FROM a heroic fighter to president and then to a revered statesman, the late Nelson Mandela sainted in his image as both cause and muse in the entertainment community. From the 1960s, when he was a political prisoner and South Africa was under the laws of apartheid, right up to recent times when the racist laws of the land had fallen and he was among the world’s most admired people, Mandela inspired concerts, songs, poems, fiction and movies.
Artists were equally drawn to the man and to what he stood for. During the more than a quarter-century that Mandela was jailed, his freedom became synonymous with the freedom of his country. Songwriters and poets invoked his name in calling for apartheid’s end and an artistic boycott of South Africa.
Highlights of works inspired by Mandela include concerts. One of the landmarks of the movement to free Mandela was a 1988 televised concert from London’s Wembley Stadium that celebrated his 70th birthday and featured such superstars as Stevie Wonder, Whitney Houston and Sting.
Songs protesting apartheid and praising Mandela were written throughout the 1980s and up through his release from prison in 1990, from Eddy Grant’s “Gimme Hope Jo’Anna” to Steve Van Zandt’s all-star “Sun City,” featuring Bruce Springsteen, Majek Fashek’s Free Africa; Free Mandela, Miles Davis and many other performers, which called for artists to refuse to play in South Africa.
Some of Hollywood’s greatest actors played him on film. Academy Award-winner, Sidney Poitier, gifted at conveying fiery resilience and good-natured restraint, was an obvious choice to portray him for a TV movie in 1997. Morgan Freeman, another Oscar-winning actor of such august bearing that his roles have ranged from judges to God, played Mandela in 2009’s “Invictus,” directed by Clint Eastwood, about a South African rugby team. Danny Glover also starred in a TV movie about his life, while Mandela himself made a cameo at the end of Spike Lee’s “Malcolm X,” released in 1992. “Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom,” starring Idris Elba and based on Mandela’s autobiography, was just released this month.
Nadine Gordimer’s 1987 novel, “A Sport of Nature”, prophesied the end of apartheid and included a liberation leader based on Mandela. Poems about Mandela date back at least to the 1970s with “And I Watch it in Mandela,” by South Africa’s John Matshikiza. Jekwu Ikeme’s “When Mandela Goes,” published in 2004, bowed to mortality and looked to a future without the hallowed man, whose tribal name was Madiba. “When you go Madiba, your nobility shall be our lasting inheritance, this land you so love shall continue to love you, we shall trail the long and majestic walk your gallant walk shall be our cross and shepherd.”
