African musicians will finally have a competition to call their own, with the inaugural Best African Music Performance category. Since then, desert blues bands from the Sahara, extraordinary singers from Senegal and Cape Verde, pop divas from Nigeria and Benin, and a superstar DJ from South Africa have earned trophies in various categories.
That the singer had done this while fighting the apartheid regime of South Africa in exile β and amid the civil rights movement in the United States β makes it all the more revolutionary. Born in the segregated township of Prospect near Johannesburg in to a Xhosa father and a Swazi mother, Makeba sang in choirs as a child and gravitated towards a musical career.
A part in the anti-apartheid film Come Back, Africa rocketed her to fame in the U. The album featured the two singing folk songs from across Africa in languages such as Swahili and Zulu, several with explicitly anti-Apartheid themes. As Apartheid finally fell in , a newly-freed Nelson Mandela arranged for her homecoming.
Born in Ibadan, Nigeria to a Yoruba-ancestry father and an English mother, Helen Folasade Adu had studied fashion in London before becoming the vocalist and face of the band that bears her name, Sade. The jazzy, soulful sophisti-pop on their record Promise earned instant acclaim, reaching No.
But their influence β especially that of the famously reclusive singer Adu β resonates beyond awards. It was this headstrong nature that led him to music β his parents frowned upon his musical ambitions, but he defied them, building his own musical instruments. He began to hit upon a style that fuses his African influences with those from across the Atlantic. Starting off as a club singer in the port city of Mindelo, she gained fame as the "Barefoot Diva," performing without shoes in tribute to the poor.
