Creativity Quote by Miriam Makeba

Makeba’s line lands with the plainspoken force of someone who’s spent a lifetime watching institutions pick favorites and call it “need.” She’s not arguing in abstractions; she’s pointing at an administrative bias so normalized it disappears into the background. “A lot of homes for boys” isn’t just a statistic - it’s an indictment of whose vulnerability society is prepared to recognize. Boys’ precarity gets infrastructure. Girls’ precarity gets silence, or worse, moral policing.

The phrasing matters. “Very few for girls” is an understatement that carries its own anger: she doesn’t dramatize the harm, she lets the imbalance speak for itself. Then comes the pivot - “that is why I chose” - which quietly claims agency in a world that often treats charitable work as benevolent impulse rather than political decision. Makeba frames care as a corrective, not a gift. She’s stepping into a gap created by culture, policy, and patriarchy.

Context sharpens it. As a South African musician exiled for opposing apartheid, Makeba understood how systems decide who is worth protecting - and how quickly “protection” becomes a tool of control. Girls, especially in many African contexts under colonial and apartheid legacies, faced layered risks: sexual violence, domestic labor burdens, early marriage, lost schooling. Her commitment reads as feminist pragmatism: start where the neglect is measurable, where the social ledger is already tilted.

It’s also a reminder that celebrity activism can be at its best when it’s specific. Not “help the children,” but build for the ones nobody built for.