The Music Changed It All

Growing up in Rochdale Village Queens  in the 1970s and early 80s, I lived between two worlds that weren't supposed to touch. I would spin the radio dial in my  bedroom—past Neil Diamond, past Gladys Knight leaving on that midnight train to Georgia, landing on WBLS with Frankie Crocker's smooth voice, then flipping to 99X, the rock station, where ABBA's "Dancing Queen" would be playing.

Music was WONDER to me—all good music. I knew every word to Hotel California just as intimately as I knew Stevie Wonder's Songs in the Key of Life.  I could sing along with the soundtrack to Jesus Christ Superstar and then switch seamlessly to Fiddler  on the Roof. My father was a talented pianist and could play any song we wanted to sing so there was that too. 

But I carried guilt about this wonder. In the segregated soundscape of that era, rock music was coded as white music, and soul and funk were coded as Black music. Lines were drawn. Territories were claimed. And here I was, crossing back and forth, unable to contain my curiosity about all of it.

I felt like I was betraying my Blackness by loving what I loved. But wonder doesn't recognize these boundaries. Wonder asks only: Does this move you? Does this make you feel alive?

The Music That Changed Everything

Then my mother introduced me to different sounds—music that would become the foundation of my life's work. She played the music of South Africa’s greats,  Miriam Makeba and Hugh Masekela, explaining that they weren't just musicians. They were freedom fighters, humanitarians using their art to battle for the rights of Black and ‘Colored' South Africans living under apartheid.

Mom explained what apartheid meant: a system of legal segregation that kept races separated. Black South Africans were required to carry pass books—internal passports that controlled where they could go, when they could travel, and how long they could stay. The pass laws were among the main instruments of apartheid, and by the end of the system, over 17 million arrests had been made. Black people, the majority population,  couldn't set up businesses in white areas, and every public space—from hospitals to beaches—was legally segregated. Even as a child, it was clear that South Africa and America had a lot in common.

Mom told me how Miriam Makeba—known as Mama Africa—stood before the United Nations in 1963 and pleaded with world leaders to support the end of apartheid. In her speech, Makeba asked: "Would you act differently, would you keep silent and do nothing if you were in our place? Would you not resist if you were allowed no rights in your own country because the color of your skin is different from that of the rulers, and if you were punished for even asking for equality?"

After her UN testimony, the South African government revoked Makeba's citizenship and passport. She couldn't go home. But she kept singing. She kept fighting.

As a little girl in Queens, listening to my mother explain these things, something shifted in me. Wonder expanded beyond just curiosity—it became a compass pointing toward purpose.

From Wonder to Purpose

Decades later, the irony still astounds me. That little girl who listened to Miriam Makeba's clicking language, Xhosa, the language of Nelson Mandela, would grow up to produce a seminal documentary about South African freedom music.

Amandla! A Revolution in Four-Part Harmony took us ten years to make. It won the Audience Award and the Freedom of Expression Award at the 2002 Sundance Film Festival. The film received five Emmy nominations and won one Emmy. It's still streaming today and is considered one of the top documentary films ever funded by the Ford Foundation.

During college I was awarded the Washington Legislative Internship in the office of Congressman Mickey Leland of Houston Texas. Leland was head of the Congressional Black Caucus, Chair of the Subcommittee on Hunger and leading the divestment in South Africa. It was at this time that in an echo of Miriam Makeba’s 1963 plea at the UN, musicians like Stevie Wonder were refusing to play Sun City, or other venues in South Africa and were taking a political position to be vocal about their disapproval of the apartheid regime. Global awareness culturally put a new level of pressure for the walls of apartheid to crumble. Students across the country were engaged in the anti apartheid movement. On February 18, 1981, a young Barack Obama gave his first political speech as part of a movement to persuade the Occidental College Board of Trustees to divest its investments in South Africa.

That same year, I remember being frozen in my tracks in the Rayburn Building on the Hill when Steve Wonder in a full length fur coat strode into Congressman Leland’s office to discuss strategy in the divestment and cultural campaign. Music held the power to change the world and my activist heroes were doing it. Mickey Leland was fearless and led with a sense of defying circumstances to stand in the future where liberation was possible.  Childhood wonder became purpose.

A decade later, while producing the film AMANDLA! (Meaning power in Zulu), we interviewed Miriam Makeba. We spent time with Hugh Masekela. We documented how music—simple songs sung together—became the spiritual weapon that sustained Black South Africans through decades of brutal oppression and ultimately helped bring down apartheid.

This is what the film captures: the power of song to change beliefs, to unify humans, and to transform the world for the better.

By chance on my first night researching in South Africa, I met Nelson Mandela in one of my most dramatic and life changing moments. Outside of the Carlton Hotel in Johannesburg, waiting at the valet parking kiosk where the African National Congress was meeting to strategize on designing the new Republic. I spoke with him about the importance of music in keeping people alive—not just physically, but spiritually. Nelson Mandela  understood that wonder, expressed through song, was survival itself. He was the embodiment of this as a newly elected President who had been imprisoned for 27 years. 

From the little girl who grew up singing, who wrote plays with her sister about dolls being freed from slavery, who tried to teach herself the clicking sounds of Xhosa—to the filmmaker documenting how a nation sang itself to freedom. My life was changed by wonder. My purpose was found amidst the wondrous curiosities that held my attention as a child and transformed into meaningful contributions to documenting the power of human beings to forge the lives and the society they dreamed of.