Photographs of a young Miriam Makeba never seen before go on show in Johannesburg this week.
The images form part of an exhibition of one of Africa's pioneering photojournalists, Priya Ramrakha. The Kenya-born photographer covered numerous assignments for Kenyan newspapers, and then Time and Life.
Ramrakha left East Africa in the late 1950s to study in California. It is there that he most likely encountered and photographed the young Makeba in 1960, in the era before she became the first African to win a Grammy.
"He would have been a student in Los Angeles and probably excited to meet Makeba, given his connection to the anti-colonial press in Kenya, and his interest in the Civil Rights Movement in the US," says curator Shravan Vidyarthi. "Priya's scrapbooks are a visual record."
Look at her. She was more relaxed.
There was not, as yet, a self-awareness of a brand. She had not mutated into the "spokeswoman of the race". It would be a matter of time before she gave the 1963 speech at the UN, pleading with world leaders to force South Africa to do away with apartheid.
The photographs are a memory jolt of her searing and demanding beauty and, if anything, the burden with which beauty in all its variations must deal in times of strife.
The exhibition is a labour of love for Vidyarthi, who also made an award-winning documentary about the photographer.
"Africa had been portrayed through the colonial lens. Priya became one of the first photographers to document Africa from an African perspective," he says.
Vidyarthi trawled through archival material stashed in boxes, some of them piled up in a Nairobi garage.
Born into an activist/journalist family, Ramrakha photographed Kenya's struggle for freedom. Following independence in 1963, he covered conflict in Zanzibar, Congo, Rhodesia, Aden and Nigeria. His work includes images of 20th-century icons: Martin Luther King Jr, Malcolm X, John F Kennedy and Jackie Kennedy Onassis, Richard Nixon and the British royal family.
"As one of the first African photographers for Time/Life, he was in a unique position to counter, to some degree, reductive views on African experiences," says Vidyarthi.
In 1968, a CBS film crew captured his final moments in crossfire between Nigerian soldiers and Biafran rebels. He was shot several times, his camera fell to the ground.
CBS correspondent Morley Safer tried to carry Ramrakha to safety. He died, at the age of 33, just before they reached an aid station.
A Pan-African Perspective 1950-1968 opens at the FADA Gallery, University of Johannesburg, on October 5..