The trouble is that she wants to go
home—home being a four-room house in Mofolo Village, a South African
“location” outside Johannesburg.
“Down there, if you aren't white, you may be a star, but you're
still a nothing,” she admits. “But I still want to go
home.” Singer Miriam Makeba, a Xosa tribeswoman ,
is probably too shy to realize it, but her return to Africa would leave
a noticeable gap in the U.S. entertainment world, which she entered a
mere six weeks ago. Miriam Makeba, 27, has had no formal musical training, and a few years
ago she still earned her living as a housemaid in Johannesburg, but she
is the most exciting new singing talent to appear in many years. At Manhattan's Blue Angel, a smoky, low-ceilinged
saloon-for-sophisticates, she is delighting the customers with the
songs and styles she learned as a child. In her high, sweet, reedy
voice, the knowing can hear many echoes—of Ella Fitzgerald, whose
records she bought as a child, of Harry Belafonte, who helped her get
started in the U.S.—but she sings like no one else. Click of Corks. The close-cropped, woolly head and the sleek white Fifth
Avenue gown come from different worlds, but the combination has a charm
and grace of its own. In a ballad, she maintains the clean, classic
phrasing of a church singer, she can be roguish in a West Indian ditty
about a naughty flea, and she can make a chilling lament of A Warrior's
Retreat Song—”Jikele maweni ndiyahamba/Jikele maweni
indiyahamba,” which she says suggests, “We've had it, we
can't make it.” Memory brings back the “Back of the
Moon,” a black saloon in Johannesburg, and life bounces suddenly
to a bongo rhythm: Back of the Moon, boys, Back of the Moon is where the folks unwind. When Makeba sings or talks in her native Xosa dialect, its expressive
staccato clicks sound like the popping of champagne corks. Though she
tries many styles, she never sings the Afrikaaner songs of white South
Africa . But whatever mood she assumes,
Miriam Makeba maintains a simple and primitive stoicism that sets her
sharply apart from the emotional, often artificial style of American
Negro singers. The Show Went On. As remarkable as anything about Makeba is the fact
that, however arresting her talent, she managed to sing her way out of
the anonymity of South African Negro life. Helping her mother in
various servants' jobs around Johannesburg, Miriam sang in school, at
weddings and funerals. If she could get close to a radio, she tuned in
the native songs played on Johannesburg radio stations. “Anyone
who sings, makes music.” says she, “as long as it's good to
my ear.”
