“Miriam’s Place”: South African jazz, conviviality and exile

Abstract

Michael Titlestad has suggested that jazz serves “to mediate, manage and contest” what he terms a “staggered, but also cruel and unusual South African modernity.” His volume Making the Changes (2004) uses the “pedestrian” as a chronotope to describe the “local peripatetic appropriations of global symbolic possibilities” that jazz affords there. This paper proposes a different “chronotope”: that of the train. This substitution facilitates the reading of jazz history in South Africa in tandem with histories of labour migration and other forms of displacement – including trajectories of exile that intersect my account elsewhere of the “global itinerary” of South African cultural formations under apartheid. The deterritorialisation of South African works of expressive culture and social actors associated with anti-apartheid resistance, I have argued, affords the cultural historian strong historiographic purchase over conjunctures outside of South Africa. The present discussion explores this claim in relation to Miriam Makeba’s memoir Makeba, My Story (1988), written during her stay in Guinea. Makeba’s life-writing shows the strategies of the black South African performer in exile to be embedded in the conviviality that shaped jazz performance culture during its emergence in urban South African. Conviviality can be shown to offer an implicit critique of nativist imaginaries in decolonising Africa – including in this instance, the doctrine of authenticité promulgated by Guinea’s controversial leader, Ahmed Sékou Touré.

Keywords:

• South African jazz
• apartheid
• black Atlantic
• Miriam Makeba
• Ahmed Sékou Touré
• Hugh Masekela

Jazz in transit

Wide consensus exists at the interface between cultural studies, diaspora studies, ethnomusicology and cultural history regarding the significance of the translocal circulation of jazz over the course of the twentieth century. Jazz, it is argued, is a charged vehicle of what Elam and Jackson (2005) have termed “black cultural traffic.” Such insights have been pivotal for understanding black responses to modernity in South Africa, against the backdrop of systems of governance – colonialism, apartheid – that embedded the accession to modernity within racialised capitalist economies. For Achille Mbembe, the “distinctive commercial civilisation” that emerged in Johannesburg and that was sustained there through the expendability unto death of black life – or what he terms “superfluity” – rendered this city “a central site not only for the birth of the modern in Africa, but for the entanglement of the modern and the African – the African modern” (2004, 373, see also 374–375 and 379–383). Against the backdrop of such entanglement, Michael Titlestad suggests that jazz functioned “to mediate, manage and contest” what he memorably terms a “staggered, but also cruel and unusual South African modernity” (2004, xi).

Pioneering work by Coplan (1985), Erlmann (1991) and Ballantine (1993) has repeatedly pointed to the importance of urban configurations in these processes, even as it has destabilised rigid divides between the urban and the rural, the traditional and the modern. Coplan has shown forms of musical syncretism to be coeval with the birth of urbanity in South Africa. Noting parallel forms of social history in the context of the United States, he proposed early on that migration and urbanisation “set the stage for the emergence of performance styles that served comparable expressive needs” (1985, 147; see also Erlmann 1991, 1–20 and Ballantine 1993). African-American musical styles were multiply transposed into black expressive culture in South Africa’s cities in taut response to highly situated contexts of racialised and gendered oppression (Ballantine 1993, 146–192; Allen 2004). The musical culture that emerged here was interlaced with particular forms of conviviality that transcended ethnic identities – a dimension of black urban subjectivity that we will reencounter as this argument progresses in the context of the life and life-writing of South African jazz singer and political exile, Miriam Makeba. I will approach Makeba however by way of reflection on the influential reading of jazz culture in South Africa that Michael Titlestad offers us in his volume Making the Changes: Jazz in South African Literature and Reportage (2004).

For cultural theorists working at the literary end of this spectrum as I do, Titlestad’s work offers a point of entry into an unfolding interdisciplinary conversation. Making the Changes uses reportage and literary representations of jazz culture in South Africa to analyse the subaltern modernities and counterhegemonic identities that emerged in Johannesburg’s townships. Titlestad mobilises a variety of theoretical paradigms to describe “the epistemological itinerancy entailed in local appropriations and manipulations of jazz music and its accompanying discourse” (2004, xiii). Michel de Certeau’s analysis of the tactical digressions associated with “walking in the city” (1984) is set alongside theories of the black diaspora derived from Paul Gilroy one the one hand (1993) and accounts of errantry and relationality derived from Édouard Glissant on the other (1997). The ensuing account privileges the trope of improvisation as the sonic equivalent of de Certeau’s modelling of resistance to hegemonic power on the basis of practices of walking in the city. The emphasis in this set of interventions consistently falls on what Titlestad glosses as “local peripatetic appropriations of global symbolic possibilities” (2004, xiii, my emphasis).

Titlestad’s work is compelling. However, its privileging of heuristic and hermeneutic paths derived by analogy with the urban flâneur deflects attention away from other patterns of circulation consequent on the advent of modernity in South Africa. For one thing, the coercive extraction of labour specific to South Africa’s racialised modernity was bound to migration. The movement of black migrant labour between the impoverished native reserves and the whites-only urban centres was foundational to the political economy of South Africa throughout the twentieth century but assumed a distinctive form under apartheid with the consolidation of the homelands, argued Harold Wolpe – a sociologist and political exile closely associated with the ANC (1972). Labour migrants also flowed into South Africa as the mining industry, in particular, actively recruited cheap labour from adjacent territories.

The history of migration, I would like to suggest, is crucially implicated in the life-worlds of Titlestad’s peripatetic subjects yet is somewhat masked by his emphasis on the pedestrian or peripatetic. Adjacent to the social histories he articulates stands a different “chronotope” – that of the train or steam engine which is both materially and symbolically associated with the displacement of migrant labourers. The chronotope in Mikhail Bakhtin’s well-known formulation configures space–time relationships as a single unit of analysis – literally, “time-space” – capable of structuring narrative frames or genres as well as their extra-textual or real-world frames (Bakhtin [1981] 2004, 84). “Just as a narrative’s chronotopes shape […] narrated processes, developments, and activities,” historical geographer James Lawson tells us, “‘real-world’ chronotopes shape real processes, developments, and activities” (2011, 385). Substituting the train for the pedestrian as a response to the industrialised time of modernity and to the spaces of urbanity allows a differently weighted perspective to emerge.¹ The train as chronotope maintains a different, metonymic relation to the disruptive consequences of the advent of modernity in South(ern) Africa: one evocative of mechanical movement and the linearity of the track rather than digression. This is not to say that the train is the exclusive signifier of black modernity in South Africa, nor that invoking it disqualifies other accounts – Titlestad’s included. Rather, the substitution allows us to revisit the itinerant cultural economies associated with jazz as these are brought into being by a specific labour regime. It is the salience of this labour regime for theories of decolonisation on the part of African politicians and public intellectuals in the immediate aftermath of independence in West Africa that Miriam Makeba’s lived itineraries and life-writing will eventually allow us to highlight.

If the “stimela” (isiZulu, isitimela/izitimela: train) furnishes the contours of a chronotope, it is also manifest as the content of expressive cultural performance. The train is synonymous with arguably one of the most iconic jazz performances of twentieth-century South African artists: Hugh Masekela’s now classic 1974 “Stimela (Coaltrain).” Masekela’s voiced preamble to “Stimela (Coaltrain)” draws upon anaphora and deliberate cadence to invoke the “train that comes” from afar:

There is a train that comes from Namibia and Malawi

There is a train that comes from Zambia and Zimbabwe,

There is a train that comes from Angola and Mozambique,

From Lesotho, from Botswana, from Swaziland,

From all the hinterland of Southern and Central Africa …

(Preamble to “Stimela [Coaltrain]” from the album I am Not Afraid Chisa/Blue Thumb, 1974)

Masekela’s incantatory capture of the inexorable rhythm of the train as well as his laying bare of the violence of the coercive labour exchange as his performance unfolds draws on collective memory. It resonates with other aural or textual condensations of travel by rail in Southern African expressive culture. David Coplan’s work is again instructive here. Coplan catalogues references to “the master metaphor of the train to the mines” in the sung poetry of Lesotho migrants, the lifela or songs of the adventurers. The train, his interlocutors suggest “shake-dances like a male initiate or an entranced diviner; it’s an adventurer, a warrior, a madman, a raging prairie fire, a whole menagerie of wild, swift animals, a centipede, a millipede, a swallower and disgorger of the ‘people of Moshoeshoe’” (2014, 171, 176). Elsewhere, in the medium of print culture, Treason Trialist Alfred Hutchinson uses acoustic ekphrasis in his memoir of escape by rail from South Africa to convey the depersonalisation of miners in transit:

A howl, a whoop, tore me from the newspaper. A train, laden with migrant workers was coming into the station headed for the mines. […] The whoop rose again and again, a terrifying jellying sound. It churned and boiled and twisted with a nameless agony – rejection, welcome, derision – bundled into one. (1960, 68)

Sound is rendered primal, visceral as it writhes against the spoken language that it supplants. Hutchinson’s defamiliarisation of the migrants curiously anticipates Masekela’s imitation of the shrieking train at the cusp between voiced and instrumental performance in the latter’s rendering of “Stimela (Coaltrain).” The social history referenced in both instances is that of racial capitalism – never a benign force in the region, as historian Saul Dubow reminds us: “South Africa,” he comments, “may not have been the most exploitative capitalist society in the world (though it was surely one of these)” (2014, 276).

Substituting the chronotope of the coaltrain for that of the pedestrian in order to illuminate the social history of jazz enables us to read this history in conjunction with what the recent debate on global modernism in literary studies terms “geomodernism.” The referencing of labour regimes and of racialised capitalism remains decisive to this reorientation. For Laura Doyle, the term references “the geopolitical history to which all modernisms respond, the transperipheral and international exchanges within which they take shape, and the long global history that has prepared their emergence” (2012, 685). Accordingly, geomodernism encompasses “literatures arising in multiple sites under the diverse, interacting conditions of multiple empires and multiple resistance movements since the latter nineteenth century, conditions which are intensified by new technologies of finance, travel, communication, labor, and war” (685, emphasis mine). The so-called geomodernist aesthetic in this view is presaged on the recognition of highly uneven development in a world system shaped not only by capitalism but by competing imperialisms. Race is also integral to this configuration, as the introduction to Doyle and Laura Winkiel’s coedited volume attests (2005, 1–14). Certainly, the chronotope of the train gives greater amplification to the importance of the circulation of expressive culture on an uneven world historical stage dominated by the shared conditions of industrial modernity than we might reasonably ask from the chronotope of the pedestrian.

The alternative imaginary associated with the train binds tropes of mechanised movement and circulation to the interplay of centre and periphery within Africa that are integral to economic modernisation. The train, embedded in the more encompassing political economy that shaped the evolution of jazz culture in South Africa, embedded moreover in a major work of local jazz culture, might be compared to the chronotope of the slave ship in Paul Gilroy’s account of the black Atlantic. The sailing ship serves Gilroy as a figure for modern transcultural mediations – not least of all because it is so damningly emplaced in the economic exchanges underlying European modernity. Ships, Gilroy notes, “refer us back to the middle passage, to the half-remembered micro-politics of the slave-trade and its relationship to both industrialisation and modernisation” (1993, 17) – an observation which does much to explain the centrality of the ship for Gilroy’s rethinking of modernity in relation to the black Atlantic. In a similar manner, the train is literally a motor of modernity in Africa. Restoring it to view counters any lingering notions we might entertain, Paul Gilroy’s included, that Africa is a point of origin external to the tangled modernity of the black Atlantic. Since the train must of necessity evoke the exploitative infrastructures of colonial modernity in Africa, it is testament that the continent itself is held within the same play of forces that shaped the diaspora – an argument I propose here in dialogue with the position taken by Piot (2001).

Piot contests what he takes to be Paul Gilroy’s and Stuart Hall’s tacit conception of Africa as lying outside of the distinctive histories of modernity which shaped the black Atlantic world, seeking instead “to return Africa to the diaspora.” Africa is no longer characterised “as a site of origin and symbolic return” but rather is seen “as itself diasporic – as derivative of the Atlantic slave system and made and remade by its encounter with modernity” (2001, 156). Of course, Piot’s arguments cannot be applied to the case of South Africa without qualification. While the region was not unaffected by the slave trade as Harries (1981) and Hofmeyr (2007) have pointed out among others, the distinctive imprint of its racialised modernity lies elsewhere: at the confluence of extraction of natural resources and the “superfluity” of black life (Mbembe 2000, 2004). The coevalness, however, of the interrelated histories of Southern Africa and the Atlantic diaspora remains pertinent all the same.

South African cultural historiography oriented to the importance of jazz as a medium has never forgotten Africa’s coevalness with the processes of modernisation that have shaped the volatile histories of the black diaspora. For example, witness the interventions of Coplan (1985), Erlmann (1991) and the more recent scholarship by Jaji (2014, 14) regarding what we might term the syncretism of coeval partners on both sides of the Atlantic. But then again, nor have South Africa’s jazz musicians forgotten this constitutive and reciprocal coevalness, judging from Masekela’s witty double entendre “Coaltrain”/Coltrane. The invocation of John Coltrane that ghosts behind Masekela’s parenthetical translation-cum-qualification of the word “stimela” serves not only as Masekela’s homophonic tribute to the legendary jazz saxophonist but also as evidence of the multiply cross-hatched relations between South African and American jazz culture. This having been noted, still further dimensions of the translocal may yet be made to emerge from Masekela’s entry into our narrative: they hinge upon displacement figured not only as economic migration but as exile. Note that the circumstances of Masekela’s composition of “Stimela (Coaltrain)” work against the centripetal narrative which Masekela himself provides in its lyrics. Admittedly, there is a “train that comes from Namibia and Malawi” to South Africa, and one from Zambia and Zimbabwe, and so on. Yet, Masekela would also know at first-hand the violent centrifugal force of apartheid’s destabilisation of the trajectories of black life. Recall that the piece was written in exile from apartheid South Africa, as he vividly recounts.²

Masekela’s status as an exile, like that of his wife for a time Miriam Makeba, places him in a continuum with Michael Titlestad’s analysis of the figure of the jazz exile as an extreme case of the vagrancy of the pedestrian (2004, 125, see discussion in 124–155). However, where Titlestad focuses predominantly on the phenomenology of the individual in exile, I would like to access a supplementary dynamic that affords exile a decisive place within the circulatory nodes of global modernisms across their textual, visual, cinematic and musical forms. This shift of orientation is allied to a paradigm that I have explored elsewhere as “apartheid’s global itinerary” (Bethlehem 2013). This paradigm wagers that the deterritorialisation of South African texts, images, works of performance culture and social actors, particularly those associated with anti-apartheid resistance, affords the cultural theorist or historian strong historiographic purchase over conjunctures outside of South Africa. At innumerable points along the grid of international anti-apartheid contestation, South African performers, texts, images and works of music were propelled into the global public sphere where they negotiated aesthetic, institutional, linguistic and political constraints in their host countries.

In a companion piece to this one, I have stressed the potential gains of such an approach for transnational methodologies in Cold War history through situating Miriam Makeba in relation to black internationalism and pan-Africanism during her exile in America and in Guinea (Bethlehem, forthcoming). Here however, I would like to investigate how Makeba’s formation within the crucible of black South African urban modernity – whose economic determinants the chronotope of the train helps to make more salient – equips her to negotiate the circumstances of her exile. How does Makeba render accounts of the trajectories of her life in her memoir Makeba, My Story (Makeba with Hall 1988)³ as she encounters the political, artistic and ideological ferment of decolonisation in continental Africa? What continuities and ruptures are associated with this negotiation and with its rendering as memoir?

Configuring exile

The prologue to Makeba, My Story launches a highly stylised first-person meditation on Makeba’s identity, deferring the chronological account of Makeba’s life to its first chapter:

I look at an ant and I see myself: a native South African, endowed by nature with a strength much greater than my size so I might cope with the weight of a racism that crushes my spirit. I look at a bird and I see myself: a native South African, soaring above the injustices of apartheid on wings of pride, the pride of a beautiful people. I look at a stream and see myself: a native South African, flowing irresistibly over hard obstacles until they become smooth and, one day disappear – flowing from an origin that has been forgotten toward an end that will never be.

Repetition is governed here by the rhetorical device of symploce: a combination of anaphora and epistrophe, that is to say the repetition of the same words at the beginning (“I look at”; “a native South African”) and end (“and I see myself”) of successive clauses, phrases or sentences. Metaphors grounded in the natural world (“ant,” “bird,” “river”) convey “strength,” black South African “pride” and resilience in the face of Makeba’s individual reflections and her people’s collective oppression.⁴ The overt patterning of metaphor and symploce stands alongside metonymic and tacitly synecdochical identifications: “My life, my career, every song I sing and every appearance I make, are bound up with the plight of my people,” Makeba comments in the next paragraph. A further parallelism concludes the sequence: “I am in exile on the outside. We are in exile on the inside” (1988, 1).

Like the life-writing of many other exiled South African writers, artists, musicians and political dissidents, the opening passages of Makeba and Hall’s volume inscribe Makeba’s private history onto the greater narrative of anti-apartheid resistance. Makeba aligns her authorial voice with a form of heightened historical consciousness shared by other constituencies in the twentieth century: witness, for instance, the revolutionary fervour associated with diary writing under Stalin that Jochen Hellbeck has documented (2009).⁵ Yet, the reliance on metonymic transfers displayed here can also be used to reflect on the selfhood that we can reconstruct Makeba, the black South African exile, as inhabiting. Observe that the impulse towards self-definition (“I look […] and I see myself”) is tightly bound to broader social inclusion (“a native South African”).

Post-apartheid idealisations of ubuntu aside, Makeba’s formulation of her subjectivity partakes of an explicitly relational view of personhood held in common by many black South Africans. In their discussion of personhood in southern Africa, Comaroff and Comaroff (2001) describe Tswana personhood (not reducible certainly to Makeba’s fractured identity but not unrelated to it) as “everywhere seen to be an intrinsically social construction.” This, they specify, obtains in two senses: “nobody existed or could be known except in relation and with reference to, even as part of, a wide array of significant others”; while at the same time, “the identity of each and every one was forged, cumulatively, by an infinite, ongoing series of practical activities” (268). These relational bonds are severed when Makeba’s passport is rendered invalid by the apartheid regime when she seeks to return to South Africa following her mother’s death: “They have exiled me. I am not permitted to go home, not now, and maybe not ever. My family. My home. Everything that has ever gone into the making of myself, gone!” (1988, 98).

Writing of another South African jazz exile, Sathima Bea Benjamin, Carol Muller describes how the layered transnational dimensions of jazz provided those whom she terms “jazz migrants” like Benjamin and her husband Abdullah Ibrahim with “an inner sense of belonging to a home while on the move. Knowing its repertory […] provided people like Ibrahim and Benjamin with a structure within which to improvise” (2006, 71).⁶ Makeba’s memoir richly attests that she experienced the hospitality of the jazz community in the United States. Like her close friends Nina Simone and Abbey Lincoln, Makeba forms part of an “emergent collectivity” of black women performers who combine music with civil rights activism (Feldstein 2012; 33, see also 2013, 51–83). In many respects, however, Makeba copes with the wrenching dislocation of exile by turning to tactics of everyday life redolent of those used to cope with black urbanisation in twentieth-century South Africa. Music is never extraneous to these processes. It is not so much the case that black South Africans used jazz in mid-century South Africa “to create a more cosmopolitan Africa” as Muller argues (2006, 70). Rather they used jazz and jazz culture to negotiate new social forms adequate to new urban realities, as Coplan claims of popular music more generally (1985, 75). Jazz was used to stake a political claim to forms of urbanity that were denied to black South Africans by the apartheid state.⁷ Broadly speaking, the politicisation of black popular musical performance in Johannesburg of the 1950s – the milieu that shaped Makeba – does not stem solely from the social commentary that music frequently offered but from the very fact of urban conviviality in the face of the inroads of the Group Areas Act; the violence of the township setting; and the looming destruction of Sophiatown. Jazz was, as Titlestad’s pedestrian would surely agree, a tactic of “urban ‘habitation’” in Titlestad’s phrase, available as a resource to be deployed against those regimes of labour, of semiosis, of racialisation which we might metonymically associate with the alienating agency of the coaltrain (Titlestad 2004, 30). This is a matter of performativity – an articulation of political claims through being and through doing – as much as one of performance.

Across the various phases of her exile, Miriam Makeba counters its threat to her person and personhood by marshalling the resources of the distinctive conviviality of her urban South African formation. Both of Makeba’s memoirs are replete with memories of accommodation shared, meals consumed, kinship relations and surrogate kinship relations proffered and accepted in a manner that defies their cataloguing here. This conviviality is not limited to explicitly political networks of affiliation, although it is crucial to note that political currents flow through it whether at home or abroad. Makeba’s New York apartment, Feldstein observes, became a “nerve center where entertainers and diplomats from Africa mingled with African Americans” (2012, 26, 2013, 78). That the form of this transnational activism is broadly speaking pan-Africanist deserves reiteration, however.⁸ Pan-Africanism was widely debated by black South Africans during this period well beyond the political circles of the local custodians of pan-Africanism, Robert Sobukwe’s Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC) – with Drum magazine serving as an important arena of debate. “Will There Be a U.S. of Africa?” asked Drum in January 1959, in response to the All-African People’s Conference in Accra. Meanwhile, a subsequent summary of the conference confidently observed that the South African delegates to Accra, Ezekiel Mphahlele and Jordan Ngubane, “expect ‘freedom in our lifetime’.” Coverage of African political leaders was frequent: Nyerere, Kaunda and Kenyatta were among those who “wrote, were written about and interviewed in Drum” (Odhiambo 2006, 157–174). Makeba was explicitly associated with this political cohort in Drum magazine. Under the heading “Miriam Comes… Back to Africa,” one report in January 1963 vividly recounts how Jomo Kenyatta imitated “the famous Makeba hip wriggle” during Makeba’s first visit to Kenya at the initiative of Tom Mboya.⁹

For her part, Makeba was tied to the Pan-Africanist Congress, through bonds of identification and, not least of all, mourning: two of her uncles were among those massacred at Sharpeville in 1960 (Makeba and Hall 1988; 97). Harry Belafonte, Makeba’s powerful patron during much of her American sojourn, acerbically names Makeba a supporter of the South African Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC) against his championing of the African National Congress (Belafonte with Schnayerson 2011; 286–287). Hugh Masekela, for his part, recalls an evening he and Makeba spent with Maya Angelou and her life partner at the time PAC representative Vusumzi Make, upon Masekela’s arrival in New York (2004 [with Cheers], 125). Makeba’s romance with Stokely Carmichael would unfold in Tanzania in 1967 against the backdrop of potential PAC support for Carmichael in his own pan-Africanist incarnation (Carmichael with Thelwell 2003; 638). Friendships with figures like Tom Mboya of Kenya, Achkar Marof, Guinea’s Permanent Representative to the UN, and his wife Rosamond, helped broker Makeba’s rise to visibility in the international public sphere as part of the heightened condemnation of the South African regime following the Sharpeville massacre. Her appearances before the United Nations Special Committee on Apartheid in 1963 and 1964, at the first summit the Organisation of African Unity in Ethiopia in 1963, as well as at Independence Day celebration in Kenya in December that year set decolonisation in sharp contrast with the growing repression of the apartheid regime (see Feldstein 2013, 54–56).

Conviviality out of bounds

Makeba would eventually enter into the cultural politics of decolonisation in a more sustained fashion once her stay in the United States ended. She moved to Ahmed Sékou Touré’s Guinea in 1968 in the wake of two dramatic developments which severely impacted her ability to perform in the United States: her rift with former patron Harry Belafonte, and her marriage to Carmichael by now himself identified with African-American political mobilisation of pan-Africanism and radical internationalism (see Fleming 2016). Her arrival in Conakry would locate her in an important crucible of decolonisation and would expose her to saturated expressions of a local pan-Africanist imaginary whose appeal Makeba would have been well positioned to recognise. Guinea, now mainly associated in the global public arena with Sékou Touré’s increasingly reckless despotism over the 26 years of his rule, was strongly identified with radical anticolonial politics during the 1950s and 1960s. The country rejected incorporation into Charles de Gaulle’s Fifth Republic in the fateful referendum of August 1958, opting for full independence at the price of massive, vengeful French reprisals instead (Schmidt 2007).

In his attempts to forge a modernising Guinean national identity, Sékou Touré embraced an idiosyncratic blend of African socialism, pan-Africanism and anti-imperialism. The Guinean leader was a prolific author who had enormous regard for the political efficacy of the printed word (Mouralis 2007, 283–298).¹⁰ The doctrine of authenticité that was central to his political vision was disseminated in innumerable books and party tracts which Sékou Touré variously authored or which were attributed to him, as well as in the state-controlled media (Camara 2005). Sékou Touré repeatedly set authenticité in strident opposition to Léopold Sédar Senghor’s Négritude. Unlike many French West African political leaders, Sékou Touré was not educated in France. He rejected out of hand the supposed rediscovery of African culture in Europe by Senghor and his cohort, stressing instead indigenous cultural transmission (Kaba 1976; Dave 2009). The idealisation of rural populations, particularly the youth who were seen as untouched by Western influence, as well as the desacralisation of indigenous traditions in the name of “demystification,” went hand in hand with the regime’s persecution of Guinea’s non-Muslim forestier communities as well as the often murderous suppression of political opposition (Straker 2009; McGovern 2013).

Makeba’s arrival in Guinea is the occasion for a complicated set of engagements around her identity. The singer’s South Africanness becomes malleable and the meanings of her anti-apartheid resistance shift as she is refracted through Guinean nationalist and anti-imperialist discourses alike (Hashachar 2015; Bethlehem, forthcoming). This malleability in response to local Guinean contingencies is crucial. Restoring the political saturation of Guinea’s cultural sphere to view casts the prologue to Makeba’s memoir, referenced above, in a new light. As Makeba and Hall attest, much of the memoir was written in Makeba’s home in Dalaba, Guinea. Recall also, that in the prologue, Makeba the “native South African” destabilises the temporal unfolding of autobiography by invoking African cosmology: “I close my eyes and the past surrounds me. It is today.” The section ends with the assertion “I look at the past and I see myself” which circles back to its stylised opening lines. The text invokes simultaneity as the hallmark of Makeba’s rendering of her life. It is associated with the metaphor of the “pool” where “the waters of past, present, and future swirl around together” as opposed to the linear “stream” of Western time: “When a Westerner is born, he or she enters a stream of life that is always flowing” (1988, 2).

The reference to the pool and the setting of Western belief systems in opposition to African ones foreshadow Makeba’s visit in the concluding pages of the memoir to a spring known as “the Source” in Yimbaya near her home in Dalaba. After the depredations of exile and terrible personal bereavement – the death in Guinea of Makeba’s grandchild and later of her daughter and a second grandchild – the narrative ends on a note of consolation with the commemoration of a new cycle of birth. At the spring, Makeba thanks her ancestors and prepares an offering in the local custom:

I pray, and because I am only human, I ask for things. I ask that I and the people on the outside can be freed from our exile. I ask that my people at home be freed from our bondage. I ask that I may never forget those who have helped me, and to whom I am grateful. (243–249, citation from 248–249)

The repeated use of anaphora recalls the figurative heightening of the language of the prologue, even as the substance of this chapter reiterates the opposition announced in the prologue between African practices and those of the West, with the aim in this later setting of repudiating the taint of “superstition.”¹¹ Makeba wards off the atavism that colonialism – and indeed apartheid – attributed to the black subject in a manner that is consonant with the doctrine of authenticité. She invokes countervailing indigenous knowledge systems as she described how her worship reconciles her South African political aspirations with the ratification of her offering: “I know Africa and its magic. What has my life been but an exercise in African magic? … I look back./The offering is gone” (249).

Makeba’s invocation of “African magic” seeks to mitigate exile in a personal register even as it suggests, in a political register, something of Makeba’s aspirational claims as a pan-Africanist patriot who always trails her South Africanness with her. But the consolidation that the assertion offers is not as stable as Makeba might perhaps have wanted it to be. This instability pivots on Makeba’s own appropriation of the apparatus of synecdoche. The exemplarity of Makeba’s life in relation to Africa is overwritten by the trope which routinely attaches to Makeba in the global public sphere, namely “Mama Africa.” Whereas the synecdoche in this form is not directly referenced here, the shuttling between the self and the collective is particularly marked: “I and my people on the outside […] my people at home.” Makeba’s status as the very figure who condenses the anti-apartheid struggle on the global stage, as the figure who allows its meanings to “congeal” for a plethora of only partly overlapping constituencies, is contained within the seemingly stable and homologous relationship between the part and the whole.¹² Yet, a caveat is in order. At this point in the unfolding of Makeba’s life in historical time, exile has roughened the grooves of synecdoche, the uneasy transmission of the same-same. Synecdoche traverses but does not reconcile the continuing inscriptions of Makeba’s double exclusion: from her country, within her country.

Much like the fetish in the Freudian account, Makeba’s use of synecdoche combines an apotropaic warding off of loss inscribed in Makeba’s gesturing towards a larger whole with the simultaneous memorialisation of that which has been lost (Freud [1927] 2001).¹³ Perhaps Makeba’s invocation of “African magic” then shares this much with the discourse of authenticité: they are both inscribed within the restless economy of avowal and disavowal that the fetish lays bare. And perhaps this avowal–disavowal is the source of the political affect of authenticité: a properly fetishistic palliative in the face of colonial extraction, but one whose defensive nativism secretly, ceaselessly pivots on the very loss of autonomy it seeks to overcome. If so, Makeba’s referencing of herself as a “native South African” in the prologue, despite the prior and pejorative capture of the adjective in the segregationist colonial and apartheid lexicons, might, in such a reading, disclose nothing so much as her Guinean idiolect.

Yet, the nativism that pervades the Guinean discourse of authenticité should not blind us to an important aspect of the political critique that Sékou Touré articulates alongside it. In the light of the economic basis of colonialism, Négritude’s valorisation of race is of less consequence for decolonialisation, or for the world beyond Africa, than is the recognition that: “Our cultural identity and common historical destiny should be our main concern as we have all been treated unjustly by exploitative powers,” as the Guinean missive to the Sixth Pan-African Congress states. For Sékou Touré, mobilisation against the capitalist basis of imperial domination follows as a corollary in the face of this injustice (“Modern imperialism was developed through capitalism and thus concerns the whole world”) – rather than the “fetishist [sic] and emotional contemplation of a few ‘African works of art’” that he dismissively associates with Négritude.¹⁴ Sékou Touré’s insistence on the economic basis of colonial oppression recalls the terms of the critique of racism on the part of black internationalist constituencies in the United States in the 1930s and 1940s which Penny von Eschen has analysed (1997). More importantly, it is also evident in Makeba’s own account of black South African history which pivots on her understanding that:

Came each new period in history, our land provided the natural resource that was needed: diamonds and gold for the Crowned Heads during the Reign of Monarchs, coal during the Industrial Revolution, oil during the Automobile Era, uranium for the Atomic Age. (Makeba and Hall 1988, 6)

This laying bare of the economic basis of white hegemony in South Africa provides the grounds for the unfolding of Makeba’s personal history in the first chapter of the autobiographical narrative proper where Makeba reckons actively with historical change:

Tribal ways have become mixed with Western ways by the years of my infancy. We worship our ancestors with sacrifices but we wear suits and drive cars. Johannesburg is now a great modern city. But it is a white man’s city. […] We are the servants of whites. Our wages assure us that we stay in poverty. (1988, 6)

Makeba’s observations bring us full circle. We return to the formative encounter with Johannesburg as that distinctive commercial civilisation which we have already referenced – a city whose very existence is presaged upon the expendability of black life but one whose modernity also depends on the forms of coercive mobility facilitated by the coaltrain. “This train” intones Masekela, “carries young and old, African men/Who are conscripted to come and work on contract/In the golden mineral mines of Johannesburg/And its surrounding metropolis, sixteen hours or more a day/For almost no pay” (Preamble to “Stimela (Coaltrain)” from the album I am Not Afraid Chisa/Blue Thumb, 1974).

In the face precisely of this alienation, a word I mobilise across its phenomenological and economic registers, the formation of Miriam Makeba, the individual performer, stands revealed in her own account as embedded in the conviviality, the quotidian structures of survival that shaped – and were shaped by – the emergence of jazz performance culture in its urban South African settings.¹⁵ Yet, precisely to the extent that Makeba’s appraisal of her origins crosses alienation in the double sense I have indicated, her assessment exceeds the critique of political economy she shares with her African socialist mentor, Ahmed Sékou Touré. Alongside this critique, Makeba enables us to retrieve a form of resistance to apartheid that is set in motion by the very apparatus of labour migration itself:

My mother is a member of the Swazi tribe. My father, Caswell, whose African name is Mpambane, is a Xhosa. Since I am his daughter, I am Xhosa, too. But in South Africa tribal differences are not important. […] To be a tribalist is to be a racist. (4)

It is this defamiliarisation, this improvisation in the face of apartheid’s reification of identity, that South Africa’s pan-ethnic township jazz styles encode, or better still – relay. Jazz emerges in direct response to the need of black South Africans to create new social forms capable of consolidating a sense of community for labour migrants whose assimilation within the pan-ethnic urban setting could no longer depend solely on the resources of older tribal forms or institutions (Coplan 1985, 144–148).

Jazz is inimical to pure originary narratives, to autochthony (Kelley 2012). Jazz as Makeba inhabits it, bears concrete testimony to this – in Sophiatown certainly, but also in Conakry. As Yair Hashachar has convincingly shown, the annals of Miriam Makeba’s recording history in Guinea attest to her ongoing negotiations with North American jazz and blues repertoires despite Sékou Touré’s Socialist Cultural Revolution which banned non-indigenous cultural influences in the name of Guinean nationalism (Hashachar 2015; and his contribution to this volume, Haschachar 2017). Call Makeba’s practice Afropolitan, if you will, in anticipation of the theoretical appropriation of the term for music production in Africa by Skinner (2015) among others. However named, Makeba’s performances and performativity furnish compelling instances of a conviviality that is out of bounds twice over: in the face of Hendrik Verwoerd’s restrictions certainly, but also in the face of Ahmed Sékou Touré’s chauvinism. Conviviality out of bounds is the substance of her ownership of a nightclub in Conakry: the “Zambezi” where Western, African and Cuban music alternate. “I am hostess, but I do not sing,” the first-person narrator observes. “We open at nine; people start coming in at ten-thirty and dance until four in the morning. […] It’s exhausting but fun for me, and the people enjoy themselves at ‘Miriam’s place’” (Makeba with Hall 1988; 215). Music is manifest here as what Mbembe calls “a celebration of the ineradicability of life” or then again, “the practice of joy before death” (2015, xiv).

A shebeen in Conakry? Why not? The restlessness of South Africa’s jazz culture transmits hospitality, providing us with legacies of inclusion that might be invoked against the discourses of autochthony, of indigeneity, of authenticity that inform the escalating anti-foreigner violence of our own times. The possibility of politics, Hannah Arendt argued in The Human Condition ([1958] 1998), arises fundamentally out of human plurality and the manifestations of this plurality in public space. Thus, the inception of politics for Arendt is “a cultural achievement of the first order” as Maurizio Passerin d’Entreves (2014) glosses.¹⁶ If our public stance as intellectuals consists partly in our insistence that the analysis of culture might help open new political imaginaries, then the restless conviviality of South African jazz deserves to be reiterated, re-enacted. Joy then, before death – in the face of its possibility. Jazz cannot afford to be disenchanted of its obligations to what Arendt calls “the space of appearance” – that is to say, “the space where I appear to others as others appear to me” ([1958] 1998, 7, 198). Regardless of where it takes place, South African jazz understood in this sense as political performance stands revealed as something more than pedestrian.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Funding

The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Research Council; European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP/2007–2013)/ERC [grant agreement number 615564].

Notes on contributor

Louise Bethlehem is an associate professor in the Department of English and the Programme in Cultural Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her book, Skin Tight: Apartheid Literary Culture and its Aftermath (Unisa Press, Brill 2006) appeared in Hebrew translation in 2011. She has co-edited six volumes in the field of South African literature, African Studies and Cultural Studies, and currently holds a European Research Council Grant for a project entitled “Apartheid – The Global Itinerary: South African Cultural Formations in Transnational Circulation 1948–1990.”

Acknowledgements

I wish to acknowledge the generous support of my funders. My thanks also go to The Bailey’s African History Archive for access to Drum magazine, and to Liz Gunner and Tom Penfold for the conference invitation that lent impetus to this paper.

Notes

1. Barnard’s (2007) work Apartheid and Beyond: South African Writers and the Politics of Place addresses the cultural and political significance of the train in South African literature in the context of a volume whose investigation of predominantly spatial topoi lends itself, at times, to reflections on the chronotope (2007, 7–8).

2. Masekela notes the spontaneous emergence of the song, as it were, at a nightclub in Woodstock: “Suddenly, I ran to the piano and began to sing a song about a train that brought migrant laborers to work in the coalmines of Witbank, my birthplace.” His companions refuse to believe that the song is in the process of being composed: “For me, songs come in like a tidal wave … At this low point … the tidal waves … came all the way from the other side of the Atlantic, from Africa, from home” (2004 [with Cheers], 238). The passage beautifully complicates standard notions of origin or influence as tied to either the United States or Africa in a manner that attests to the polycentric nature of South African jazz culture.

3. Makeba collaborated on a second memoir subsequent to her return to South Africa (Makeba with Mwamuka 2004). For a treatment of “maternal myth” in Makeba, My Story, see Odhoji (2008). For an important disaggregation of the strategies of representation at work in Makeba’s co-authored auto/biographies and in jazz memoir more broadly, see Dalamba (2008). Kgomotso Michael Masemola has also addressed Makeba’s memoir which he juxtaposes against that of Bloke Modisane, another influential figure in Makeba’s Sophiatown cohort (2011).

4. For April Sizemore-Barber, the passage recalls the primitivist tropes which framed Makeba for American audiences during the 1960s (2012, 270). For alternative discursive framings, see below.

5. My thanks to Tal Zalmanovich for this insight as well as for the reference to Hellbeck.

6. Muller references de Certeau’s “walking in the city” – but not Titlestad’s use of it – when considering Benjamin’s relationship with the built environment of New York.

7. For a fuller discussion of jazz and urban political aspirations, see Coplan (1985, 164–182) and Ballantine (1993, 118–129).

8. Sizemore-Barber notes Makeba’s “increasing Pan-African consciousness” during this period without elaborating in detail (2012, 262).

9. Drum citations are the following articles: “Will There be a U.S. of Africa?” Drum, January 1959 [East Africa February 1959], 19); “‘Africa Shall Be Free in our Lifetime’”, Drum, February 1959 [East Africa March 1959], 49 and “Miriam Comes … Back to Africa,” Drum, January 1963, 7. My thanks to the Bailey’s African History Archive for access to the Drum magazine archive.

10. My thanks to Tal Sela for this reference.

11. “There is mystery, here,” says Makeba of the Source. “There is magic. Because here is where the forces from the other side have chosen to settle. Things happen here. It is a place where the living and the dead come to terms. One must respect the Source, or there will be misfortune. We know this. In the West, the Theory of Evolution has not been proven one hundred percent. But if a person chooses to believe Darwin, he is not considered superstitious. He is considered the opposite, in fact. In Guinea, we have no scientific explanation for the power of the Source […] But even so, we believe, and we are not superstitious to do so” (1988, 243).

12. For the congealing or stabilisation of discourse and its role in the constitution of historical events, see Wagner-Pacifici (2010, 1381). For the different political meanings which accrue to Makeba in America, see Feldstein (2013, 51–83), and Sizemore-Barber (2012).

13. In Freud’s well-known account of fetishism, the substitution of the fetish for the absence of the mother’s penis compensates for the fact of castration while nevertheless “set[ting] up a memorial to itself [castration] in the creation of this substitute” ([1927] 2001, 154).

14. Citations from: “To the Sixth Pan-African Congress in Dar-Salam [sic]” The document is housed in the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library. I want to thank Yair Hashachar for bringing it to my attention.

15. This is quite literally the case. Makeba’s mother would be arrested shortly after her birth for that quintessential township pursuit of brewing beer. She, and the 18-day-old infant Miriam, would spend the next 6 months in jail (Makeba and Hall 1988, 7).

16. See commentary in d’Entreves (2014).