24 August 1989
There’s a generation of people for whom Nelson Mandela was always the twinkly-eyed, grandfatherly figure who served as president and figurehead of South Africa in the 1990s and ’00s. For those of us who were alive and aware of world affairs in 1989, we had a different concept of him – and ‘concept’ it was, as no one had seen Mandela in public in 25 years. The idea then of Nelson Mandela in six years’ time presenting a white South African rugby captain with the Rugby World Cup in a packed South African stadium as president of South Africa while wearing a South Africa rugby jersey would have seemed fanciful, to say the least. Yet it came to pass.
The ’80s saw several prominent songs about the continuing apartheid system in South Africa and specifically about its two most notable political prisoners: Steve Biko, who had been beaten to death in police custody in 1977, and Mandela, who in 1989 had been in jail for a quarter of a century. Those tracks include ‘Free Nelson Mandela’ by The Specials, ‘Biko’ by Peter Gabriel, ‘Mandela Day’ by Simple Minds, and this Celtic folk composition.
I’m not a fan of Dolores Keane or this song, I don’t find it has much to say, plus it does the same thing as ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’ in making a specific country stand for ‘Africa’ in general. What I will say in its favour is that, the imagery of the title aside, it sticks to prosaic language—”Sweating in the dungeon of the diamond mine / Blood was shed on the picket line“—and rightly trusts that this will do the job. This immediately lifts ‘Lion In A Cage’ above U2’s terrible ‘Silver and Gold’, for instance. Faint praise, I know.
These ’80s songs didn’t bring down the South African apartheid regime any more than Lethal Weapon 2 did; the figureheads of that successful struggle were the people of South Africa themselves, their global envoys like Desmond Tutu, local pressure groups like the Anti-Apartheid Movement in Britain and the striking Dunnes Stores workers in Ireland, and activists like Biko and Mandela who suffered grievously for what was right. That said, in our time we still see appalling structural racism in action, plus venomous and equivocating responses to the simple proposition that Black Lives Matter. As well as being pop-cultural time capsules, maybe those songs can simply stand to remind us that even at their bleakest, things can be changed, if we want.
