Become a singer despite the apartheid
The kid who became the muse of Pan-Africanism in songs could have missed out on her own destiny. Flashback on a young Makeba locked behind apartheid’s barbed wire.
Uzenzile: “You can only blame yourself”
If you want to sweep the course of an existence, you have to start from the beginning. The very beginning: birth. The day when African music “empress” – as they would call her later – was born, is a decisive one: indeed, she took her name from that very day.
On March 4th, 1932, Christina Makeba, a professional nurse, feels that the birth contractions are getting closer. Alone at home, she boils water and lays the rush mat on which she lies, and gives birth to a little girl. She cuts herself the cord that connects her to the newborn. The grandmother and the neighbors who heard the cries of the infant come running, only to find the mother lying on the floor. She fainted. The grandmother nods her head and, looking at her daughter, who has just regained consciousness, says: “Uzenzile, you can only blame yourself.” Christina had been told that she and her daughter would not survive the childbirth and, indeed, the thin and sickly girl already showed signs of weakness and could not even eat. As for the mother, she has only become a shadow of her former self. But finally, against all odds, regained their health, and the “Uzenzile” word that the grandmother had let out will remain in the family’s history as a tender reproach, falsely angry. Anyway, that’s where Miriam took her name: Zenzile. Full name, Zenzile Makeba Qgwashu Nguvama.
Zenzi is only eighteen days old when she is sent to prison for the first time! To make ends meet, her mother brews traditional corn beer (“umqombothi”). But the laws of what is not yet officially called “apartheid” policy forbid Black people from consuming or possessing alcohol. Particularly, to produce any. The young kid and her mother spent six months in prison, as the father could not gather the 18-pound-fine required by the police to free them. Later, Zenzi will remember the words that her mother repeatedly told her during childhood: “If you go to prison once, you will go back at least three times.” And she will go back inside a cell more than this during her life.
