Anyone old enough to remember 1985 knows that “We Are the World” made music history. The single was huge. The album, with bonus tracks from several of the artists, not only sold well but won a Grammy. Pictures and CDs sold, T-shirts sold, posters, books … By the summer, USA for Africa had taken in $10.8 million from the recording, and another $45 million from merchandise sold around the world. Eventually, the song’s sales totaled well over $100 million. All this money—from the music to the merchandise—would go to famine relief. Assuming, that is, that we could control it carefully enough.
I hadn’t anticipated “We Are the World” would be a full-time job for me after the song was out on the market. In fact, my job had just begun. We hired experts in relief work and logistics, made the command decision not to parcel out money to other, established groups, and embarked on a global effort to get the goods we needed. After all the publicity focused on famine in Africa, many countries had sent emergency food supplies. We came to see that the greatest contribution we could make at that particular moment was to bring planeloads of lifesaving drugs and other medical supplies, tents, pumps to dig wells, and more such essential nonfood goods. We started bargaining with international pharmaceutical companies to get these drugs at the lowest possible prices. USA for Africa was registered in California, and at every step, state and federal overseers had us under their magnifying glasses, looking for unpaid taxes or bogus deductions. So along with supply contractors, we had a crack team of accountants and business managers, too.
One day in June 1985, I boarded a commercial jet in New York bound for Belgium—the first step in our journey. With me were Julie, Ken Kragen, and two prominent doctors, Irwin Redlener and Lloyd Greig, as well as Michael Jackson’s brother Marlon. Oh—and a pack of print and TV news journalists who had sworn they would focus their reporting on the relief effort and famine, not dwell on the tyrants in Ethiopia and Sudan. We’d had trouble persuading those governments to let us in at all. The last thing we needed was to alienate them. More of their people would die if we did.
Two chartered Flying Tigers 747 cargo jets were waiting for us in Belgium, loaded with the pharmaceutical supplies and other goods we’d pulled together. We transferred to those planes and flew on to Khartoum. There to meet us, with a big grin, was Mohamed Amin, the remarkable Kenyan cameraman whose shocking footage of the famine camps had awakened the world and launched our campaign. One of eight children born to a railway engineer in Kenya, Amin had overcome abject poverty to cover most of Africa’s tragic dramas of the late sixties and seventies, from Tom Mboya’s assassination to the handover of Kenya by the British to Jomo Kenyatta. His recent film African Calvary had dramatized the impact of famine all over the continent, particularly in Kenya, yet the outside world had ignored it. Finally he’d collaborated with BBC television reporter Michael Buerk and gotten that seven-minute clip shown on British television. He was the real hero of our story.
From the airport we were driven directly to the presidential palace, where Sudan’s newest band of leaders had just set up residence. Sudan’s strongman, Jaafar Nimeiri, had been pushed out of power weeks before by his defense minister, General Abdel Rahman Swar al-Dahab. We joined the general and his colleagues for dinner beneath white flags with red crescents. Al-Dahab went to great lengths to persuade us that he was a transitional leader—as soon as elections were held, he would step aside—and in fact, he did just that the next year. But he seemed unbothered that uncountable numbers of his countrymen were starving in camps outside the capital while he dined on fragrant grilled lamb and couscous. Nor did he have any qualms about warehousing sacks of grain, intended to relieve suffering in southern Sudan, in Khartoum’s port. The south, after all, was controlled by the rebels in Sudan’s ongoing civil war.
Since we were bringing medical supplies, not food, and perhaps since our every move was being recorded by television cameras, we were granted extraordinary access. First we went to a camp outside the capital, where tens of thousands of people lay in desperate straits. Nothing could have prepared us for this degree of horrible need. Mothers giving their children dry breasts to suck, mothers carrying dead children to an open pit, mothers and fathers sitting over these pits mourning the loved ones they’d just put in. Many graves were marked white with lime, to indicate cholera or some other highly infectious disease. The smell of death and disease was unlike any other, overwhelming and unforgettable. For weeks we’d ridden such a high from the triumph of “We Are the World.” Now we were plunged to the deepest low. This suffering was too vast.
The next day we headed south in a convoy of trucks. I remember the parched earth, with not a speck of green as far as the eye could see, and the endless military checkpoints, where mostly teenage soldiers, with AK-47’s, solemnly checked our papers of passage. We were going from clan to clan; at each successive checkpoint, the danger of being turned back—or detained, or worse—was very real.
The southernmost camps were even more horrifying, if that were possible. After some hours of wandering stunned past emaciated figures and little green plastic lean-tos that housed whole families with nothing but the canvas coverings over their heads and the rags they wore, I staggered back toward the supply trucks, where our doctors had set up a tent and were administering to a long line of the needy. The line went on and on; I couldn’t see the end of it. Clearly, the doctors would run out of supplies long before they ran out of patients. “How can you handle that emotionally?” I asked one of the doctors that night over dinner. “Knowing that you’ll never have enough to meet the needs of the people?”
The doctor, an Australian, had a ready answer. “I used to look at a crisis in all its magnitude,” he said. “I never do that anymore. I look at what’s in front of me. I’ll never save everyone, or even very many, but the one in front of me—I may save that one, and the one behind him. You do what you can do. The important thing is that you do it.”
Those words stayed with me as we flew on to Kenya. Jomo Kenyatta had died in 1978, though his dreams of national unity had expired long before. Theoretically, Kenya was a democracy, wealthier than its neighbors, and in the capital of Nairobi, we saw well-dressed citizens striding off to work. But in the outlying areas, to which Mohamed Amin led us, the people were as hard hit by the famine as anywhere else. There, Kenya was even more monochromatic than Sudan: no green leaves, no green fields, no birds or flowing rivers, just carcasses and corpses.
Our next stop was the heart of darkness, Ethiopia, where some of the worst suffering was occurring. In Addis Ababa, its capital, we met the country’s notorious Mengistu Haile Mariam, responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of Ethiopians, many of them children. Mengistu denied having smothered the ailing Haile Selassie—my mother’s hero, whose face I so well remembered from movie theater newsreels. He even denied instituting a reign of terror made famous for the “wasted bullet” tax: Families whose members were shot to death would have to pay for the bullet used.
In person, Mengistu was a little Napoleon bedecked with medals, holding court in a palace of Polish marble. He talked of all the good he was doing for his people, having somehow forgotten how many of them were starving nearby. He seemed very much at ease with himself, and in truth he was a cultivated man with an easy charm, but you could tell who was boss, and by the way he spoke to his henchmen, that he was not to be trifled with. I had to suppress my deep desire to challenge much of what he was so smugly espousing. I had no choice. We needed his permission to fly helicopters to the northern province of Tigre, where much of Ethiopia’s worst suffering was occurring. Since this area was rebel-held in Ethiopia’s ongoing civil war, Mengistu hadn’t even allowed the Red Cross to go there. No breach of diplomacy was as extreme as that between the United States and Ethiopia. Mengistu would not allow any contact between the United States and his government. Apparently, because of my earlier negotiations with his representatives at the United Nations in New York and my plea to let this band of artists have access to the peoples of Ethio
pia for our humanitarian mission, he waived his restrictions.
We flew to Tigre on three helicopters provided by Mengistu. The landscape was strikingly monotonous—plateaus in every direction. The lead helicopter got lost, and we all had to land in a remote village, atop one of those plateaus. The children peeped out from their mothers’ skirts, saucer-eyed, as if we’d come from outer space. We left them small sacks of grain, and when we were back on course, we swooped low over the plateaus and identified more villages that would benefit from food drops by cargo planes.
Near the end of that day, when we’d reached the camp in Tigre and handed out our supplies, I met a flock of nuns—in their black habits and white head scarves, they really looked like birds—and struck up a conversation with them. They were as Irish as could be, and flabbergasted to have this day in the camps end by meeting me. We sat around a campfire, and I fell in love with the whole lot of them. They weren’t visiting, like we were. This was their life, helping the world’s most desperate people survive, or more often, to die with comfort; more than one million Ethiopians would die from this famine before it was through. What sustained them, even more than their innate good cheer, was their faith. I still had such conflicted feelings about the Church, such anger at those Catholic nuns who’d rapped my knuckles long ago. But these ladies, these activist nuns, were a very different breed, and I felt blessed—there was no other word for it—at being in their company.
“Harry,” one of the nuns said softly as the fire was ebbing, “will you do us a favor?”
“Anything,” I said.
“Will ya sing ‘Danny Boy’ fer us? Nobody sings ‘Danny Boy’ like you do.”
I sang alone at first, then the nuns joined in, and we sang more songs, until the fire was just embers in the Ethiopian night.
Critics—and there were more than a few among the journalists who covered our campaign—would say “We Are the World” was naïve at best, a speck in a sea of suffering. They would note that we’d worked with the repressive governments of Sudan and Ethiopia, which kept food relief from the rebel-held areas, hoping to literally starve the opposition to death. To me these criticisms seemed shortsighted and cynical. Our aid saved lives—lots of lives. And as that Australian doctor had said, you saved the lives you could. That in itself justified the effort. But it did more. “We Are the World” had brought to America the spirit of helping famine relief that Bob Geldof had ignited in Britain. Now the organizers on both sides of the Atlantic combined efforts for the next step: Live Aid, the largest famine-relief live concert, held on July 13, 1985.
Live Aid was the most ambitious live broadcast in history. Some two billion viewers around the world listened as the daylong concert unfolded on two continents simultaneously: at Wembley Stadium in London, and at John F. Kennedy Stadium in Philadelphia. I had an engagement I couldn’t break that evening in Atlantic City, singing at the Golden Nugget. But the owner, Steve Wynn, was kind enough to put a helicopter at my disposal; as soon as the show was over, I flew over to Philadelphia. I arrived just in time for the finale of “We Are the World,” joining dozens of musicians on that stage, led by Lionel Richie, Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Ronnie Wood, and many others. The stars on Wembley’s stage sang with us, and millions more around the world joined in. That moment was as inspiring as the recording of the song in L.A. six months before. Financially, Live Aid was even more successful; between pledges made and merchandise sold, it raised more than $275 million.
Among the many lives changed by this amazing year was Ken Kragan’s. Live Aid had barely ended before Ken began plotting his next move. This time I was the one to be a little hesitant. “You want to do what?” I’d heard right: Ken wanted to organize a human chain from New York to California, millions of people holding hands in an unbroken chain across the country, humble and famous alike, for fifteen minutes of solidarity that would raise millions more exclusively to fight hunger and homelessness in the United States—if, as hoped, each participant contributed ten dollars. Through USA for Africa, Ken hired a staff of four hundred and began working tirelessly toward his “Hands Across America” date: May 25, 1986. One of the greatest obstructionists we had to turn around was President Reagan, whose administration scoffed when we first proposed that the human chain go right through the White House. Yet by May, when we had recruited more than five million Americans to participate, most of them of voting age, and lined up major media for the event, Reagan had a change of heart.
On the day itself, I was stationed near the start of the chain, at the George Washington Bridge in Manhattan, not far from Brooke Shields. Yoko Ono and Liza Minnelli were somewhere in that New York chain as well. Bill and Hillary Clinton joined the chain in Arkansas. Nuns in Pittsburgh held hands with Hells Angels. In rural New Mexico, ranchers filled in gaps in the human chain by lining up cattle, horn to hoof. There were, no doubt, a few gaps remaining, but enough people did participate to span the country, at least mathematically. Hands Across America would be called a “noble failure,” because it cleared only $3 million after its $17 million in costs, instead of the roughly $50 million that should have come in after costs if every participant had paid $10. Perhaps. But I’d emphasize “noble.” Nothing like Hands Across America had ever been imagined, much less carried out. It did raise money for local U.S. charities fighting hunger and homelessness. And it passed into history as a unique demonstration of the best of the American spirit: the willingness to help those in need. I feel we’re too inward, now, too self-absorbed, to create such a moment ever again.
There would be more massive fundraising efforts before this trend ebbed—Farm Aid, for one. For its own part, USA for Africa would spend the next several years giving its millions away, mostly to small African NGOs, where block grants of $50,000 could build and sustain child-care centers, women’s health centers, training schools, and more. Its work done by the early 1990s, USA for Africa would lie dormant, though still ticking, until late 2010, when it would issue a twenty-fifth anniversary We Are the World album of new music by a new generation of artists. People are still starving in Africa, and hunger stalks far too many homes in America. The work is unfinished; sadly, the will to do it has diminished.
Our work would go on without Mohamed Amin, the Kenyan cameraman whose shocking footage had led to all that followed. For a while after the mid-eighties famine, his luck held. He was one of the first cameramen into Baghdad after the invasion of Kuwait in 1990; he covered the Ethiopian civil war that brought down Mengistu the next year. But it was in that conflict that he lost his left arm—and nearly his right as well—in an ammunition dump explosion. No one thought he would work again, but Amin designed a prosthesis that doubled as a tripod and enabled him to snap pictures with his recovered right hand. Then one day in 1996, hijackers boarded the flight he was taking from Ethiopia to Nairobi. Amin tried to reason with the hijackers, pointing out that the plane didn’t have enough fuel to reach Zanzibar, where they wanted to go. The hijackers didn’t believe him; the plane went down, and Amin was among those who died.
Through all these fundraising records and concerts, I never lost sight of the sanctions movement against South Africa’s apartheid government, and the campaign to free Nelson Mandela. In May 1986, all the pressure put by those of us at TransAfrica on U.S. corporations, politicians, artists, and athletes, and all those daily demonstrations at the South African embassies, led to an historic triumph: the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act. Introduced in Congress that month, it became the first foreign policy bill of the twentieth century to survive a presidential veto. Reagan struck it down in October, arguing that the sanctions it made official would hurt the people it meant to help. By large margins, the House and Senate disagreed. The bill banned all new U.S. trade and investment in South Africa and all commercial air travel between South Africa and the United States, and put pressure on companies like my nemesis Coca-Cola to withdraw from the country. To undo those sanctions, South Africa would have to eliminate
apartheid—and free Nelson Mandela. Almost overnight, South Africa plunged into a deep recession, and for apartheid, the endgame began.
I had a plan of my own to help put more pressure on South Africa to free Mandela. I wanted to produce a TV miniseries on his life and have it broadcast all over the world. I even had the perfect actor to play Mandela: Sidney! But therein began a difficult journey that would lead to our second big break.
Getting Sidney to say he’d play Mandela was the easy part. Securing rights to Mandela’s story—from Mandela himself—posed a larger challenge. I still couldn’t go to South Africa, much less visit Mandela at Robben Island prison. I dealt instead with Mandela’s lawyer, one Ismail Ayob, of Indian origin, a somewhat mysterious character whom Mandela would eventually successfully sue for profiteering from the use of his name and mishandling his family trusts. Twice I wrote letters to Mandela, sent them through Ayob, and heard nothing back. The third time, I got a signed agreement back from Mandela through Ayob. For his rights Mandela wanted no money for himself; any profits should be given to the foundation being formed in his name at that time.
I thought the hardest part was done. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Again through Ayob, I then went to Winnie Mandela, Nelson’s wife, and got her to grant us her rights as well. She, unlike Nelson, wanted money. We were instructed to send it to one of the nonprofits she oversaw, and so we did, though with misgivings. Winnie, by any measure, was a hero. She’d taken the heat, stared the police down, endured house arrest, and never wavered from attacking the state. No matter how much she was jailed (sometimes in solitary confinement) and humiliated, she held her head high. But the stress from all this, while her husband languished in jail year after year, perhaps never to be released, had taken its toll. Understandably, she saw the prospect of a big payday as her due. I just wondered how much of a guarantee our money was buying. As it turned out, I was right to worry. Winnie liked the terms of our deal so much that she sold her rights twice. I woke up one day to read in the trades that Bill Cosby’s wife, Camille, had just acquired them, too.
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