A Postcard From Brighter Times

On February 11,1990, Nelson Mandela was released from Victor Verster prison in South Africa after having been incarcerated for twenty-seven years.

On that same day I was trying, not very successfully, to recover from a slew of personal hardships. My partner had died, too young, not long before. After nursing him over four painful years, I fell into incapacity myself, utterly drained and dispirited. My relatively privileged North American life had not well prepared me—by my mid-twenties– for oncology wards and hospice care. The aftermath of his illness left me seeing life through an achingly grey lens, and I had few hopes of any kind.

The news of Mandela’s release from prison was a welcome shaft of sunlight breaking through the grey gloom that encircled my life. I felt it–for a moment–the goodness and potential in a world that I was frankly near-ready to quit, my own tiny and self-imposed jail cell of despond pierced by the potential, by the inherent optimism that this unexpected and righteous turn of events augured.

So when I learned that Mandela and Winnie, the latter as yet untainted by the scandals that would eventually envelop her, were making Boston a stop on their tour of the US that June, I knew I had to be there.

The event was held on the Esplanade at the Hatch Shell amphitheater where Arthur Fiedler conducted the Boston Pops every Independence Day, fireworks over the Charles punctuating the 1812 Overture. On June 23,1990, the day of Mandela’s visit, the celebration was far more visceral and urgent than any Fourth of July concert. The oneness and solidarity which ran through the crowd was such that the signers of the Declaration of Independence would surely have been over the moon had their own work inspired it. This was an unfettered festival of love and joy and hope for a better world, and it went on for what seemed like forever.

There were upwards of a quarter of million people there, every imaginable sort, waving streamers of yellow, green and black beside the river, dancing and embracing and cheering and believing together in a future built on love and a shared vision for freedom and justice and equality. It was as if we sensed that against the odds, we had triumphed over the darker side of human nature, that goodness and light were at last going to prevail.

There was music all afternoon. Ladysmith Black Mombazo, Johnny Cleg and Savuka, Paul Simon, Bobby McFerrin, Tracy Chapman, Livingston Taylor, David Bromberg and Michelle Shocked all took turns together and alone on the stage. Hugh Masekela showed up last, to perform his infectious Bring Him Back Home (Nelson Mandela) in an endless and ecstatic loop as the sun began to set.

Mainstream political luminaries–either genuinely eager to join in the celebration or there simply to pick up some star-dust on the soles of their shoes–began to gather on the stage. Jesse Jackson, Mike Dukakis, Ted Kennedy, Boston mayor Ray Flynn milled about, smiling irrepressibly. Masekela’s trumpet kept us all dancing, and at last Nelson and Winnie arrived.

The emotion when Mandela, grinning ebulliently, began to move to the music, his fist raised, shot across the Esplanade and beyond, as if all 250,000 of us were one. It felt like an orgasm of the heart. A spiritual epiphany. A communal peak experience. Like all truly inspirational leaders, he allowed us to project onto himself our own radiance, holding it and then returning it back to us, amplified and sacralized.

No one at the Hatch Shell that day was unaware of the twenty-seven years of suffering and injustice on Robben Island that had preceded, and in fact birthed, this moment. And few of us, I suspect, despite the shimmering diversity of the crowd, forgot that our own city was currently rife with inequality, that there were among us quite a few who were hungry and without shelter. My sorrows were still real and very much with me. Yet, for that one day, in that small spot on this often perplexing planet, things made sense. It surely seemed to me that we were united and joyful, our hearts transcendent with an innocent, unabashed belief in grace and pure goodness.

Mandela’s Boston Speech July 23, 1990
(go to 34:50: for the dancing!)

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