Within minutes of arriving in the United States for the first time, on November 28, 1959, 27-year-old Zenzile “Miriam” Makeba was whisked to the Manhattan office of the famous Jamaican-American singer Harry Belafonte. After a quick hug, Belafonte exclaimed: “Miriam! We haven’t a minute to waste!”
Belafonte, who had seen her performing in London a few weeks earlier, had pulled out all the stops to arrange a US visa for Makeba, a Black South African woman at the height of apartheid. And now that she was finally on US soil, he was determined to make it count.
