Creativity Quote by Miriam Makeba

Makeba’s genius here is how she turns a familiar news-cycle narrative - “tribal conflict,” “instability,” “ancient hatreds” - into a supply-chain question. “Who gives us the arms?” isn’t rhetorical decoration; it’s an accusation aimed past the local strongman and toward the international marketplace that profits from perpetual fracture. She’s refusing the story that Africans are simply fated to fight. The fight, she implies, is financed, stocked, and quietly incentivized.

The second pivot is even sharper: debt. Arms don’t just kill people; they restructure a country’s future. By naming indebtedness, Makeba links gunfire to balance sheets, IMF meetings, and extraction contracts. Violence becomes a business model: you sell weapons, then you collect payments through leverage over “the very resources we need to keep there.” That line lands like a punch because it identifies the real collateral as sovereignty itself - minerals, oil, land, labor - the stuff a nation would use to build schools and hospitals now pledged to repay its own destabilization.

Coming from a musician who lived in exile for her anti-apartheid stance, the message carries lived authority. Makeba is doing cultural work as much as political work: breaking the spell of blame that keeps attention locked inside borders. Her subtext is a demand for moral accounting, but also narrative control: stop treating Africa as the site of inexplicable chaos and start naming the upstream beneficiaries.