But some of the publicly backward were assaulted by these works (aesthetically they said, they were against apartheid too, they said, bust must you sing about it).As if the struggle to end apartheid in South Africa was unmentionable in "high art" and it's evocative tragedy and pain were purely a figment of some black woman singer's overactive imagination. You can go to Soweto today and still be moved to wail with such incendiary beauty, as Abbey's to further change the place even years after apartheid has been formally dismantled. Its remains are still visible and still stink.
     Like wise Driva Man and Freedom Day co-authored by the inestimable Oscar Brown , Jr. drawn from the historic emotional log of grievous black American memory, and you could be talking about a memory you gonna get after you go outside tomorrow. Abbey sings of a real world, which she paints with her own soul's experience. Max Roach, she repeats, was the agent of her recognition of that soul in music as a function of raising a young artist's "true self-consciousness" already unfolding.
     It is a common topic of conversation among the various diggers how Abbey and Max had to pay for their commitment to "The Movement". The very same crocodiles who might skin and grin in their presence would advance almost a boycott of these two internationally acclaimed artists, as pay-back for them daring to use their art in the service of democracy and the people. But self-determination is anathema to the corpses, even if packaged only as an aesthetic and located exclusively in the world of art.
     "Miriam Makeba took me with her to Africa (1975). I was sort of her Lady-In-Waiting" We went to Guinea where the president (Sekou Toure) was her patron. He gave me the name Aminata ( ). In Zaire, they added the name Moseka ( ). She is a wonderful person and a fantastic singer. She can do so many things with a song, with her voice, with the words. She sings in so many languages.
     I was trying to vouchsafe to this grand artist of blue song that I wasn't there to press her for any don't-need-to-be-told stuff about the whatevers of her life. Instead, she volunteered a somewhat stunning raison d'être, coming out of the expressive discussion on what things have shaped her, and I guess booted by the mention of the Motherland. "I'm an African woman. Really. I'm not a monogamist", She offered, seeking to clear up whatever questions she thought she could acknowledge vibing in my knot, that she felt, perhaps, would not be asked but needed to be laid out.
     "People don't understand. Max was not a womanizer. He wasn't running around. But I don't want to have to answer where I was last night! I don't want him to divorce his lst wife if he can't have me. I don't want my sister to be without. I would never do that again." A high spangled laugh, "But at my age, I'm not gonna do any of that any more…any way.

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