Makeba, anti-apartheid's voice, dies after concert

Miriam Makeba, the South African singing star who was banned from her own country for more than 30 years under apartheid, died today after a concert in Italy. She was 76.

Makeba performed with musical legends, including Nina Simone, Dizzy Gillespie, Harry Belafonte and Paul Simon, and sang for John F. Kennedy and Nelson Mandela.

"Her haunting melodies gave voice to the pain of exile and dislocation which she felt for 31 long years. At the same time, her music inspired a powerful sense of hope in all of us," Mr Mandela said.

The mayor of Castel Volturno, near Naples, said Makeba collapsed yesterday at the end of a concert to campaign against organised crime, which has been blamed for the local massacre in September of six Ghanaian immigrants.

Makeba started singing in Sophiatown, a cultural hotspot in Johannesburg in the Fifties before its black residents were forcibly removed by the apartheid government. She teamed up with jazz trumpeter Hugh Masekela, later her first husband, and her rise to international prominence started when she starred in the anti-apartheid documentary Come Back, Africa in 1959.

When she tried to fly home for her mother's funeral the next year, her passport had been revoked. It was 30 years before she returned, asked back by Mr Mandela.

In 1963, she called for an international boycott of South Africa. Its government responded by banning her records, including hits such as Pata Pata, The Click Song and Malaika.

Makeba received a Grammy Award in 1966 with Belafonte for their album dealing with the plight of black South Africans under apartheid.

She became a star in the US and performed for President Kennedy at his birthday party in 1962. But she fell out of favour when she married black power activist Stokely Carmichael and moved to Guinea in the late Sixties.

"I'm not a political singer," she said earlier this year. "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."

She is survived by her two grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.