The Specials AKA, ‘Free Nelson Mandela’: We live in hope

The Specials AKA
‘Nelson Mandela’

Highest UK Top 40 position:
Number 9 on April 8, 1984

1. 21 years in captivity

Right now, as I’m typing, it is mid-November, 2024. Donald Trump has just been elected President of the United States. “Elected” seems too weak a word to describe what’s happened. He conquered. Ascended. The three branches of American democracy, which are supposed to work independently and keep each other honest, are entirely under his control. Nobody has had this much undisputed power since… ever, I think? Maybe Stalin? Julius Caesar? Even Caeser had to deal with a hostile Senate.

The situation is pretty fucking bleak, especially as Trump has sworn to be a violent, vengeful leader. Every nightmare scenario is possible now. Spiralling climate change. War in Europe. Concentration camps in America. Oligarchs carving up the world in a new tech-feudalism. None of this is guaranteed to happen. But any of it might happen. The boundary around unthinkable things has shrunk. It’s hard to imagine the future with optimism. It’s hard to imagine the future at all.

This sense of futurelessness isn’t new to me though. It reminds me of being a kid. I grew up in 1980s Ireland, a country that had only come into existence around 50 years before my birth after centuries of violent struggle. Our revolution stagnated and, by the time I arrived, Ireland was a cultural and economic backwater. The mid-80s were especially rough, with an economic collapse causing 15% of people in my hometown to become unemployed almost overnight, my dad being one of those affected. The grown-ups around me didn’t seem to have any sense of the future, and neither did I.

World news started creeping into my consciousness, and it terrified me. I remember being very, very young and flicking through a pamphlet one of my brothers had brought home from a CND rally. I learned about “The Button”, and discovered that someone like Ronald Regan could, at any moment, flick a switch that would end my life and the life of everyone I knew, and that there was nothing we could do about it except hope he didn’t. I started watching the news whenever I could, looking for signs and portents that might tell us if we’d be allowed to live.

The news provided more things to worry about. We were in the Sellafield blast zone, and it seemed like Margaret Thatcher didn’t care if it exploded. It seemed like she wanted it to explode. She liked punishing Irish people and kept Irish people in jail even though she knew they were innocent. Meanwhile, Northern Ireland produced this relentless drumbeat of murders, bombings and punishment beatings. Killing people was wrong, it seemed obvious to me, and I didn’t understand why they were doing it, or why there was graffiti everywhere that seemed to be encouraging them. People assured me that I’d understand when I was older that there were big, powerful forces driving this. Ugly things in the past that made our present inevitable. A war; a famine; centuries of injustice.

Again, I was a kid. I couldn’t piece all of this information together. I just had a constant sense that something was wrong in the world.

Even pop culture didn’t offer an escape. 1984 was the year of ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas’, a thrilling, Avengers-style superstar team-up that was also a sledgehammer reminder of the suffering in this world. A few months before that, there had been a catchy chart hit that seemed like pure escapism until you asked the question it implied:

“Who is Nelson Mandela?”

2. Are you so blind that you cannot see

A lot of people didn’t know who Nelson Mandela was. Jerry Dammers, who wrote the song, hadn’t heard of him until 1983.

Dammers had burst through in the punk era as a founder member of The Specials, scoring two unlikely Number Ones with ‘Too Much Too Young’ (1980) and ‘Ghost Town’ (1981). Dammers had also founded the iconic 2 Tone label and launched several other massive ska acts, including The Beat, The Selecter, The Bodysnatchers, and Madness.

The Specials were driven by a manifesto of socialist politics and racial equality, a response to Margaret Thatcher’s relentless attack on working class life. Sadly, the band barely lasted the length of her first term. Following an argument after their Top Of The Pops performance of ‘Ghost Town’, The Specials imploded and splintered into two different groups (admittedly, a very socialist thing to do.) Terry Hall, Lynval Golding and Neville Staple departed and formed Fun Boy Three, having their own string of unlikely hits and even unlikelier partnerships with Bananarama and The Go-Gos.

Jerry Dammers carried on as The Specials AKA but the music underwent two major changes: the lyrics got more political, while the music became more polished and synth-driven. The first single from the new-look Specials was ‘The Boiler’, a collaboration with Rhoda Dakar of The Bodysnatchers.

‘The Boiler’ is perhaps the most traumatic song ever released as a single. A horrifying account of a date rape, it ends with Dakar screaming as if it’s happening to here right there in the recording booth. Even more disorienting for modern listeners, all this happens over a keyboard riff that sounds a bit like ‘Ebeneezer Goode’.

‘The Boiler’ reached Number 35, which is miraculous given its graphic content. Dakar joined the band fulltime and they began work on the first album of the new era, which included overtly political songs like ‘Racist Friend’. Dammers himself took part in political protests, including anti-Apartheid demonstrations. Yet, somehow, he’d never heard of Nelson Mandela.

At this point, the most anti-Apartheid figure was Stephen Biko, the murdered activist immortalised in song by Peter Gabriel. Everything changed in 1983 when Dammers went to an event in London.

I hadn’t actually heard of Mandela until I went to a concert at Alexandra Palace to celebrate his 65th birthday. People like Julian Bahula, the South African musician who came to Britain in exile, were singing about him, which gave me the idea for the lyrics.

I picked up lots of leaflets at the concert and started learning about Mandela. At that point, he’d been imprisoned for 21 years and the leaflets said the shoes he had in jail were too small for his feet, so I put that in the lyrics.

—The Guardian, December 2013

‘Nelson Mandela’ (also known as ‘Free Nelson Mandela’) was something of a Band Aid affair in itself, featuring Ranking Roger and Dave Wakeling from The Beat, Lynval Golding of Fun Boy Three, and Elvis Costello, who also produced. Caron Wheeler, who would go on to find fame with Soul II Soul, sang on the chorus.

And what a chorus it was. While Paul Simon’s ‘Biko’ was sombre and reserved, ‘Nelson Mandela’ was a joyous party anthem with an unforgettable hook. It was a 1984 song of the summer. The imprisoned ANC leader, suddenly and improbably, became a pop icon.

This was only the beginning of a wave of anti-apartheid pop hits. Stevie Wonder wrote ‘It’s Wrong (Apartheid)’ and got arrested while protesting outside the South African embassy. Spitting Image put ‘I’ve Never Met A Nice South African’ on the b-side of their novelty hit, ‘The Chicken Song’. Labe Siffre won an Ivor Novello for ‘(Something Inside) So Strong’, and Eddy Grant had a worldwide megahit with ‘Gimme Hope Jo’anna’.

Apartheid finally got a proper Band Aid-style charity song—complete with Bono cameo—in the form of ‘(I Ain’t Gonna Play) Sun City’, featuring the likes of Springsteen, Lou Reed, and Bob Dylan alongside Run-DMC and other 80s rappers.

Momentum kept building. Some leaders (such as Thatcher) still denounced Mandela as a terrorist, but the heightened public awareness led to more grassroots action. Here in Ireland, a group of grocery store workers led a multi-year strike because they refused to handle South African bananas. Archbishop Desmond Tutu called to Dublin and thanked the strikers while he was en route to collect his Nobel Peace Prize.

And then, suddenly, the impossible seemed possible. Nelson Mandela was released from prison in 1990. The South African government held talks with Mandela and other Black leaders, eventually agreeing to all-race elections. In April 1994, ten years after the song ‘Nelson Mandela’ had peaked in the charts, Nelson Mandela became the new President of South Africa.

Of course, by then impossible had become almost commonplace. We’d seen the fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of the Cold War, the Northern Ireland peace process, the releases of the Birmingham 6 and Guildford 4. Even Maggie Thatcher was gone. All over the world, good guys were winning and bad guys were on the run. I was a teenager by now and, for the first time, I was beginning to feel that both the world and I had a future.

3. Only one man in a large army

Did a pop song really end apartheid though? No, of course not. In fact, ‘Nelson Mandela’ probably wasn’t even the most important in the anti-Apartheid struggle.

South Africa had been segregated by race since Dutch colonists conquered the Cape of Good Hope in the mid-1600s. Various European factions fought for centuries, while the indigenous people continually lost land and rights. In 1915, the British finally assumed full political control and immediately began building a legal framework to keep the races apart.

(Quick note: Apartheid involved some fucked-up racial politics involving at least four distinct ethnic groups. I’m not getting into that. For simplicity’s sake, we’re just going to say  “White” and “Black”, but it was more complicated than that.)

After World War II, most South African cities saw some degree of race-mixing as non-white workers came to urban areas in search of work. Black leaders saw this as an opportunity to push for improved conditions, and the government seemed somewhat willing to listen, especially as the newly formed United Nations was openly criticising South Africa’s structural racism. There was a sliver of hope for the first time in 300 years.

You’ll never guess what happened next.

Anxious white people, especially in rural areas, grew afraid of these changes. The relatively small National Party ran for election in 1948 on a platform of re-segregation, which they would implement through violent authoritarianism. They won.

People fought back of course, and some of that fightback was cultural. Vuyisile Mini, an African National Congress activist and songwriter, wrote ‘Ndodemnyama we Verwoerd’ (‘Watch Out, Verwoerd’) about Hendrik Verwoerd, the so-called Architect of Apartheid who later became Prime Minister. It absolutely slaps. Here is an excellent version by Harry Belafonte and Miriam Makeba.

None of these protests made any real difference. The National Party won the next election in 1953 with an even bigger margin and used this mandate to keep pushing forward with Apartheid, using gruesome violence to establish rigid ethnic borders.

One of the darker episodes in this era was the destruction of Sophiatown, a bohemian area sometimes described as the Harlem of Johannesburg. Soldiers and police evicted 60,000 people from Sophiatown in 1955, forcing them to a township known as Meadowlands. Afterwards, Sophiatown was renamed Triomf—the Afrikaans word for Triumph.

This event inspired another songwriter, Strike Vilakazi, to write ‘Meadowlands’. It seems innocent enough and the South African authorities even praised Vilakazi for supporting their policies. But Vilakazi’s audience detected the bitter sarcasm he had smuggled into the song, and exiled South African artists turned it into a protest song.

In the 60s, the ANC abandoned politics and turned to military action. Under the leadership of Nelson Mandela, the group began training as a guerilla army with plans to cause disruption and damage, although the group stopped short of intentionally killing civilians.

Music started to become weaponised too, with more radical, militaristic songs becoming popular. One of the best-known is ‘Sobashiya Abazali’ (’We Will Leave Our Parents’), a marching song with the lyrics:

We will leave our parents at home
We go in and out of foreign countries
To places our fathers and mothers don’t know
Following freedom we say goodbye
Goodbye, goodbye home

Mandela was arrested in 1962 and placed on trial for conspiring against the state. In 2016, an ex-CIA agent admitted that they’d helped the South African authorities capture Mandela as they feared that he was a Communist. Mandela faced the death penalty and fully expected to die like so many before him. Vuyisile Mini, the songwriter behind ‘Ndodemnyama we Verwoerd’, had been executed in 1964 despite an international outcry. According to witnesses, he sang before he was taken off to his fate:

“And then, unexpectedly, the voice of Vuyisile Mini came roaring down the hushed passages. Evidently standing on a stool, with his face reaching up to a barred vent in his cell, his unmistakable bass voice was enunciating his final message in Xhosa to the world he was leaving. In a voice charged with emotion but stubbornly defiant he spoke of the struggle waged by the African National Congress and of his absolute conviction of the victory to come… Soon after, I heard the door of their cell being opened. Murmuring voices reached my straining ears, and then the three martyrs broke into a final poignant melody which seemed to fill the whole prison with sound and then gradually faded away into the distant depths of the condemned section”

—Inquiries Journal, November 2010

If you feel pessimistic after Donald Trump’s victory, imagine how bleak things must have been during the rise of Apartheid, how hopeless the future must have seemed against an unbeatable enemy that had ruled for centuries. Imagine the extraordinary courage and belief you’d need to stare into that void and keep singing.

4. Free

There’s a thematic connection between South Africa’s 1948 election and the 2024 Presidential election. Voters have once again expressed their bloodlust and elected a lawless, brutal government that promises to inflict violence on people of colour. This is chilling even if you’re not American, or if you’re likely to suffer from these policies. It’s just horrifying to know that some of your fellow humans relish violence.

But there’s also a direct connection between the events. After the National Party’s 1948 victory, racists and extremists from around the world began emigrating to South Africa because they liked the sound of Apartheid. Among them was J.N. Haldeman, a Canadian chiropractor and a tech-fascist who believed democracy should be abolished and society ruled by scientists and engineers. Haldeman was a zealous champion of Apartheid and wrote several political tracts celebrating the system. Here’s something he wrote around the time Nelson Mandela was arrested:

“Every day the brain-washers repeat and emphasize the things they want us to believe. As examples ‘The Natives are ill-treated,’ ‘underpaid,’ ‘underprivileged,’ ‘separate development is wrong,’ ‘apartheid is un-Christian.’ Every day newspapers, magazines, commercial radio newscasters…din this into the conscious and subconscious minds of the public. People who know it is 99% untrue repeat these lies emphatically and emotionally.”

—New Yorker, September 2023

J.N. Haldeman was Elon Musk’s grandfather. While we can’t judge people by their grandparents, it’s hard to read Haldeman’s words and not hear echoes of Musk polemic about “the Woke Mind Virus” and Great Replacement Theory. And it’s chilling to think that this guy is a core part of Trump’s inner circle.

The past is never dead, as Faulkner said. It’s not even past.

The grim mood of this moment is something I haven’t felt in a long time. It’s even more sickening when you remember the optimism of the 90s and the general feeling that history was moving in the right direction. How can the moral arc of the universe bend towards this? How can we still be hopeful after such dramatic failure?

I wonder, though, if we’re looking at it wrong. We witnessed a unique set of circumstances in the 90s that swept away a lot of structures that were rotten and ready for demolition anyway. Perhaps this tricked us into believing that progress would be easy and justice could be delivered in our lifetime. Perhaps we were spoiled.

From a European perspective, it seemed like ‘Nelson Mandela’ ended Apartheid and pop songs could change the world. But if you pull back, you see that was just one step in a long, long journey, and many people who walked that journey never got to see the end.

Even Nelson Mandela himself only lived one part of that journey. Before him, there were centuries of struggle. People who didn’t know if justice would arrive in the time of their grandchildren or great-grandchildren, but kept hoping anyway.

I could have used some reassurance as a kid, but I don’t have that luxury as an adult. None of us can treat hope as something that’s contingent on outcomes and abandon it when things don’t go out way. If anything, that’s when you most need blind, stupid, ridiculous hope that the world might one day get better. Other people are relying on you to hope. Kids are counting on you to hope. When things are bleak, hope becomes a duty.

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