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Nothing Personal
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Letta M'boulu, a singer whose career Makeba promoted in the 1960s, was there with her husband, she says. Whatever emotion she felt at the meeting is not for me to know. It is presented as little more than pleasantries exchanged between acquaintances.

"Then I was invited to come here to Washington when he was honored by all the black important people just before he went to Guinea to die," she says. "But I couldn't come. I had been engaged to go perform, and I couldn't get out of it."

Big things happen in Makeba's life while she is on the road, and she is rarely able to cancel a gig, she says, since bad management at the height of her career left her dependent on performances for her income. She receives little money from her recordings, and none, she contends, from the hits she made in the 1960s.

Of all the intrigue and legend of Makeba's life, perhaps the most consistent theme of her work is the idea of home. After 30 years away, three decades lived as a citizen of the world, how comfortable does she find the South Africa of today? The title of a cut on the advance copy of the "Homeland" CD grabs my attention: "Unhome." It turns out to be a misprint. When I raise it with Makeba, she corrects me: "UM-home," she says.

The song is a searing lament in Xhosa, Makeba's native tongue. The words seem secondary to the cry of desolation conveyed by the singer. I ask her what the lyric means.

It is, she explains, the story of a young woman, newly married in the traditional manner. When it is time for her to go to live with her husband's family, she is escorted to his home, as is customary, by a young woman from her village, who her new husband falls for.

There's a knock at the door. I instinctively get up to answer it; it's the room service waiter with a silver coffee service, which he places on the cocktail table before us, as I move a blood-pressure monitor out of the way. Makeba is not one who has made it this long by dint of good health. She's had bouts with cancer and, early in her career, survived a gruesome car accident in South Africa. After happening upon the wreck, a white policeman had left Makeba and members of the act, Township Jazz, with which she was performing at the time on the road to die. Three of her fellow troupers did.

Makeba returns to her narrative about the bride in her song.

"Now she's thinking of the dowry the parents had paid, you know, there are a lot of difficulties," she explains. "You can't go back home. You'll be an embarrassment, so what do you do? So she goes outside and sits on a rock and she says, 'I have nowhere to go, nowhere to hide. This feeling, I cannot explain. And I cannot go back home.'"

There's an obvious resonance there for Makeba, but not only in the idea of exile. Her first marriage, the one of which her daughter was born, was to a black South African policeman, whom Makeba caught in flagrante with her sister.

The song as it appears on the CD is Makeba's own interpretation of it, she says, "but it's an old song I learned from my grandmother. She used to sing this and explain it. I used to wonder if she didn't go through this because she sang it very well, with so much feeling. And she would look that sad."

But back to that question of home, I say. Is she really at home in today's South Africa?

"Well, it's still the same place, where I left my umbilical cord," she contends. "In the mind, in the heart, I was always home. I always imagined, really, going back home. Because when I left home [in 1959] I had no intentions of not going back."

She cites "Masakhane," the new CD's opening cut, a rousing number, beautifully composed by Zamo Mbutho, one of the musicians in her band. Written with a Xhosa lyric, the title is a word coined by activists to describe an idealized spirit of nation-building. "This young man knows," she says of Mbutho. "He's with me all the time because we work together, we travel. And he knows how happy I am to be back home. There's a part where it says [she sings]: 'Sengi buyele mna singibuyile khaya Kwasi kwamnand, ekhaya we vumanibo He mn.' It means: I'm back! I am back home! And it's so wonderful; it is so great to be back home. So let's all get up!"

"A lot of things have changed" in South Africa, she continues. "We're now able to go to places we were never allowed to go to. Look at black and white children, all those races, going to the same schools, and so on. And here are some beautiful things that have happened. But it's just still now the poverty and the homelessness that we have to work hard on now. So the struggle goes on."

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