Malaika in this thread refers to a specific song.

The Kumasi Project provides the lyrics of the song "Malaika" as found on the recording "Mama Africa: The Very Best of Miriam Makeba".
The lyrics & translation are very much like those found in the first post to this thread 09 Nov 01 - 07:53 AM .

The Kumasi Project also provides this commentary about the song:
"Authorship of Malaika is disputed. A Kenyan named Fadhili William recorded it a couple of times in the late 50s and early 60s. He says he wrote it and he is generally recognized as the owner. Miriam Makeba made it famous with her recording of it in 1964(?). Angelique Kidjo copied Makeba's version sound for sound as best she could but between the two of them, they really mangled the words in Swahili. You can hear Makeba singing the song to her husband Stokely Carmichael and Angelique put all that stuff in her song not knowing what she was saying. It appears the song was written in the 40s by a Tanzanian but two different people are credited. So no one really knows (except for Fadhili and the Tanzanians).

Malaika was transcribed in Joan Maw's Twende! A Practical Swahili Course and also in Magdalena Hauner's Nyimbo za Kiswahili. The early Fadhili William recording (1959) has only two verses and so do these two transcriptions. However, Mariam Makeba's recording has a third verse (the Pesa... verse) and a later record by Fadhili also has the Pesa verse. It is likely that Fadhili did not write the original two verses but may have authored the "pesa" verse. It appears from Kwame Bandele's internet posting that Grant Charo gets credit for the song in the Hauner book. Other East Africans claiming to have written the song are Lucas Tututu from Mombasa and Adam Salim from Tanzania. Researcher Flemming Harrev says that Salim claims to have written the song while living in Nairobi in 1945-46. He recorded the song for Columbia Records in 1950. Fadhili is now generally recognized as the composer for royalty purposes."...