‘Why shouldn’t power be Black’? How Miriam Makeba won and lost the US

The Black South African singer defied the odds to become a household name in the US. Then she was cancelled.

Within minutes of arriving in the United States for the first time, on November 28, 1959, 27-year-old Zenzile “Miriam” Makeba was whisked to the Manhattan office of the famous Jamaican-American singer Harry Belafonte. After a quick hug, Belafonte exclaimed: “Miriam! We haven’t a minute to waste!”

Belafonte, who had seen her performing in London a few weeks earlier, had pulled out all the stops to arrange a US visa for Makeba, a Black South African woman at the height of apartheid. And now that she was finally on US soil, he was determined to make it count.

Less than two days later, Makeba found herself at the NBC studios in Los Angeles trying to keep up with the ceaseless chatter of the makeup artist on the Steve Allen Show: “Don’t worry about a thing honey, you’ll be great. Don’t even think about those 60 million people who’ll be watching.”

“How many?” asked Makeba in astonishment.

When Allen introduced her, Makeba recalled that the host “actually held me up so I didn’t collapse from fright”. Luckily, the bright lights prevented her from seeing the audience, so she imagined she was singing to her mother, Christina, and her daughter, Bongi, back in South Africa. The trick worked and the audience was rapt by her performance of Into Yam, a traditional isiXhosa – her native language – song about a woman in love with a man who is habitually drunk.