Miriam Makeba's 1966 Grammy: A Protest Album Disguised as a Folk Record

Miriam Makeba, the South African singer already living in forced exile after the apartheid government revoked her passport in 1959, won a Grammy Award on March 15, 1966, for Best Folk Recording, shared with American singer Harry Belafonte for their joint album An Evening With Belafonte/Makeba. The win made Makeba the first African, and the first African woman, to win a Grammy in any category, a milestone that arrived roughly seven years into an exile that would keep her out of South Africa for three decades.

The album itself was not a neutral folk-music showcase. Recorded and released in 1965, it paired Makeba’s voice, already internationally known through her earlier collaborations with Belafonte and her own recordings, with material that directly engaged South Africa’s political situation, most pointedly the track “Ndodemnyama we Verwoerd,” a song whose title translates roughly to “Watch out, Verwoerd,” aimed squarely at Hendrik Verwoerd, the South African prime minister widely credited as the chief architect of apartheid’s legal framework. Packaging overtly anti-apartheid material inside a Grammy-winning folk record gave Makeba’s political message a mainstream American platform her exile had otherwise cut her off from delivering inside South Africa itself.

Makeba’s exile had begun after she appeared in the 1959 anti-apartheid documentary Come Back, Africa, a film critical enough of the South African government that authorities responded by canceling her passport when she attempted to return home from screenings abroad, leaving her stateless and unable to return for the visit of her own mother’s funeral later that year. Rather than retreating from political material after being cut off from her home country, Makeba built much of her subsequent recording career around it, and the Belafonte collaboration’s commercial and critical success, capped by the Grammy, demonstrated that a direct anti-apartheid message could reach a mainstream American audience without diluting its politics for palatability.

The Grammy marked the high point of a commercial partnership between Makeba and Belafonte that had begun years earlier, when Belafonte first championed her music to American audiences after seeing her perform, and it cemented Makeba’s international reputation at a moment when she had no reputation left to protect inside her own country’s borders. She would go on to testify before the United Nations against apartheid, marry civil rights and Black Power figure Stokely Carmichael in 1968, a union that triggered a significant commercial backlash in the United States, and continue recording and touring internationally until her death in 2008, without ever losing the exile status that first pushed her music toward explicitly political ends.