Afrika’s ilk and thus inspired, you can only hasten to agree, like Mitch Albom notes of Morrie Schwarz in “Tuesdays with Morrie”, that, indeed, each in a way that is uniquely their own, “a teacher affects eternity”, that in an ideal situation, quiet easily, “we’re teachers to each other”; that “when the student is ready, the teacher appears.” A befitting description I think of a notion of what is immortality. Ever felt your hair stand on its ends at the sound of a voice, piercing or mundane? For that matter, any voice? Out of our hands perhaps, yet in our hearts we’ll hold you eternally… This much I know and India Arie agrees when in “Little Things” from her Voyage to India she sings: “It’s the little things, that’s how I know that God is real…” Sometimes coming in a size, a shape, form and/or colour, yet apparently ordinary, as Mama Afrika.

In committing the memory of the life of Mama Afrika to posterity, none but Sidney Poitier’s words in his memoirs The Measure of a Man – himself a fellow and confidant of that inimitable honourable paragon-son-of-the-Caribbean Harry Belafonte, himself Mama Afrika’s initial mentor on her early American sojourn and once her significant-other – could succinctly help, with profound respect, to sum it all up: “As to questions that remain standing in the face of humanity’s relentless pursuit of answers, maybe nature arranges it to her benefit that some of us set out on journeys that can have no end.
“Consider for a moment, that the amount of energy spent by human beings in pursuit of something that doesn’t exist, might, in very real terms, represent a sizeable chunk of the energy nature needs, to make the world go round.
“Which might also explain why even after a lifetime of struggle, most of us never find the rainbow we promised ourselves, would lead us to our pot of gold… but I do know that I am responsible not for what happens, but for what I make of it. It’s up to me to take my own measure, to claim what’s real, to answer for myself. I am still here, and truth be told, the compulsion to create and express is still here… but I still dream of that final moment on stage. Surely this must be the highest stakes game of all, and maybe the oracles are trying to tell me that this is one I can’t win, that my survival instincts aren’t going to help me, this time; that I won’t be able to charm this opponent into neutral, no matter how much drive, and hard work, and talent I apply. But, there’s still a beating heart at the centre of my being and, while there’s life…
“Human life is a highly imperfect system filled with subordinate imperfections all the way down. The only thing we know for sure is that in another 8 billion years it will all be over, our sun will have spent itself, and the day it expires you’ll hear the crunch all over this solar system, because then everything, will turn to absolute Zero. But you can’t live focused on that, you can’t hang-on, to that. Anyway, luckily we puny individuals have only 75, or 82, or 96 years to look forward to, which is still a snap in the overall impenetrableness of time. So, what we do is we stay within the context of what’s practical, what’s real, what dreams can be fashioned into reality, what values can send us to bed comfortably and make us courageous enough to face our end, with character.
“That’s what we’re seeking. That’s what it’s all about, you know. We are, all of us, a little greedy, some of us are, plenty greedy. We are all somewhat courageous and we are all considerably cowardly. We are all imperfect. And life is simply a perpetual, unending struggle, against, those… imperfections…”
Won’t we always hum along to: “Welele, welele eh, welele welele le, Wenelela we, Wenelela mama… aah uhm, aah uuhhmm….” While you’re away, never shall we let the flames you’ve helped spark aglow radiate less intense… at least not on ‘our watch’.
So, Hamba Kahle Mama…

Mwape Mumbi
Zambia.