Nelson Mandela 70th Birthday Tribute
| Popular-music concert by Various Artists | |
| Venue | Wembley Stadium |
|---|---|
| Date(s) | 11 June 1988 |
The Nelson Mandela 70th Birthday Tribute was a popular-music concert staged on 11 June 1988 at Wembley Stadium, London, and broadcast to 67 countries and an audience of 600 million. Marking the forthcoming 70th birthday (18 July 1988) of the imprisoned anti-apartheid revolutionary Nelson Mandela, the concert was also referred to as Freedomfest, Free Nelson Mandela Concert and Mandela Day. In the United States, the Fox television network heavily censored the political aspects of the concert.
The Birthday Tribute was regarded by many, including the Anti-Apartheid Movement (AAM) and the African National Congress (ANC), as raising worldwide consciousness of the imprisonment of ANC leader Mandela and others by the South African apartheid government and forcing the regime to release Nelson Mandela earlier than would otherwise have happened.
Eighteen months after the event, with a release now thought to be approaching, Mandela asked for the organisers of the event to create a second concert as an official international reception at which, after 27 years in prison, he would address the world. The second event, Nelson Mandela: An International Tribute for a Free South Africa, was, like the first, conceived to be shown on television across the world and was broadcast from Wembley Stadium to more than 60 countries on 16 April 1990.
The first concert, according to Robin Denselow, music critic and presenter of the BBC broadcast, writing in 1989, was the "biggest and most spectacular pop-political event of all time, a more political version of Live Aid with the aim of raising consciousness rather than just money."
The organiser and risk-funder of the two events was producer and impresario Tony Hollingsworth. Hollingsworth also conceived the idea for the first event.
Hollingsworth developed the plan for the first Mandela concert after talking to singer Jerry Dammers of The Specials ska band, who had written the song Free Nelson Mandela in 1984 and founded the Artists Against Apartheid organisation the following year. In early 1986, Hollingsworth contacted Dammers to say that the Greater London Council, for which Hollingsworth was producing a number of festivals and concerts, might be able to fund the AAA. The authority was due to be abolished at the end of March and had spare cash to give away. But a grant turned out to be impossible because the AAA was not a legal entity and Dammers had no interest in making it one.
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