Videos: Nelson Mandela – “It Is Music And Dancing That Makes Me At Peace With The World”

Posted by Stephen Cook On 12-6-13

By David Haglund, Slate.com – December 6, 2013

http://tinyurl.com/kmvnsow

In the 1980s, a number of musicians raised their voices to call for the freedom of Nelson Mandela. (The fight against apartheid, as the documentary Amandla! highlighted, was waged partly with music.)

The most famous of these protest songs, in the U.S. at least, is probably 1984’s “(Free) Nelson Mandela” by the Specials, which reached No. 9 on the U.K. charts and helped to make Mandela’s cause more widely known.

 (video is available on arcturiantools.blogspot.com)

Three years later, the South African musician Hugh Masekela had one of his biggest hits with “Bring Him Back Home (Nelson Mandela),” which became an anthem among Mandela supporters—and which Mandela himself would later dance to, a free man.

 

  (video is available on arcturiantools.blogspot.com)

The same year that Masekela’s song came out, the South African band Savuka, fronted by Johnny Clegg, released “Asimbonanga,” which roughly translates as “We have not seen him.”

Mandela would dance to that one, too—and in the highlight of this video, you can watch him do so below when he joins Clegg on stage.

“It is music and dancing,” he says, “that makes me at peace with the world.”

And then, after the song ends, Mandela shows us his inimitable humour…”But I don’t see much movement at the back there, you know.”

So he asks the band to play it again so people can dance more than they did the first time.