Few singers in the history of popular music have generated the level of affection that Miriam Makeba enjoyed from her people. Her voice became a potent symbol of the anti-apartheid struggle, expressing both the sorrow and tragedy of black South Africa and also its joy and resilience in the face of the oppression that was for so long an everyday reality in the townships.

Perhaps Vera Lynn was an equally potent icon to the British Forces in the war and Judy Garland may have been as much loved by the US public. But Makeba’s role was more profound than either. Forced to spend more than 30 years in exile, she was revered across an entire continent as “Mama Afrika”. It was a name conferred by the people as she crisscrossed Africa to sing at independence ceremonies in Kenya, Angola, Mozambique and elsewhere, but all the while unable to visit her homeland.

She was fêted in Europe and the US as an unofficial ambassador for black South Africa, particularly after 1963 when she addressed the UN on apartheid and movingly appealed for the world’s support for her people.

Then there was her music. She was already a singing star when she left South Africa at 27 in 1959 and had international hits with songs such as The Click Song and Pata Pata, their joyous spirit belying the tragedy not just of her people but of her own life.

Her existence may have appeared glamorous, invited to sing for President Kennedy and befriended by Harry Belafonte and Marlon Brando. But her private life was one of considerable turmoil. In addition to exile and the oppression of her people, there were divorces, car crashes, cancer and the death of her daughter. When her mother died in South Africa the apartheid authorities refused her permission to attend the funeral.

She bore both triumphs and tragedies with enormous dignity. When she was finally allowed to return to South Africa in the early 1990s, she was greeted by a media frenzy. Although she had three times addressed the UN on apartheid, there was no grandstanding or political speeches for the assembled journalists. All she said was: “I could not understand why I was never allowed to come home. I never committed a crime.”

By then, her best music was behind her but she continued to record and tour the world, evoking an emotional response wherever she appeared.

She was also active in the US Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s when she was married for a time to the Black Power activist Stokely Carmichael. It was fitting that she lived to see not only the election of a black president in South Africa but also the election of an African-American president to the White House, a double vindication of the many sacrifices that issues of race and politics demanded of her life.

Born Zenzile Makeba in Prospect township in Johannesburg in 1932, the daughter of a Swazi mother and a Xhosa father, she spent her first six months in jail. Her mother was arrested for illegally brewing beer at home when Makeba was 18 days old and sentenced to six months in jail. The infant went with her. Her father died when she was 6 and her elder brother, Joseph, who played the piano and saxophone, introduced her to music. She was soon singing in a township choir and at school and was even asked to sing a solo for the visiting King George VI in 1947. In the event his motorcade failed to stop as intended and he never heard her performance.

After giving birth at 17 she began to sing with an amateur group, the Cuban Brothers. Before long she was invited to join the Manhattan Brothers, the most popular group in South Africa and whom Mandela would nominate years later as his favourite group of all time.

Makeba was still known as Zenzi, but the group suggested a name change and printed posters and handbills announcing: “The Manhattan Brothers . . . introducing Miriam Makeba, our own nut brown baby”.

In 1956 she formed her own all-female group, Miriam Makeba and the Skylarks and toured with African Jazz and Variety, a show which led to two invitations that would change her life.