Miriam Makeba, commonly known in South Africa as "Mama Africa" was born in Johannesburg in 1932. Her mother was a Swazi sangoma and her father, who died when she was six, was a Xhosa.

Her professional career began in the 1950s with the Manhattan Brothers, before she formed her own group, The Skylarks, singing a blend of jazz and traditional melodies of South Africa.

In 1959, she performed in the musical King Kong alongside Hugh Masekela, her future husband. Though she was a successful recording artist, she was only receiving a few dollars for each recording session and no provisional royalties, and was keen to go to the US. Her break came when she starred in the anti-apartheid documentary Come Back, Africa in 1960. In 1963 she testified about apartheid before the United Nations Committee Against Apartheid,, as a result the South African government banned her music, revoked her citizship and right of return. She stayed in the U.S. and married Stokely Carmichael, a Black Panther leader. That began her exile from her South African homeland. After harassment by U.S. authorities she fled to exile in Guinea. Her South African passport was revoked shortly afterwards.

Makeba then travelled to London where she met Harry Belafonte who assisted her in gaining entry to and fame in the United States. She released many of her most famous hits there including Pata Pata, The Click Song, and Malaika. In 1966, Makeba received the Grammy Award for Best Folk Recording together with Harry Belafonte for An Evening With Belafonte/Makeba. The album dealt with the political plight of black South Africans under apartheid.

Makeba separated from Carmichael in 1973, and continued to perform primarily in Africa, South America and Europe. She also served as a Guinean delegate to the United Nations, for which she won the Dag Hammarskjöld Peace Prize in 1986.

After the death of her only daughter Bongi Makeba in 1985, she moved to Brussels. In 1987, she appeared in Paul Simon's Graceland tour.

Nelson Mandela persuaded her to return to South Africa in 1990. In 1992 she starred in the film Sarafina!, about the 1976 Soweto youth uprisings. She also took part in the 2002 documentary Amandla!: A Revolution in Four-Part Harmony where she and others recalled the days of Apartheid.

In 2001 she was awarded the Gold Otto Hahn Peace Medal by the United Nations Association of Germany (DGVN) in Berlin, "for outstanding services to peace and international understanding". In 2002, she shared the Polar Music Prize with Sofia Gubaidulina. In 2004, Makeba was voted 38th in the Top 100 Great South Africans. Makeba started a 14 month worldwide farewell tour in 2005, holding concerts in all of those countries that she had visited during her working life.

Rebecca Malope, South Africa's Queen of Gospel, was born in 1965 in a little rural township called Lekazi near the Kruger National Park.

In the 1980s, Rebecca was living like any other little girl in the village, working on a tobacco farm, earning a portion of mealie-meal, beans, salt and sugar and R10, 50 a week. Like any other black child in a rural area at that time, she could barely read or write. Rebecca had only managed to reach standard five and that is something that she has regretted through her life. To make up for her lack for formal education she attends courses to educate herself.

It is hard to believe that the Queen of Gospel also went through difficult times in her life, but at the age of 25, Rebecca ran away from home together with her sister Cynthia to look for greener pastures. They ended up in the township of Evaton, south of Johannesburg. Things were not the way she thought they would be, as she went to Johannesburg in search of her dream. They stayed in a two roomed shack which belonged to a coal merchant; they did not have any kind of furniture. The shack was filled with empty bottles and cases of beer. They put the cases together and put old door frames on top to make up beds for themselves.

Rebecca's grandfather was a church minister. He brought up all six of his grandchildren in a mission house where prayer and hymns were part of their daily lives. Rebecca was not aware of her talent though some members of the congregation were always pointing it out. She knew that she could sing and she just wanted to be a star, but she didn’t know how to achieve this until she arrived in Johannesburg.

She enountered many difficulties, but was encouraged by the chance to enter the Shell Road to Fame Talent Search in 1985. She did not win on the show, but was fortunate to be spotted by Sizwe Zakho, a composer and producer.  He wrote a song for her and she won the contest on her second try in 1987. After singing many love songs Rebecca found that gospel music was best suited to her strong personal faith in God and her beautiful voice.

Rebecca has never looked back; she has simply gone from strength to strength. She also won the OKTV award for best South African female artist for the period 1989/1990; when over 10 million listeners voted for her as the best local established artist in the 1993 Coca Cola Full Blast Music Show. She won it again in 1994. Since 1994 she has won 11 Sama Awards, 2 Kora awards and 3 Metro awards.

Rebecca made history on Good Friday, 15 April 1995, when she travelled to Israel where CCV TV crew shot a 52 minute Easter special for national broadcast. She was further given the honour of singing the national anthem which was televised live to 30 countries.

Life was not always on Rebecca's side, she tragically lost her father, brother and sister in 1996 but she was determined to continue singing with great passion. That year she performed live at the State Theatre in Pretoria in the presence of several dignitaries. Rebecca sings many of her own compositions and her CDs sell millions in South Africa.

Currently, the queen of South African gospel music presents a local television programme, Gospel Times Show, celebrating local gospel stars, on SABCTV every Sunday at 20H00. The show also serves as a platform to launch new and unsigned gospel talent.

Sources:

• 5Sm
• SAMRO

Helen Elizabeth Martins ('Miss Helen') is considered to be South Africa's foremost Outsider Artist. Outsider Art was first recognized by the French artist Jean Dubuffet, who coined the term 'Art Brut', or Raw Art.

Helen Martins was born on 23 December 1897 in Nieu Bethedsa, a small and isolated Karoo village in South Africa's Eastern Cape, the youngest of six children. She gained a teaching diploma after attending school in Graaff-Reinet and in 1919 moved to the then Transvaal to begin working as a teacher.

In 1920 Helen Martins married a fellow teacher, Willem Johannes Pienaar. Pienaar also worked as a dramatist, and the couple traveled together, appearing in theatrical productions around the Transvaal, in Cape Town, and Port Elizabeth. The marriage, however, was rocky, and Helen Martins left her husband on several occasions. They divorced in 1926 after Pienaar abandoned Martins for another woman.

Around 1928 Helen Martins returned to Nieu Bethesda and spent the next 17 years looking after her ailing and elderly parents. Martins' mother died in 1941, and her father in 1945. Left with few prospects in a marginalized Karoo village, Martins became increasingly reclusive and isolated from the local community.

Helen Martins lay ill in bed one night, with the moon shining in through the window, and considered how dull and grey her life had become. She resolved, there and then, that she would strive to bring light and colour into her life. That simple decision, to embellish her environment, was to grow into an obsessive urge to express her deepest feelings, her dreams and her desires.

In order to accomplish the transformation of her environment, Helen Martins hired the services of local workmen. First Mr. Jonas Adams, and then Mr. Piet van der Merwe were employed to perform structural modifications to the interior of the house, mostly replacing original windows with the vast panes of glass that would bathe her home in multi-coloured hues of light. And when she turned her attention to the outside of her house, she asked Piet van der Merwe to help transform her ideas into reality. An early cement owl constructed by Piet remains in the Camel Yard today.

Helen Martins' art was greeted with derision and suspicion from the village. Despite crippling arthritis, and the amputation of her small toes (her feet were disfigured from wearing narrow shoes) which left her unable to wear anything but slip-ons on her feet, Martins decorated her home with 'glass and light'.

Although she avoided people in general, once a year at Christmas she would open up the house and invite the locals to visit, enhancing the mirrors, murals and crushed-glass coated walls with the light of many candles.

In 1964 Helen Martins employed Koos Malgas, an itinerant sheepshearer, to help her make the cement-and -glass statues which fill the Camel Yard outside her house. Formally the garden, this sculpture yard had over 300 figures and animals. Malgas became her foremost friend and companion, and remained by her side for the last 12 years of her life.

Helen's close relationship with her Coloured assistant was viewed with great suspicion by Nieu Bethesda's Apartheid era residents.

Helen Martin's works of art, displayed in the Camel Yard, are a bustling kaleidoscope of cement sculptures. Predominant themes are the nativity, a curious mélange of Christian and Eastern philosophies (particularly the Bible and the writings of Omar Khayyam), as well as a large number of owls. Helen Martins was especially fond of owls and considering them a kind of totem animal - associated with intuition and insight and wisdom.

Helen Martins' eyesight began to fail and in 1976 she took her own life by swallowing a mixture of caustic soda and crushed glass in olive oil. She could not bear the thought of going blind - a great theme in her life and work is light - and she was worried that she would be taken away from her life's work. She was discovered shortly after taking the mixture and removed from Nieu Bethesda to hospital in Graaff-Reinet, where she died three days later, on 8 August 1976.

Koos Malgas remained for another two years before relocating to Worcester, but returned in 1991 to assist in the restoration of the Owl House which had been declared a national monument and was supported by the newly created Owl House Foundation. It had been Helen Martins' greatest wish that the Owl House and Camel Yard be preserved as a museum.

Sources:

• African History
• Owelhouse
• Neurodiversity
• Knowleshome