# The Thirty-Year Exile *A Biography of Miriam Makeba* — Legendary Biographies No. 082 - **Subject:** Zenzile Miriam Makeba - **Written by:** Sandile Mokoena - **Shelf:** Music / World - **Published:** 2026 - **Extent:** 192 pages, 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink - **Paperback:** $19.99 — 6 × 9 in · 192 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · perfect-bound paperback - **EPUB:** $3.99 — EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books (ISBN 979-8-90623-086-7) - **Audiobook:** $5.99 — Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Nadia Kerr (ISBN 979-8-90623-179-6) Buy it, or read the opening free: volumes/082-the-thirty-year-exile.html ## About this book She was born Zenzile Miriam Makeba on March 4, 1932, in Prospect Township, Johannesburg, six months after her mother had served a six-month prison sentence for brewing umqombothi beer. She joined the Manhattan Brothers township-jazz band in 1953, made the 1959 anti-apartheid film Come Back, Africa with Lionel Rogosin, and was stripped of her South African citizenship in 1960 after she testified to the United Nations General Assembly. She lived in exile for thirty-one years — in the United States, in Guinea after her 1968 marriage to Stokely Carmichael cost her the U.S. recording contract, in Brussels, in Lagos — and returned to South Africa in June 1990 at Nelson Mandela's invitation, two months after his release from Robben Island. She died on stage in Castel Volturno, Italy, on November 9, 2008, at seventy-six, of a heart attack between the second and the third encore of her concert against the Camorra. Sandile Mokoena's biography opens earlier and follows the arc through the township-jazz years and the Come Back, Africa breakthrough, the long Harry Belafonte mentorship and the Pata Pata 1967 hit, the Carmichael marriage and the U.S. recording-contract loss, the Guinea years and the long African tours, the 1987 Graceland tour with Paul Simon, the 1990 return to South Africa, the 2005 Lifetime Achievement Grammy, and the concert in Castel Volturno. What emerges is a portrait of the Mama Africa whose thirty-one-year exile the South African government enforced and the rest of the world's anti-apartheid movement honored, and whose death on the stage of a Naples-suburb anti-Camorra concert was the death the music world spent the next two decades writing about. ## Contents 1. Prospect Township 2. The Voice Finds Its Shape 3. The Manhattan Brothers 4. An Evening with Belafonte 5. Come Back, Africa 6. Exile Begins 7. The World Stage 8. The Click Song and Pata Pata 9. The UN Address 10. Stokely 11. The Price of Love 12. Guinea 13. The Long Distance 14. Graceland 15. The Return 16. Mother of a Nation 17. The Final Stage 18. Mama Africa 19. The Song Continues ## Questions **Who is The Thirty-Year Exile about?** Zenzile Miriam Makeba. The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case The Thirty-Year Exile — and the name goes on the line underneath. **Is this an authorised biography?** No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented. **Can I read some of it before buying?** Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 4,329 words of the book. **How long is it?** About 62,000 words, 19 chapters, 192 pages in the paperback. **What is the printed book like?** 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink, perfect-bound paperback, matte laminate. Every title in the series uses the same specification, so they line up on a shelf. ## The writer Sandile Mokoena is a Johannesburg-based journalist whose biography of Steve Biko was a finalist for the 2024 Alan Paton Award. He writes about southern African political and musical figures with the patience of an oral historian. His long-form profile work includes the books Room 619, The Estadio Chile, The Thirty-Year Exile, and The Trench Town Origin. Each narrative relies on extensive archival research and direct interviews with living witnesses to reconstruct complex twentieth-century histories. He lives in the suburb of Melville, Johannesburg, where he collects vinyl records and works as a freelance newspaper contributor.