Nelson Mandela 70th Birthday Tribute

The Nelson Mandela 70th Birthday Tribute was a concert event held on June 11, 1988 at the Wembley Stadium, London. It is also known as Freedomfest, Free Nelson Mandela Concert, or Mandela Day.

One of the initiators of that concert was singer Jerry Dammers. In 1984 he scored the hit single Free Nelson Mandela. The preparations for the Mandela concert began in 1985 with the launching of the organisation Artists United Against Apartheid. They organised a free concert named Freedom Beat which took place on Clapham Common in London in 1986. After that concert the idea of a much bigger event on the Wembley Stadum was born.

72,000 people at the Wembley Stadium and more than 600 million television viewers from 60 countries watched the broadcast, placing it alongside Live Aid as the most successful televised musical events of the 1980s. The concert was not broadcast in South Africa, so the scale of the international event went largely unnoticed there. But it created a big and strong ripple effect within the international community and later Nelson Mandela was released from prison after 27 years of hard labor.

It marks the first television performance for Tracy Chapman who had her first hits with Talkin' Bout a Revolution and Fast Car in 1988. The song Mandela Day by Simple Minds was written as a tribute for that concert and recorded there for the very first time. It was later released on the album Street Fighting Years and was a B-side of the single Belfast Child (a #1 hit on the British Charts in 1989).

Were you there?