I. Introduction

Exile, Edward Said explains in his “Reflections on Exile,” separates “people from the nourishment of tradition, family, and geography” and “any achievements of exile are permanently undermined by the loss” (173). In the late 1950s and 1960s, to fortify apartheid’s stronghold, the South African government used exile as a means to remove subversive influences. Among those exiled were musicians, including singer Miriam Makeba and trumpeter Hugh Masekela. Because of exile, each was separated from their homeland for a large amount of their lives, only able to return in the early 1990s after the dismantling of apartheid had begun. Makeba describes the ‘terminal loss’ that she realized she experienced upon her return to South Africa:

“I had also tried to go back to Prospect township and Riversiede, the places I had grown up in. I wanted to find my grandmother and my sister Hilda’s graves. They were gone. They had been built on. My elementary school was also gone, razed to the ground. During the removals, the people of Prospect township, which was near Jeppe in Johannesburg, had been moved to Orlando. The people from Riverside had been moved to Mamelodi. Prospect township and Riverside did not exist anymore. All that was there, that I could remember, was an old dilapidated little building which used to be the shop of an old Chinese man we called John muChina. That was all that was there” (Makeba 215).

However, Said argues that such depravity can be “transformed…into a potent, even enriching, motif of modern culture” (173). These two exiles were able to change their loss into such contribution but not by creating separation between themselves and the country that displaced them – “[seeing] themselves as part of a restored people” (Said 177). Rather, they remained attached to South Africa and, with the new platform exile gave them, used music to prevent the world’s oblivion and rally the ‘non-exiles’ into embracing their struggle against apartheid.