This Emancipation Day

This Emancipation Day is shaping up to be quite an eventful one. According to the latest public advisory, a tropical storm warning is in effect for several of the Leeward islands. Fidel Castro, according to who you talk to, is either convalescing or dying (and Miami’s Cuban community is acting like it’s Emancipation Day over there too). And I’m yet to make a dent in my workload. On the plus side, it is a public holiday here (yes, another one), the weather’s gorgeous, and somewhere outside, a dog named Delphine is lying contentedly in the sun, instead of plotting ways of getting into the house and hiding out there for the rest of the day.

Last night Jonathan, Nikipedia and I managed to slip into the concert at Emancipation Village just in time to hear Miriam Makeba perform (thanks for the hook-up, Dread). Ms. Makeba is 74, her face still unlined and beautiful, but she limped a bit on stage and had to rest twice, leaving us in the hands of her more-than-capable backing band. Time’s taken its toll on her voice as well, but for performers of her stature and experience, it’s never just about the voice, is it. Her presence remains commanding, and by the time she sang “Pata Pata” even some the seniors who’d been “bepping” in the front row for most of the set got to their feet, righted their African headgear, and got down. The Dread reminded me that she — Miriam Makeba, not the Dread — was once married to Stokely Carmichael, a topic the Dread couldn’t help bringing up at the press conference on Sunday (it was the best of her marriages, apparently).

One of the numbers Miriam Makeba sang was a tribute to Dolly Rathebe (“our first star, our first pin-up girl,” Makeba said), who was among (and the only black member of) the group of South Africans who sort of adopted me back in 1996 at the Festival des Trois Continents in Nantes. There was a strong South African component in the festival that year, including an exhibition of photos from the 50s and 60s from Drum magazine’s incredible collection. I believe the South Africans gravitated towards me for two reasons: I spoke English and I wasn’t European. Perhaps I also seemed harmless, or too young to pose any sort of threat (yes, friends, there was once a time when even you would have thought so). Dolly was the only one, in fact, who seemed at ease in this foreign country. The others, as I said, were all white, filmmakers and artists and culture workers with very respectable anti-apartheid credentials; but it must have been a hell of a thing to be a white South African, respectable credentials or no, in a foreign country in 1996. Or at least they acted like it. While Dolly — who was also was also being honoured at the festival that year — held court, diva-style, they seemed permanently braced for blows. Which, as far as I recall, never came (cultural festivals being, after all, utopias of a sort). None of them spoke French anyway, so any slurs hurled at them by locals would have fallen on deaf ears.

The most neurotic member of the group told me that she’d gone walking one day and wandered a little further out of central Nantes than usual, into a quiet part of town. On realising where she was, she had what sounded like a panic attack with hallucinatory overtones. Had she strayed into an equivalent area in Johannesburg, she told me, she’d surely have been attacked. Two years later, I ran into the same woman at the Sithengi Film and Television Market in Cape Town. She seemed quite taken aback at seeing me, and genuinely shocked that I remembered her name (which was so unusual as to be unforgettable). “You do get around,” she said, in a tone that could only be described as highly ambivalent. Ah well.

Dolly Rathebe, Makeba told us last night, passed away a few years ago — in 2004, to be exact. May she rest in peace.

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