My Song

by Harry Belafonte

  For my project, which NBC had taken under its wing, I had commitments not only from Sidney but from Jane Fonda and Marlon Brando. (Jane would play Helen Joseph, the white South African dissident; Marlon would play P. W. Botha, the country’s prime minister through most of the 1980s.) For Sidney, Jane, and Marlon to do television was almost unprecedented; they were willing to make that sacrifice, as three of the world’s top film stars, to get Mandela’s story out around the world. Plus I had Fay Kanin, half of a legendary screenwriting team with her husband, Michael, to write the script. Everyone understood the opportunity that existed here to do something of real importance. Everyone except the Cosbys.

  I called Bill in a spirit of camaraderie to say we had an issue I was sure he’d agree with me on, and sent him copies of the exclusive rights letters from Nelson and Winnie Mandela. Both predated Camille’s letter from Winnie. To my astonishment, Bill called me back to say Camille would be proceeding with her project anyway. This jeopardized my legal assurance to NBC that we had exclusive rights from the Mandela family. Camille’s claim would clearly undermine that fact. NBC threatened to withdraw. I was caught in a no-win dilemma because The Cosby Show was on NBC, and the network was not going to risk upsetting its biggest star. Cosby said that Camille’s focus on Winnie made it a different story, and that if I disagreed, the lawyers could work it out. “Take your best shot,” Bill said.

  So I did. I knew Bill had some of Hollywood’s best lawyers, but I went all out and hired Judge Simon H. Rifkind, a founding partner of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, one of the world’s top litigation firms. Judge Rifkind found the case quite compelling, and conveyed to Bill’s lawyers that he would take a special interest in it because he felt it could establish a legal precedent. At that point, Bill backed off. But our friendship was never the same.

  Not long after, I heard that TransAfrica had named Bill to its board. I was incensed. The Cosby Show was a top-rated show in South Africa, meaning that Cosby was profiting from apartheid. What were they thinking? When TransAfrica’s directors refused to reconsider, I resigned. I wouldn’t return until years later, when the actor Danny Glover, a close friend, became chairman and redirected the organization.

  The executive at NBC assigned to shepherd the Mandela script was a guy with the perhaps unfortunate surname of White. I knew he was salivating at the commercial prospects of a television miniseries with three of the world’s top movie stars. And yet the politics of the story made him nervous. Very nervous. From his comments on Fay’s first draft, it was clear he felt we should represent all sides—show white South Africans as earnest good guys who just happened to have a little prejudice problem—and thus produce a miniseries on apartheid that miraculously offended no one. To help me and Fay Kanin reach this ecumenical state of mind, he called me in to meet an academic from the Heritage Foundation, the right-wing think tank. I walked into a conference room to find the academic flanked by lawyers, executives, and secretaries, all there to record our conversation and so show due diligence in accord with the network’s “standards and practices” guidelines. The academic gave his opening remarks in a patient and patronizing voice. His message, boiled down, was: Diplomacy good, sanctions bad. I nodded respectfully, then gave him a reply that undercut everything he’d said. I hadn’t just come to this issue. I had my facts down cold. It was like chess, and before he knew it, he was on a major retreat. I was furious at being put through this indignity by Standards and Practices, and the Heritage Foundation, and all these corporate lawyers.

  The miniseries was on—greenlit, moving toward production—until the day in early 1989 when Winnie Mandela was implicated by one of her personal bodyguards in the grisly murder of a fourteen-year-old boy and the vicious beating of three other boys. This happened just as NBC was about to assign Fay Kanin’s approved script to a director. I pleaded with Steve White to let us follow Winnie’s trial and simply write the verdict into our script. Whichever way it turned out, that would be our ending. After all, this was history! Our job wasn’t to change it or lop off a slice to fit some narrative arc. Our job was to tell it as it was. And here we had three of the world’s best actors to tell it. Was NBC going to walk away from a miniseries with those stars? After a lot of hand-wringing with his bosses, Mr. White inched back in from the ledge. As promised, we gave the full, final, multipart script to Sidney.

  Sidney didn’t like it.

  It just wasn’t up to his usual standard, he said. He was sorry, but he would have to pass. For reasons I don’t know or can’t truly understand, Sidney never gave me or Fay Kanin the chance to make a case for our script. I was devastated. With his withdrawal, NBC’s interest evaporated. And that, in turn, made Marlon and Jane waver. They didn’t formally back out, but the signs were all too clear. The miniseries sputtered along for a while, as dying projects do, but I knew better than to invest any more hope and heart in it. It was over.

  The real sting came some weeks later, when I picked up one of the trades to read that the cable station Showtime had signed Sidney to play Nelson Mandela in a TV movie focusing on Mandela’s relationship with F. W. de Klerk, the South African leader. Michael Caine was playing de Klerk. I felt that for our friendship, this was a radical breach. There was no place for us to go except maybe where we went—away from each other.

  I write these words now in sadness, not anger. As a young man fresh out of the navy, I had no close friends until I met Sidney at the American Negro Theatre. No one has the space that Sidney has in my life, or that I do in his. Finding our way through a labyrinth of social history, we had shared so much.

  Sidney didn’t throw himself into the movement as I did. Not everyone can be who you want him or her to be. The truth is that Sidney did what he wanted to do. As the first black movie star, he took on that mantle with dignity and power and extreme grace, and set a legacy for all the black actors who came after him. That’s a lot for one lifetime.

  With the U.S. government backing sanctions, and South Africa reeling from them, those of us who’d fought apartheid for so long began daring to think, by 1988, that change might finally come. A keen sense of anticipation filled London’s Wembley Stadium on June 11, as another lineup of major music stars took to the stage, this time for Nelson Mandela’s seventieth birthday, with a chorus heard around the world: Free Nelson Mandela. I opened the show with a greeting, and introduced Sting. The concert reached 600 million viewers. None was in South Africa, for coverage of the concert was banned there, but everyone in the country, from P. W. Botha to Mandela, knew it was being held, and in some intangible but real way, it added to worldwide pressure on the apartheid government.

  I made my own musical contribution to the anti-apartheid movement that year: Paradise in Gazankulu, a studio album of original anti-apartheid songs. I still couldn’t go to South Africa myself, but I could reach out to lots of South African musicians, get them to lay down tracks in local recording studios, and smuggle the tapes out to me. For whatever it’s worth, I started that process some time before Paul Simon came out with his Graceland album in mid-1986. We were aware of each other’s efforts; we were talking to many of the same musicians. In fact, Paul came to me, wanting my opinion about his plan to go to South Africa and record his album there. After all, he was white; he could do that. The problem was that he’d be stepping across the sanctions line by spending money there. I encouraged him to go first to Oliver Tambo and the ANC in London; they could give him a pass, considering that he’d be working with black musicians. But for some reason Paul didn’t want to deal with the ANC or any other group. So he went to South Africa and made the album on his own terms. But when he released it in the U.K., the ANC came down on him hard. He had to do some serious rethinking and concluded that his best move would be to put together a world tour, not just of the musicians he’d used on the album, but of every South African musician of note he could hire—including Miriam Makeba, Hugh Masekela, and Ladysmith Black Mambazo. He loaded his space! Only then with the Graceland tour, did the heat die
down for him.

  On my album, which was to be more political than Paul’s, I started working with a wonderful songwriter named Jake Holmes, whom I’d used from time to time. Jake was a tall, lanky guy who looked a lot like Henry Fonda. I’d met him through my musical director Bob Friedman and liked the way we worked together. So I sent him and my pianist Richard Cummings to South Africa to be my eyes and ears. I directed them to meet with the musicians I wanted to work with—from Brenda Fassie to Laurence Matshiza—and lay down as many tracks as they could in Johannesburg. I cleared my plans first with Oliver Tambo and the ANC.

  Jake was white, Richard was black, but the rules had loosened a bit: Richard didn’t have to go as Jake’s bonded servant. Neither had any problem getting tourist visas. (I was black and an open critic of the South African government; that made me a marked man.) Hiring black South African musicians and making recordings with them—of anti-apartheid songs—was a whole other matter. Jake and Richard had to skulk around like spies. They started by meeting with South African writers Nadine Gordimer and Athol Fugard, using their observations as inspiration for lyrics as the songs came together. That led to clandestine recording sessions with a changing lineup of South African musicians. Eventually someone ratted them out, and they were forced to leave. But the musicians they’d worked with smuggled the tracks out themselves to us in New York, and we then put them together. When it came out in 1988, Paradise in Gazankulu got glowing reviews, although it hardly sold like Graceland.

  It was the last studio album I made.

  The next year, the Kennedy Center included me as one of its honorees. Other awards followed: the NAACP’s Thurgood Marshall Lifetime Achievement Award in 1993, the National Medal of Arts bestowed at a White House ceremony by President Clinton, eventually a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. You know you’re getting old when you find yourself on that “lifetime achievement” circuit. Then again, I guess it’s better to grow older and get them than just grow older. To me, the far greater award came in 1990, the payoff for all our years of protest against apartheid: the release of Nelson Mandela.

  In the months leading up to Mandela’s release on February 11, 1990, all sorts of backroom maneuvering occurred, not just in Johannesburg but in England, where a series of top-secret talks between white and black South Africans took place at a grand, secluded country estate. Change seemed so inevitable that in early 1990 the ANC asked the Wembley concert organizers to stage a follow-up at which Mandela might appear. The concert came off as planned, on April 16—and there was Mandela, also as planned, frail but exuberant, coming out to a hero’s welcome. Two months later, he landed in New York for the start of an eight-city, twelve-day tour that was, as one reporter put it, “instant history.” I remember every detail of that trip, because the person put in charge of coordinating that visit, entrusted with the daunting responsibility of planning Mandela’s whole itinerary and making sure everything went off without a hitch, was me.

  In late 1989, I’d gotten a call from Lindiwe Mabuza, a South African–born professor and poet, radio journalist, and activist whose many years with the ANC had led to her current position as the ANC’s chief representative to the United States, working directly for Oliver Tambo in London. “Madiba will be coming to the United States soon after his release from prison,” she told me, using Mandela’s African name. “Oliver wants you to be in charge.”

  “What do you mean, ‘in charge’?” I asked warily.

  “We’d like you to be in charge of his itinerary,” Lindiwe explained. “You make the choices, we’ll plan accordingly.”

  I called Oliver Tambo in London. “We have to talk,” I said. “This is not my bag.”

  But after two days in London with Oliver, I found myself signing on.

  It wasn’t like “What I say goes.” Oliver and the ANC had ultimate authority. But they did defer to me on all the issues of nuance and protocol: which U.S. politicians Mandela should meet (or not), which labor leaders, and which opinion makers. In Washington I started drawing up lists with TransAfrica. I’d recovered enough from my pique with the group to be working with it, and maybe I was a bit softened by the news that TransAfrica had decided to award me its first Nelson Mandela Courage Award at a star-studded ceremony with everyone from Sidney, who presented the award to me, to singer Lou Rawls, actor James Garner—and Bill Cosby. Time had passed, and if Sidney and Bill and I hadn’t forgotten our grievances, we could all be gracious, anyway.

  For the Mandela visit, I hooked up through TransAfrica with Roger Wilkins, a college professor and journalist whose uncle was Roy Wilkins of the NAACP. Roger would be my partner in planning all this.

  “Who else is leading this parade?” he asked me.

  I said, “We’re it.”

  Once Mandela’s visit became official, Roger and I found ourselves fielding calls from some powerful institutions, including the White House. First we heard from the White House staffers for protocol; they were very polite. President George H. W. Bush’s private security guys were a bit less cozy. Up they came to visit us, without the sunglasses and the earphones with the little curlicue cords. They had known that Roger and I had already blocked out much of Mandela’s itinerary and wanted to discuss security priorities. After hearing the details, they drew up a list of non-negotiable conditions. The security guys wanted Mandela in no open spaces. So no rallies, no ticker-tape parades. Basically, they wanted him to ride everywhere in a bulletproof car. And no public appearances at night. I said, “Mandela is not coming to America to be kept a secret—to move about incognito. He wants to express his appreciation to the American people and to move openly among the citizens of our country.”

  The security guards bristled, pointing out that such a visit was not quite as simple as I had imagined. There were serious security problems, and if we did not submit to their guidelines, they would not be responsible for Mandela’s safety. What they wanted was for him to shake hands with a few superstars in closed-door ceremonies and then to leave the country. At the end of a long exchange, I told them that their conditions were unacceptable and that if they wanted to withdraw, we would take up the slack.

  Through their embassy in London, the White House took this up with Oliver Tambo, who listened politely and then said, “We know we will be guided by Mr. Belafonte.” Oliver was asked if he realized that Mandela’s security would be compromised; his life would be in jeopardy. “I’ve discussed this with Harry, and we are working on it,” he said.

  And I was. The Secret Service had told me that the militant Jewish Defense League, among other groups, had come to regard Mandela with great disdain. In an interview, Mandela had compared the struggle of Palestinians to that of black South Africans, and publicly endorsed Yasir Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization. That had set off alarms throughout the whole Jewish community, from Jerusalem to Washington. I put in a call to Stanley Sheinbaum, a wise friend and passionate activist whose marriage to Betty Warner, daughter of Warner studio chief Harry Warner, had enabled him to push his causes with a lot of capital: defending Daniel Ellsberg, leaker of the Pentagon Papers, for one; promoting the American Civil Liberties Union, for another. I asked Stanley to help me reach out to the leaders of top Jewish organizations in the United States, and ask if I could speak to them personally. I did. Every one of them gave me the same story: Mandela’s on the Palestinian side, Arafat is his friend. Not only that, he’s friendly to Qaddafi and Castro—all enemies of Israel. “Everything you’ve just said about Nelson Mandela is misguided,” I told them. “I think you owe it to yourself and every Jew in America to get your facts straight.”

  I proposed that six Jewish American leaders meet with Mandela in a neutral place—Switzerland—and have a no-holds-barred talk. The ground rule was that there be no handlers along, no PR spinners. Mandela would come with one assistant, mostly to help him with his bags, and these six leaders would meet him on their own. They agreed, and the meeting took place in Geneva. For two and a half hours, Mandela a
nswered their questions and stated his views. When the group emerged, Henry Siegman, executive director of the American Jewish Congress, told journalists that Mandela had exceeded the group’s “fondest expectations.” He rejected all forms of anti-Semitism, he recognized Israel’s right to exist within secure borders, and basically he dazzled his skeptics.

  Finally the itinerary was fixed. Every moment of each of those twelve days was blocked out. Mandela would speak at the United Nations. He would meet President Bush in Washington and address a joint session of Congress. In Atlanta, he would lay a wreath at Martin’s crypt. In Miami and Detroit, he’d speak to vast union audiences. In California, another parade, another rally, more receptions, and then home.

  But first, when he touched down in New York, he would be greeted by Governor Mario Cuomo and a crowd of dignitaries, and walk the obligatory red carpet. I was there, by the red carpet, standing near the governor, when Mandela, still frail from abdominal surgery, walked gingerly down the steps of his jet’s passenger ramp. As the crowd cheered and applauded, he approached us, this man I revered, whom I had fought so hard to see freed, but whom I had never met. He scanned the beaming faces, and then saw mine, and lit up. “Ah, Harry boy,” he exclaimed delightedly. “How are you?”