61 Quotes by Miriam Makeba

I sang in Los Angeles recently and a band that had managed to get out of New Orleans played there. They asked me for one or to songs for a CD being recorded. My group and I said yes, we were ready to contribute in that way, the only way we have.

Ours was a marriage, a love affair -- the land would nurture us, and we would honor the land. But the land was too rich and too good. The powerful and greedy invaders saw this at once.

The one I missed is Billie Holiday because she died the year before I arrived. I was in America in 1959 and she had passed away before that.

I look at an ant and l 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.

In New York I heard A Piece of Ground, written by a white South African, Jeremy Taylor. I modified it a little and sang it myself. That song is very special to me because it deals with the land question in southern Africa. We were dispossessed of our land,

In those years, when I came to the States, people were always asking me why I didn't sing anymore. I'd tell them, 'I sing all around the world-Asia, Africa, Europe-but if you don't sing in the US, then you haven't really made it.' That's why I'll always be grateful to Paul Simon. He allowed me to bring my music back to my friends in this country.

[Belafonte] was a good teacher and looked after me. He said, 'You have such great talent, you must try not to be a tornado - be like a submarine. It was good advice when I found myself speaking at the UN Committee Against Apartheid and then the UN General Assembly.

When I was young, I never bought records because my brother Joseph played saxophone and had a record player. I loved listening to his records: The Dorsey Brothers, Duke Ellington, all the big American jazz bands, and vocalists like Ella Fitzgerald, Ernestine Anderson, and Kitty White, a singer from the US who was a friend of Nina Simone. Nobody in America seems to know about her, but she was quite popular in South Africa.

I didn't have much, but I was always happy to share what I did have. It seemed like every African that came to New York City would show up at my apartment door at dinnertime, and I couldn't turn them away. I wasn't much older than any of them, but they started calling me 'Mama Africa' and the name stuck.