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Continuation of the series on the casements, these women who marked history and about whom we speak little in the manuals. After having made the planet dance to her song “Pata Pata”, the South African Miriam Makeba, used her notoriety to fight in particular against Apartheid.
She could have been content to be Miriam Makeba, the singer of the first African hit, “Pata Pata”. But she put her voice at the service of the fight: first against Apartheid, for civil rights to EUnited States and finally for the emancipation of Africa. Miriam Makeba was born very poor and discriminated against because of her skin color in a South Africa marked by segregation. She sang in illegal bars to help her family, then took part in an anti-apartheid short film about an American. Invited to the Venice festival to present it, she will not see her country again for 35 years, South Africa pushing her into exile.
“To some my songs may sound like incitement to hatred, but I sing about life as it is in South Africa”, declared the singer. In 1963, at the United Nations, she begged the world to put pressure on her native country, a speech “very moving and very important for South Africa”, explains the documentary filmmaker Elodie Maillot. After the long-awaited release of Nelson Mandela in 1990, Miriam Makeba returned to her country and could sing in front of her family. She gave her last concert in 2008 in Italy, in support of a writer hunted down by the mafia, her ultimate fight against injustice.