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Mandela loved music, and was perhaps unique among global statesmen in realising how it could have an important political impact. In April 1990, on his first visit to Britain after 27 years in jail, his first appearance was not at a meeting of activists or politicians, but at an epic pop show in his honour at London’s Wembley Stadium watched by a television audience of hundreds of millions around the world. “Thank you that you chose to care”, said Mandela.
He was well aware that a similar concert, held at the same venue just 18 months earlier, had helped to transform his image, and perhaps had sped his release from prison. On June 11 1988, a television audience of some 600 million people in 67 countries had watched The Nelson Mandela 70th Birthday Tribute. It was broadcast at a time when the South African authorities still tried to portray him as a terrorist, rather than a wrongly-jailed world leader. The all-star cast included Stevie Wonder, Hugh Masekela, Dire Straits, Eurythmics, and, of course, Jerry Dammers of the Specials singing his anthem Free Nelson Mandela.
It was an extraordinary event, and echoed the role that music had played in the anti-apartheid movement. South African stars like Miriam Makeba and Hugh Masekela had started the campaign back in the late Fifties and Sixties, after managing to leave South Africa for the USA, where they used their fame as musicians to highlight the increasingly desperate situation for those they had left behind in South Africa’s townships.
Miriam Makeba was Africa’s first musical superstar, a fine jazz singer who introduced African songs to a Western audience. Starting out with the Manhattan Brothers, she sang both Western jazz standards and mbaqanga, the South African pop fusion of home-grown jazz, or marabi, and township vocal styles. In 1959 she took the lead in the hit South African jazz opera, King Kong, but then managed to leave South Africa to develop an international career, often acting as much like a campaigning diplomat as a musician. In 1962 she sang at a New York birthday celebration for President John F. Kennedy, and the following year she was the only artist invited to the opening ceremonies for the new Organisation of African Unity. In 1964 Makeba received an even great honour, as she was asked to address the UN Special Committee Against Apartheid. In the following decade, in both 1975 and ‘76, she would even address the UN General Assembly. The South African government angrily revoked her citizenship. In 1960 she had been joined in exile by the great jazz trumpeter Hugh Masekela, another fiery political activist and sophisticated performer, to whom she would briefly be married.
The musical campaign against apartheid intensified throughout the Seventies and Eighties and produced a batch of great political songs. In South Africa, there was the stirring anthem Asimbonanga (and equally powerful political pop video) by the white singer Johnny Clegg. In the USA Gil Scott-Heron released his protest classic Johannesburg and Little Steven, Sun City, a call for fellow musicians not to play at the resort in one of South Africa’s so-called ‘homelands’. From Britain there was Peter Gabriel’s powerful lament Biko, and The Specials’ Free Nelson Mandela. The Caribbean contributed to Eddie Grant’s hit Gimme Hope Jo’Anna. All these songs added to the pressure for Mandela’s release. He clearly thought that music made a difference. The story continues...
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