Diva Makeba gets girls off the streets and into music
Music diva Miriam Makeba.
By Florence Panoussian
MIDRAND – South African singing legend Miriam Makeba is preparing to make a final bow after a long career and devote more time to a group of girls who were rescued from the streets and taught to love music.
The Makeba Centre for Girls, housed in a white Dutch colonial house in Midrand north of Johannesburg, is home to 14 teenage girls, ranging in age from 13 to 17.
“They are children who you still have to bring back to the fold,” said Makeba, 73, who last week began her farewell tour with a concert in Johannesburg.
“But they are all very talented. The next performers could be among those girls,” she said of the girls who come to the centre through referrals from social workers.
The teenage girls have all found refuge at the centre from the brutality of the streets: rape, prostitution, drugs, abuse.
There they are discovering life through music and the arts, a fitting therapy from Makeba, one of the most accomplished African artists of her generation.
“They learn a lot of things: drama, singing, dancing, poetry. We haven’t got enough money yet to teach them music. But Papa teaches some of them the drums,” Makeba told AFP, referring to her Guinean drummer Papa Kouyate.
Every day, four volunteers lead the girls into practice next to an old pool that has been left empty to allow for the centre’s meager funds to be spent on other priorities.
“Some of them have no family at all, some have mothers who themselves are problem people and can’t take care of them,” says the centre’s director Elaine Masekela-Britton, whose brother, jazz trumpeter Hugh Masekela, another member of South Africa’s music royalty, was married to Makeba.
Elaine, who has worked with women’s rights groups and grew up in Johannesburg’s gritty township of Alexandra, says many of the girls are scarred and find it difficult to embrace the opportunity for a new start, even if it is through an uplifting exposure to the arts.
“Getting them to trust somebody is a daily struggle,” she says.
Opened in 2003, the centre has a monthly budget of R40 000 (6 200 US dollars / 5 200 euros), supplied by Makeba, the social welfare ministry and private donations.
The girls remain within the confines of the centre, at the start, before they are slowly brought back into the mainstream, through joint projects with local residents.
One 13-year-old girl says she feels at home at the centre.
“Before, at my aunt’s, I was only cooking, cleaning, washing all day. When I was dancing, she was shouting at me,” she said.
This latest resident at the centre says her dream is to teach the other girls to cha-cha and hopes they can together compete as a dance team.
After concerts in Johannesburg and Cape Town, “Mama Africa” is to embark on a tour next year to say goodbye to her fans worldwide.
Known for classics such as “The Click Song” and “Pata Pata”, Makeba became the first black African woman to receive a Grammy Award which she shared with folk singer Harry Belafonte in 1965. – Sapa-AFP.