Art & Creativity Quote by Miriam Makeba

Makeba’s genius here is how casually she detonates a whole industry’s euphemisms. “World music” sounds like a generous umbrella, a cosmopolitan playlist category. She hears it as a soft-edged insult: a way to keep African, Asian, and Latin American artists safely “over there,” filed under geography instead of genre, innovation, or authorship. The joke lands because it isn’t really a joke; it’s an x-ray of cultural hierarchy pretending to be curation.

Her pivot to development language sharpens the blade. The West’s vocabulary doesn’t abandon the ranking system, it just updates the packaging: “underdeveloped” becomes “developing,” “third world” becomes “world,” a rebrand that lets institutions feel humane while the power dynamic stays intact. Politeness becomes a technology of control, smoothing over the fact that someone is doing the naming and someone else is being named.

Context matters: Makeba built a global career while living the costs of apartheid-era exile and the politics of representation. When she questions the label, she’s not quibbling about marketing; she’s calling out the way global culture consumes Black and African artistry as “flavor” without granting it the same critical seriousness afforded to Western pop, rock, or classical. The subtext is blunt: if your work needs a special shelf called “world,” it’s because the default shelf still belongs to someone else.