most identity loss happens from the inside — a faith fades, a role ends. miriam makeba's was done to her from the outside, by a government, in a single administrative stroke: the paperwork of who she was, cancelled while she was out of the country. what she built to replace it is one of the great identity reconstructions of the twentieth century.
she left south africa in 1959 as a working singer riding a sudden wave: a role in come back, africa, an anti-apartheid film that won the critics' award at venice, then london, then new york — on november 1, 1959, she sang on the steve allen show to an estimated 60 million viewers. she had a booked itinerary and every intention of going home.
in 1960, after the sharpeville massacre made south africa's brutality a world headline, her mother died. makeba went to fly home for the funeral — and learned her passport had been cancelled. no warning, no process, no goodbye to her mother. she would not stand on south african soil again for three decades.
the paperwork of a person
what followed shows how much of an identity runs on documents — and how little of it has to. in 1962 and again in 1964 she testified before the united nations special committee against apartheid, describing the pass laws and calling for sanctions. south africa's answer: her records banned at home, her citizenship formally revoked. she was now stateless — a person without a country, on paper. the world's answer was different: over her lifetime, nine countries issued her passports, ghana and guinea and algeria and belgium among them, and roughly ten granted honorary citizenship. her legal self was assembled, piece by piece, from what other nations chose to give — while her actual self kept singing.
the career ran its own gauntlet. a grammy with harry belafonte in 1966; 'pata pata' a worldwide hit in 1967. then, in march 1968, she married the black power activist stokely carmichael — and her american bookings and record deals evaporated almost overnight. a second rupture, eight years after the first, this time from the country that had celebrated her. she moved to guinea, stayed some fifteen years, and by 1975 was guinea's official delegate to the united nations — a diplomatic identity granted by a country that had taken her in, standing in for the one that had thrown her out.
losing the paperwork of who you are is not the same as losing yourself. an identity one authority strips can be rebuilt from what other people choose to give — and from what nobody can take.
the return
nelson mandela walked out of prison in february 1990 and personally invited her home. on june 10, 1990, miriam makeba returned to south africa — thirty-one years, as the count is usually given, after she'd left on tour. and she never stopped working: on november 9, 2008, at 76, at a concert in italy held in solidarity with a journalist under mafia death threats, she sang 'pata pata' — the song from the years she couldn't go home — collapsed as she finished it, and died that night. by then the name the world had given her, mama africa, had long since outgrown every passport in the drawer: an identity no government issued and none could cancel.
the honest ledger
the exile is counted as 30 or 31 years depending on whether you start from her 1959 departure or the 1960 revocation — this piece uses the common 31. the nine-passports and ten-citizenships figures are widely repeated from a single well-regarded source and given here as reported. her famous lines about exile are widely attributed but hard to pin to a page, so none are printed here as verbatim quotes — the facts of her life say it louder anyway.
for the shattered mirror: her state stripped the official self and she rebuilt from what couldn't be stripped — the voice, the testimony, the name she earned. what's the part of you no signature can cancel? it might be the right foundation to rebuild on.