Remembering Sathima Bea Benjamin

Sathima had the unique ability to strike first at your heart, not unlike the experience of hearing Billie Holiday for the first time.

The cover of Sathima Bea Benjamin's debut album recorded under the direction of Duke Ellington.

With what feels like a physical blow to the body I try to make sense of it all.  “Hi Rashid, is it true?” “Yes Matt she is on the other side.” Barely a month earlier I was in Cape Town for what was to be Sathima’s swan song: a live performance at Tagore’s in Observatory celebrating the reissue of her 1976 masterpiece African Songbird that I’d just reissued on my label. Although suffering from flu Sathima commanded the room with the voice of an angel. The electric atmosphere and crowded space only enhanced the palpable sense of being in the presence of greatness.

As we mark Sathima’s birthday today I’m still trying to make sense of it all. Her long struggle to be heard, never playing on her African roots and resolutely uncommercial with a complete commitment to classic jazz idioms. And a big shadow cast by her partner Abdullah Ibrahim, the challenges of motherhood exacerbated by exile and an uneasy homecoming from the Chelsea Hotel in New York where she said she felt most at home.

Sathima had the unique ability to strike first at your heart, not unlike the experience of hearing Billie Holiday for the first time. She cites hearing Billie’s performance in Lady Sings the Blues as being pivotal to her development as a singer. And Sathima’s original compositions like Africa and Nations in Me eschew the commonly prescribed categories of race and nationhood propagated by Apartheid. It’s a powerful combination.

Her final performance at Tagore’s was highly anticipated and packed shoulder-to-shoulder. Some initial microphone issues before Sathima took to the stage, backed by the Hilton Schilder Trio, to perform one more time her classic songbook tunes, laments and the anthem Africa. “I’ve been gone much too long/and I’m glad to say that I’m home, I’m home to stay…” I was so happy for her despite the knowledge that perhaps this might all be too late. We spoke late into the evening at the Labia Cinema on Sunday and at the Mahogany Room on Tuesday about taking this forward.

Too late, and now she’s on the other side. And that’s our lament: that home is still the other side.

Further Reading

Coming home

In 1991, acclaimed South African artist Helen Sebidi’s artworks were presumed stolen in Sweden. Three decades later, a caretaker at the residential college where they disappeared found them in a ceiling cupboard, still in their original packaging.

Imaginary homelands

A new biography of former apartheid homeland leader Lucas Mangope struggles to do more than arrange the actions of its subject into a neat chronology.

Business as usual?

This month, Algeria quietly held its second election since Abdelaziz Bouteflika was ousted in 2019. On the podcast, we ask what Abdelmadjid Tebboune’s second term means for the country.

The complexities of solidarity

Assassinated in 1978, Henri Curiel was a Jewish Egyptian Marxist whose likely killers include fascist French-Algerian colons, the apartheid South African Bureau of State Security, and the Abu Nidal Organization.

From Naija to Abidjan

One country is Anglophone, and the other is Francophone. Still, there are between 1 to 4 million people of Nigerian descent living in Côte d’Ivoire today.

De Naïja à Abidjan

Un pays est anglophone et l’autre est francophone. Quoi qu’il en soit, entre 1 et 4 millions de personnes d’origine nigériane vivent aujourd’hui en Côte d’Ivoire.