Alex Smith

Twenty hours ago, documentary maker, Mwape Mumbi, in Zambia, sent an email with a subject line that read: REMEMBER MIRIAM MAKEBA – CARVE HER NAME WITH PRIDE. In it was Love Note #14.

At One with “Mama Afrika” – Miriam Zenzile Makeba
By Mwape Mumbi

Growing up a sanguine, idealist propitious teenager, conceited as it may sound, this verse from Bob Marley’s Survival has had a lasting impression on an adult me, with the benefit of hindsight, as to one’s general outlook and life philosophies: “Some people keep the best outside, Some people keep the best inside, Some people can’t stand up strong, Some people won’t wait for long…” In this life we live, looking back now much later farther down the road, one ought to thank their stars that their destiny, the aspect of one’s calling in life, the picking and choosing as to which road to have to travel, becomes apparent from the day one is able to freely run and roam the length and breadth of the vicinity one calls home. Such is the epitome of the story that was Miriam “Mama Afrika” Makeba, the story that still is, and always will serve to reaffirm the credo that certain of us are – indeed its true what they say – meant for certain things.
In which case this existence we call life, the body collective of what passes for the experiential and the happenstances, becomes and is about going through the hoops and loops thrown down and swung along one’s earth pathways. The catch being that one is able – after having been through it all – to stand before oneself in a mirror and internally feel a warmness, smile and silently sigh to the self the words: “You did OK”. Ayi Kwei Armah as recently as 2006 in his memoir The Eloquence of the Scribes has made the assertion that: “The quality of an artistic creator is not only a matter of technical skill; the uses to which we put our skills are also matters of artistic judgement.” Citing Jane Austen and her literary work Mansfield Park, he avers that: “Here, an artist uses her skills to cover a social agreement not to examine, and not to discuss, an atrocity that was too profitable to be subjected to moral judgement. It would be foolish to argue that moral judgement was of no consequence in Jane Austen’s art. It was supposedly at its centre. Only, the type of moral judgement she choose to focus on was essentially puny”.
His contention in reviewing a part of Austen’s Mansfield Park, is, in his words, from the point of view that: “This is an argument about art and the unequal distribution of human attention and sensibility. It is on that artistic ground,” Armah reasons, “that I propose to consider the implications of the passage.” At another occasion whilst, intriguingly, on a visit to South Africa, Armah was noted as having implored that: “Africans need speak and write not from the heat of passion but from the light of intelligence… Africa needs people who will analyse and interpret Africa’s path to transformation and self-realisation… Only a few scholars are analyzing present day and ancient events for us to have a bigger picture of the past, for a better future… Creativity comes in being rooted.” Compelling, illuminating and insightful stuff, no question. Yet Mama Afrika, quiet obviously, seems to have stumbled upon this edifying fount of wisdom years before, her most humble inception into conscientious adult living by way of domestic work, if inductive, notwithstanding.
Some three years ago my sojourn south in Harare, Zimbabwe, coincided with the country’s silver jubilee independence anniversary commemoration of majority black rule. I could swear then to thinking I had to have momentarily been time-machine zapped back into my formative years, at five, eight, ten and twelve. For easing its way back into my awake and now livened senses, at hearing an intro to a musical interlude in the proceedings – something about the voice and crooning lady performer – courtesy of a live public television feed of this momentous gathering of Southern Africa’s veteran sons and daughters of the struggle, were the poetic, haunting, pained lyrics, in part: “Tino gara msango iwe, senderera, hayi nyama iwe”; gently ebbing to: “Abantu ba-Zimbabwe ba tshupekile, ayi wena, tchaya bazooka, paya ma-buunu…”; Ah, a Miriam Makeba mimic, I, quietly, nostalgically, thought to myself.
She’s performing some rendition of another one of Mama Afrika’s, I reassured myself. Only, it quickly turned out, this clearly revered and seasoned artiste in her own right commanding an equal amount of respect too, was in-fact Zimbabwean-born, but South African nurtured Dorothy Masuka. An unquestioned peer, colleague and contemporary of Mama Afrika. With the help of my mother, I was only early in this present year 2008 able to piece together how I came to believe all through my formative years that the songs taking me down memory lane as explained above, were all Miriam Makeba’s recordings. As it happened, Aunty-Dotty, as Dorothy Masuka is fondly known, had visited Zambia in 1976/77. A visit being neither her first nor last. On this visit, significantly, one place she performed at was Mongu’s Lyambai Hotel situated close to a lagoon sand embankment of the (Kasamba-bezi) Zambezi River, only a stone’s throw – a couple of hundreds of meters – from our family residence. A town I also fondly remember for some two particular ditties, one in honour of the Royal Barotse leading the people’s seasonal flood induced switch from plain and valley low lying areas to the safe higher ground – the two traditional capitals Lealui and Limulunga – Kuomboka: “A liyeni kwa Nayuma, kwa Nayuma luyobona, luyobona Nalikwanda, Nalikwanda kimukolo, kimukolo wa Mulena, wa Mulena Mbikusita, Mbikusita Lewanika…”, and the other a more folkloric spellbinding interjection in melodic variation to an oral fable famous among locals: “Ka njetu njetu njetu, ka njetu, Kiwena mani? Ka njetu njetu njetu, ka njetu…”
Being devoted members of Aunty-Dotty’s sub-region’s legion of fans, my parents, themselves societal avant-gardes’ and arty, had our entire household – all my siblings and I – attended the show. This was the period, it also has to be said, at the height of the struggle for majority black rule in Southern Africa, and Zambia was home to multitudes of a mix of exiled freedom fighters and non-combatant South Africans, Zimbabweans, Mozambicans, and Angolans. Looking back, my own guess now is that Mongu must have been a proven ideal safe haven, being a town situated in the nearly far-flung western-end of Zambia. For practical assimilation purposes, it also shared a most common store of ethnic and cultural values for those of our regional brothers and sisters seeking refuge.
Myself a child of the somewhat earth-shattering early 70s, I concluded early in the 80s then still growing up in southern Zambia’s Livingstone, that this continued repeat of ‘revolutionary sign tunes’ I kept hearing in our home, from and amongst friends having ourselves every now and then pitched into song – never mind our off-cord timbre – whilst rolling, slithering in the grass, leaping and scuttling side sand embankments and drainage ditches, skulking to clamber along and over any separating boundary hedge or neighbourhood fencing – all this musical expression for the most part ending up a lingering ‘ring in my head’, and just about all around me, surely, must have had all to do with this proud South African woman called Makeba, whose recordings were every self-respecting music collectors treasured-chest item. So, the name Makeba itself just seemed to me to quite simply be hanging in the air, mostly around things, as far as I could make out, the musical, the celebratory, the common and ordinary, the familiar. The themes too, I was made to understand by the elderly around me – siblings, family friends and the community at-large – were shot through-and-through with the dignity that goes with struggle and the significance of a place in one’s life for pride – self-pride and pride in one’s roots, African pride. They would point to another fact that because of her resolve and sense of pride, Makeba had positively influenced the then budding musical careers of even pioneering Zambian women musicians, inspired by an indigenous sensibility, like our own Anna Mwale, Violet Kafula, Muriel Mwamba, and Maureen Lilanda among others. The tunes still ‘playing in my head’ as heard from early memory may not have been, now I know, Makeba’s. But the spirit they enthused, and still to this day, is undoubted.
Matter of fact had most of Africa, in retrospect in my view, been hearing, listening to and understanding Mama Afrika, had Africa seen and increased replication, nae continuation of the substance, the thinking through the years informing Mama Afrika as an artiste, the once President of South Africa, Thabo Mbeki, would have been saved the trouble of expressing these concerns, in appealing to Africans, through a plea to every South African, as carried in a weekly “Letter to the ANC” communiqué in 2005 under the theme SUSTAINING THE CIVILISING MISSION OF DEMOCRACY:
“In what ways are today’s artisans, priests, prophets and prophetesses, generals, poets and musicians path-finders in a journey of creation?
Are these artisans, manufacturers, traders, priests, prophets and prophetesses, generals, poets and musicians committed actively to change social relations in line with the civilising mission of revolutionary democracy; or are they getting transformed by the very system that they seek to change! Are they the brains trust of a new social order or have they succumbed to the intellectual indolence that comes with glorification of material benefits! Where is the African writer who has put down on paper the experiences of Robben Island or Barbeton Prison or Soweto or Gugulethu or Congoa in Tanzania or Kitenge and Kashito in Angola! Where is the African producer who has put together a film that lays bare the rationale, the emotions and the contradictions of revolutionary struggle! If the artisans, the priests, the prophets and prophetesses, the generals, the poets and musicians of the current age do not assert the values of the civilising mission of the new South Africa, they shall, as possibly happened in African society of yore, be consumed by petty jealousies that lead individuals in positions of power to subvert a whole social edifice; the ethnic and sub-ethnic chauvinism that pits citizen against citizen; and the indolence of mind that befalls an intelligentsia possessed by the comforts of political and economic power. And, steadily but surely, the national democratic project will lose its way.”
And it is this soul and character that you take with you wherever in the world you happen to find oneself. In another sense, Mama Afrika was and is always by your side ready to reaffirm the fact, if in any doubt, ‘you’re home… for I too, I am here’. This for me has happened all too often. Most distinctly I remember when making the acquaintance of Menelika, a friend of my host family in the serene, hilly petite town of Frostburg – an American rural college town in the picturesque tranquil state of Maryland back in 2001. A self-proclaimed eclectic collector of music, I knew Menelika – a prideful, radiant, incandescent self at pointing out the fact of her ‘triple American heritage’ as flowing in her veins: “African, Cherokee Indian, and Scottish” – would half understand me and my ‘world’, from whence I came, without my ever having to volunteer any exotic, regaling tales from Africa, when she mentioned Makeba was one “sista” from the Mother continent whose recordings she’d made a point of “stocking up on”! As did my sense of relief later on when I moved camp to the eastern shore board port city of Baltimore, a crumbling old English town, especially its early settlement inner city parts, with a somewhat physically desolate look of a place about it.
I was reenergized, bubbling and brimming with glee when rummaging through music cabinet sections of the Towson town and Cockeysville public libraries in Baltimore north, for there in my hands was the sunny and unassuming Mama Africa compilations, from whose album sleeves looking you straight in the face she would seem to me to be repeating those telepathic words audible only at heart and in mind, ‘you’re home… for I too, I am here’.
I can sure as the green on the Congo tropical forests remember how I thought I had heard the entire world rolling in the aisles at the youngest “The Cosby’s Show” tot character played by Raven Simone wondering “Do you have a cold?”, this after Mama Afrika, on making a guest appearance on this hilarious family show, went about inducting her ‘host African American family’, as to where exactly in Afrika she came from, what native language she spoke, you know the kind. Actually, its at this salutations stage – the family having to be introduced to and their having to welcome in their midst this visitor from, incidentally, far away mystical Africa – that the young Simone’s “The Crosby’s Show” character name “Olivia” Mama Afrika went about explaining a Xhosa equivalent for; as being “Xoliswa”, as meaning a gift of all things beautiful, angelic… this properly nuanced, enunciated, pronounced, yes – double-clicked! “Do you have a cold?”, or so young “Olivia” seemingly thought of Mama Afrika, because of her click-accented Xhosa… which dig-in-the-ribs just about broke loose all hell!
Of course Mama Afrika, sharing in the laughter, picked up on the cue and explained that she in-fact was feeling superb, and that that clicking of tone in her vocal inflection signified a language spoken by and among her people in a land on the other side of the body of water separating it from America… a land of drums and percussion, a place she adored, missed and remembered most, she went on, for its resplendent sun lit colourful country-sides, green undulating hills crisscrossed by silver-like shiny streams, interlaced by rivers dashing with verve, set apart by regal, copious fresh water bodies of lakes, graced with gentle breezes filled with tuneful sounds bouncing off stone and rock cliffs mixed with the chirping of birds, the wheezing, sneezing, snoring, grunts and groans of every living, moving thing, big and small, visible and hidden!
How she so fondly remembered this place, Mama Makeba further explained, because its there she had been born and raised and first taught the value of exemplary steady character, personal integrity and humility, useful individual traits that were later to help make her life bearable, being as she was to find herself, away from the cherished company, faithful un-stringed love and protection of family and community, unable to return and visit even if she so wished. A little actually, like I felt being in America’s “Apache country” – Maryland’s western end, up and over the western side of the Appalachian mountain range. Like Mama Afrika, even I could often relate, all too well, the hollowed anguish deep in the psyche, in much the same way I conversely could recollect feeling and hearing the tinge of pure delight and sheer bliss in the mix of silk and velvet that was the voice of Linda Ronstadt in her hits “Down by the banks, of the Ohio”, or “Country roads”, played out again from my childhood memory, knowing exactly what local physical and non-physical animate realism was being touched upon, celebrated, lamented.
Unlike Mama Afrika, Linda Ronstadt and me of course were free to somewhat roam the expanse of the country she called, and I could consider, home; places that made the stuff of her lyrics, but only wistful moments of remembrance for me, if torturous at times. During my time in Frostburg, whether, on occasion, picnicking with my “multi-national, multi-cultural, multi-ethnic” FSU-CIE team [a mischievous, adventurous bunch boasting endless gusto, very much ‘carried on the sleeve’] at the Muddy Creek Falls [a Kalambo Falls like sight, but not quite], hiking around Swallow Falls State Park, braving the rapids whitewater rafting or just floating down the Ohiopyle River [the size of our Lusemfwa River] in nearby Pennsylvania state to the north, I eventually came to learn that West Virginia, the same one in “Country Roads”, was only a drive across the Potomac River just 5 minutes south of Frostburg. The Ohio river flowed a little farther to the west a couple of hours in neighbouring Ohio state, and the Blue Ridge mountains also mentioned in “Country Roads”, formed a part of the Appalachian mountain range serving as canopy if sighted from the trough of Frostburg down below, a viewing vantage, panoramic plane, on mounting its shoulder.
While fondly referred to as “Apache country” by some elderly in-the-know locals, an understanding beforehand I carried of the history and fate of the native Indian Apache tribes in this part of the otherwise spectacular Maryland countryside triggered something inside, the more I learned about the still existing native American Indian reserves; a matter I later was made to understand as something of an un-enforced choice, in much the same way with other existing zoned off areas for groups preferring a not necessarily conformist, “modernist” way of life. I curiously could feel it – the land – staring back at me with a certain quiet, tacit torment, foreboding or so it sought to, some rendering tale, a dark one even, a melancholy that seeped its way into the deeply set seat of that part of the self we each, in time, come to know as “me”. Oh how proper a quirk of fate, I would think. Could anything possibly compare, I would in endless wonder mull over.
From Makeba, to the San hunters and gatherers, to the Sotho valley and mountain herdsmen, the Maasai plains, valley and highland herdsmen and hunters, the Ethiopian valley and highlands herdsmen, Mali’s Dogon and Tuareg mountain and desert communities, to native America’s forest and plain Cherokees and Apaches, their comparable guttural, chant and leap, torso jerk and round-the-fire body and feet dragging dance in laboured duck-like step, in instances on all-fours and on occasion a complete flip-over on the back, arms now flailing now stretching, mouth twisted lips and brow twitching, eyes behind their lids rolling up and down half-closing and opening, an evening or midday performance – ritual and trance-inducing-like, in supplication or celebration – makes for one and the same story. One of the human spirit desirous of making and maintaining connection, searching, reaching out… wanting to get back, almost it seems, to that one place, as some among us would have it, “where it all began, where we were all moulded… out of the same, clay.” Because ours is a circular planet in shape, surely, every surface point therefore is a centre of the earth… your centre of the world. It’s a rule consistent with that of circles… a midpoint in any position with respect to the poles. Would you not think?
What emotive awakening I felt was immediate transportation, transcendental, a conscious, living transmigration back across the Atlantic to the times of my growing in Zambia – in all but two of its nine provincial regions – amongst all the creative clamour, the hubbub that was family. There is no doubting this tune… among many others. It had always stayed etched in my psyche. But the words and the fact that it was a lyrical Zimbabwe’s Shona song in praise and admiration of human valour, resolve and steeliness steeped in their tales of generational revolutions, self-assertiveness, originally recorded by an ensemble calling themselves “The Harare Mambos”, I also have only now come to learn and understand: “… Mbuya Nehanda, kumva vachitaura shuwa, kuti tinotora sei nyika ino? Shoko rimwera vakati udza: tora gidi, uzvi tonge; Ba Kaguvi, kumva vachitaura shuwa, kuti tinotora sei nyika ino? Shoko rimwera vakati udza: tora gidi uzvi tonge. Vauya muhondo, shuwa here, vaka mhanya mhanya ne masango, vaka toora anti-air, kuti ruzhinji ru zvitonge.” Similarly, when I heard Mama Afrika’s lines of lamentation, “aah uhm, aah uhm, Nelson Mandela, aah uhm, aah uhm wena Sisulu…” or her tribute, “Sekou Toure mama, Nyerere…” I knew she shared and always carried with her all of humanity’s pain, hopes and dreams. I knew then and I know it now she had picked on just the right vocation fighting, in Sturds Terkel’s words, “the good war”.
The conviction in the necessity and inevitability of her work matches the deep admiration and doggedness on her part I could feel, and how so awe-inspiring an awareness to have to come round to, at seeing the preserved wood and thatch safe and rest house along the Baltimore-Annapolis highway in the Salisbury area as used by the mercurial Harriet Tubman, that indefatigable woman, a human liberator at the heart of the Underground Rail Road traversing and facilitating escape routes north into Washington DC, New York and into Canada of runaway formerly enslaved Africans in the America of those forgettable times. As were my emotions and sense of perception one with Mama Afrika, at visiting the preserved slave plantation house in Baltimore’s Druid Park Zoo, off Druid Park drive, mentioned and location details given me by an elderly African-American lady sales assistant in the souvenir’s section of the Baltimore city public library downtown branch, on my first visit there.
Neither will I forget the combination of wretchedness, sheer despair and the choking ball-in-throat sensation overwhelming me whilst watching the Steven Spielberg cinematic dramatization of the fate of a group of African slaves landed at Annapolis in 1839, relative to Mama Afrika’s life travails, in the movie “L’Amistad”, the name itself derived from the human and other “cargo” carrying ship [having initially been sailed on the “Tecora”] at the centre of the controversy. This particular group of enslaved Africans marine carted and being headed to the sugar growing island of Cuba, then a Spanish-crown-controlled territory [during the reign of their teenage queen, Isabella-II], had freed themselves on the high seas by mutiny, overpowering the ship captain and his entire crew.
With help from a passing British cargo ship, however, the Spanish crew were able to re-take control and sail the L’Amistad on to Annapolis, whereupon docking, the crew of the British ship claimed ownership of the ship and all on-board “cargo”. A “finders, keepers” rule of thumb, a fad informed and nurtured in the nascent juridical stages of naval “international waters” salvage operations. Completely un-amused and much to their angst, the Spanish crew of L’Amistad appealed to the local Annapolis port and maritime authorities for arbitration… More specifically, asking the Annapolis court of law to declare this Spanish crew as the rightful, lawful owners of “these goods”, the Africans, and thereby, their being taken back into possession, for whatever trade and/or commercial purposes, as was to follow the court’s affirmation. But what do you know, unlike a group of African captives in an era much earlier among whom had been the irrepressible Kunta Kinte of Alex Haley’s “Roots” fame and lineage saga, also landed and auctioned off at port along the Virginia and Maryland shoreline having been sailed in from the West African Sene-Gambia coast, this one L’Amistad borne group with help from local Annapolis area slavery abolitionists, themselves having got wind of the ‘upcoming court case involving a group of Africans’, mounted a legal challenge against both Spanish and British crew ownership claims. But the complete human drama for me, is the point at which the appointed spokesperson for the group of Africans, the character Cinque played by Burkinabe screen icon Djimon Hounsou, in his first big screen appearance, has to help their defence lawyer – a foremost American topping that early league of past statesmen and in his time a senator of note – John Quincy Adams, played by the Welsh cinema great Anthony Hopkins, to formulate and craft out a deposition.
With the help of a translator – a British-raised Sierra-Leone-born Mende, Covey – played by the impressive, versatile Chiwetel Ejiofor, Cinque explained to Adams that he trusted in the protection of his forebears, whose intercession he’d always invoke in times of need, for he believed he, Cinque, was the only reason they would have ever been and walked upon this earth. In his court closing remarks, Adams was later to relate to the US appeals supreme court bench of justices how he saw and connected with Cinque’s relative human sensibilities, as his own, a sense of relating to past and present times – of roots of human family continuity, of filial inclinations, of shared proclivity for nature, its mix of character and complexity and beauty exposed by sunlight – arguing that no such conscious living being could possibly be deserving of the tag “goods”, and thus be the object of a commercial and/or trade transaction disputation.
Then being roundly mocked in official circles by contemporaries, close and personal colleagues alike [ notoriously the then US Secretary of State John Forsyth for one] as he whom, unlike his father before him John Adams, America would recall in posterity for no more than “his middle name”, John Quincy Adams, Anthony Hopkins character, minced no words counseling all and sundry in his closing argument for the defence: “Well, gentlemen, I must say I differ with the keen minds of the South and with our President, who apparently shares their views, offering that the natural state of mankind is instead – and I know this is a controversial idea – is freedom. Is freedom. And the proof is the length to which a man, woman or child will go to regain it once taken. He will break loose his chains. He will decimate his enemies. He will try and try and try, against all odd, against all prejudices, to get home.
“This man is black. We all can see that. But, can we also see as easily, that which is equally true? That he is the only true hero in this room. Now, if he were white, he wouldn’t be standing before this court fighting for his life. If he were white and his enslavers were British, he wouldn’t be standing, so heavy the weight of the medals and honours we would bestow upon him. Songs would be written about him. The great authors of our times would fill books about him. His story would be told and retold in our classrooms. Our children, because we would make sure of it, would know his name as well as they know Patrick Henry’s. Yet, if the South is right, what are we to do with that embarrassing, annoying document, The Declaration of Independence? What of its conceits? “All men created equal,” “inalienable rights,” “life, liberty,” and so on and so forth? What on Earth are we to do with this? I have a modest suggestion. [tears papers in half]
“James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington… John Adams. We’ve long resisted asking you for guidance. Perhaps we have feared in doing so we might acknowledge that our individuality which we so, so revere is not entirely our own. Perhaps we’ve feared an appeal to you might be taken for weakness. But, we’ve come to understand, finally, that this is not so. We understand now, we’ve been made to understand, and to embrace the understanding… that who we are “is” who we were. We desperately need your strength and wisdom to triumph over our fears, our prejudices, ourselves. Give us courage to do what is right. And if it means civil war? Then let it come. And when it does, may it be, finally, the last battle of the American Revolution.”
For good measure, whilst your eyes will have been glued at the screen, your full attention having completely been won over, as will your heart and mind, you ought also to keep your musical sense livened still because the accompanying harmonious performance is equalled only, I believe, in lasting restorative cherubic effect by the East African traditional acapella and cultural background music as one can only hear in the Kuki Gilman inspired cinematic drama “I Dreamed of Africa”, Kwa-Zulu Natal province in Makeba’s native RSA providing the breathtaking landscape for backdrop filming. It’s with beautiful, soothing, healing adaptations of Traditional West African spiritual chants and poetic incantations in soundtrack compilations for L’Amistad the movie by John Williams that helps deliver this stomping powerful theme and visuals… a woman’s meticulous wail of vocals, in a murmur, floating over an exquisite blend of drums, trumpet, sax, clarinet, trombone and the strings, a crescendo now a rising, yearning, pleading sob, then dipping to a quiet, confident snuffle, worthy only of and a mark of eternal defiance, fading into… “Dry your tears Afrika; Yah Weh; Timuyandya mu ye, timuyandya mu ye, Afrika…”

PART 2