Joan Baez

Nelson Mandela , 2020

 
24 x 30 in

acrylic on canvas

Joan met Nelson Mandela at his 90th birthday party – a gala, celebrity-filled tribute concert and dinner in 2008 in London’s Hyde Park.

Belying his small stature, this giant on the world stage radiated an overarching charisma and an aura of wisdom and resiliency earned through decades of confinement, struggle, suffering and ultimately triumph. In 1994, four years after he was freed from prison, he was sworn in as South Africa’s first black president.

“He was a gentle soul,” Joan says. “But you can’t get any tougher than being locked up for 27 years in a South African prison and emerging without a chip on your shoulder.”

At the dinner, she was equally moved by Mandela’s prison comrades, who were anxious to tell her something that brings her close to tears as she recalls that moment all these years later.

“The loveliest part was that his cellmates approached me to tell me how much my music had meant to them when they were in prison,” she remembers. “I said, ‘Really?’ Because I didn’t know that.”

Without resorting to violence, this champion of social justice waged a lifelong fight against racism, winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993 for dismantling apartheid, the government-sanctioned system of discrimination and segregation that oppressed its black citizens for 50 years.

Mandela died in Johannesburg in 2013 at the age of 95. In his memory, Joan released a Grammy-nominated rendition of “Asimbonanga (Mandela),” an anti-apartheid anthem written while Mandela was imprisoned on Robben Island by South African musician Johnny Clegg and his band Savuka. The title, in Zulu, roughly translates to, “We can’t see him,” alluding to the pain and frustration his followers felt while their leader was locked away from them and their movement.

At the 90th birthday tribute concert in London, Joan, Clegg and the Soweto Gospel Choir performed the “Asimbonanga” together. After dancing on stage to the song at a concert in 1999, Mandela asked the band to play it again, saying, “It is music and dancing that makes me at peace with the world.”

From the collection of William Pereira

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