NELSON MANDELA: July 21, 1991: 'This is the happiest day of my life'
The measure of an event’s significance to Jamaicans who are not the official movers and shakers is how moved they are to comment in song and shave a leg to their sentiment. The names Nelson and Winnie Mandela are enshrined in Jamaican popular music, which wholeheartedly endorsed are Jamaica’s anti-apartheid stance at he government level.
So while there were songs speaking against apartheid in South Africa generally, such as Peter Tosh’s Fight Apartheid and Bunny Wailer’s Botha the Mosquito, there were also songs specifically about the incarcerated African National Congress (ANC) leader (among them deejay Brigadier Jerry’s Free Mandela) and his wife Winnie (Carlene Davis did Winnie Mandela). And when they visited Jamaica in 1991 on a 24-hour stay, Ninja Man rejoiced Mandela Come.
At the state level, in a memorial service at the University Chapel, Mona, after Mandela’s death, Professor Rupert Lewis said Jamaica, under the leadership of Premier Norman Manley, banned trade with and travel to South Africa in 1956. However, Jamaica’s anti-apartheid stance had begun over a half-century before, when Robert Love set up Pan-African committees across Jamaica to educate persons about conditions in South Africa and continued with mass meetings organised by Marcus Garvey in the USA in the 1920s.
So it was natural that Nelson Mandela would have an affinity for a country which, at the state level was the first in the Western Hemisphere and the second globally (after India) to bring sanctions against South Africa, and whose popular music was an inspiration to those in the armed struggle against apartheid.
But no-one could have predicted the depth of Jamaica’s effect on Nelson Mandela who was welcomed with an outpouring of numbers and emotion on July 21, 1991, as he did the official rounds, from National Heroes Park to Gordon House, Vale Royal and the University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona Campus; but it was when he stood before the mass of Jamaicans gathered at the National Stadium that Nelson Mandela said, “this is the happiest day of my life.”
It was a strong statement from someone who had been released from 27 years of imprisonment just over a year previously, on February 11, 1990.
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