POST by Lady Kootore

This is truly a sad day! People have been dying left and right! We at the Fly Paper send our prayers and condolences to the Makeba family and all of South Africa!

As one black leader ascends, another one, we lose. In the case, it’s the death of Grammy Award-winning South African singer and international cultural icon, Miriam Makeba, who died Sunday in Italy, after a performance. Known as “Mama Africa” because of stirring voice and political stances against the political and social injustices in South Africa, Makeba died from a heart attack at age 76.

According to The New York Times, she was performing at a concert in Baia Verde to support writer, Robert Saviano, who was receiving death threats after writing about organized crime. She collapses as she was leaving the stage.

Throughout much of her career, Makeba was exiled from apartheid South Africa. In 1960, she discovered that the South African government revoked her passport when she tried to re-enter her home country to attend her mother’s funeral, after touring the U.S. A year prior, she had performed in an anti-apartheid documentary, Come Back Africa, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival.

She testified at the United Nations in 1963 against the apartheid in South Africa, which led to the country revoking her citizenship and her right to return. Soon after, she gained honorary citizenships in 10 other countries and 9 passports.

Makeba married several times; her former husbands include Black Panther leader, Stokely Carmichael and South African jazz trumpeter, Hugh Masekela.

“I’m not a political singer. I don’t know what the word means,” she said in a May 2008 interview with British writer Robin Denselow, reports The New York Times. “ People think I consciously decided to tell the world what was happening in South Africa. No! I was singing about my life, and in South Africa we always sang about what was happening to us — especially the things that hurt us.”

VIA BET