Geneva: Le Gingembre Littéraire pays tribute to Miriam Makeba for International Women’s Day
On the occasion of International Women’s Rights Day, the pan-African magazine ContinentPremier.com and its association are organizing, on March 6, 2026 in Geneva, a public conference dedicated to Miriam Makeba. An encounter which intends to revisit, based on Guinean archives, the activist and political journey of the South African icon.
Entitled “Miriam Makeba, an activist and political trajectory”, the meeting is part of the activities of Gingembre Littéraire. It aims to highlight a lesser known part of the life of “Mama Afrika”: her years of engagement in Guinea, after her departure from the United States in 1968.
If Miriam Makeba remains known worldwide for her fight against apartheid and her forced exile from South Africa, her commitment to Guinea remains less documented. Alongside President Sékou Touré, she participated in the socialist and pan-Africanist ferment that marked the country at the end of the 1960s and 1970s.
It is precisely this episode that the conference intends to explore, through Guinean archives, in order to shed light on the connections between art, politics and liberation struggles on the African continent.
The meeting will be moderated by Dr. Elara Bertho, researcher at the CNRS in the Les Afriques dans le monde laboratory (Bordeaux). A specialist in the relationship between literature and politics, she works in particular on private archives and pan-African stories.
Initiated by journalist El Hadji Gorgui Wade Ndoye, founder of Gingembre Littéraire, this meeting is intended to be both a moment of memory and reflection on the political and artistic legacy of the woman the world nicknamed “Mama Afrika”.
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