Human Rights Now! Concert: Harare 1988 - Part 3

Sting, Tracy Chapman, Jack Healey of Amnesty International, Bruce Springsteen, Peter Gabriel and Youssou N’Dour, Harare National Sports Stadium, 1988 Source

In Part 2 of my story of travelling to the 1988 Amnesty International Human Rights Now! concert in Harare, Zimbabwe, we had reached Harare. Now the concert begins!

A Banner Day

Crowds of people, mostly white South Africans starved of live international music, streamed into the Harare National Sports Stadium for the concert of their lives. The traffic was hectic, so walking was the only reasonable way to get there. There was huge excitement in the air. A big group of armed policemen gave us the Black Power salute as they drove past in a large armoured vehicle. Any black person spotted doing that in South Africa at the time would have been arrested. So it was very liberating and we saluted back - for probably the first and only time in my life.

We actually had allocated seats but after sitting there for a few minutes it was decided that the view and vibe would be much better on the floor near the front.

It's a huge stadium and it took some time to fill up because of the congestion outside, but by the time the artists strolled onto the stage the crowd was loudly cheering and chanting. It was hot and steamy, made even more so by the packed stadium.

People were holding up banners everywhere. Most were political, generally denouncing the Apartheid system. Others, of course, were aimed at the artists.

My friend Bruce also had one. A giant pink affair with the letters M A R G S painted boldly on it. The backstory to this is that his girlfriend Margie had flown up from Johannesburg separately and in the pre-cellphone era there was no way of locating each other except, thought Bruce, by putting her name on a huge banner and waving it around.

Another friend, looking at all the other political banners, wittily concluded that Bruce's banner meant "Many Apartheid Regimes Go Sour".

Well, Margie apparently did see the banner on the big screen but still could not find Bruce. They never did meet up in Zimbabwe.

The Concert Starts

At about 4 pm the artists - Sting, Tracy Chapman, Bruce Springsteen, Peter Gabriel and Youssou N’Dour opened with a rendition of Bob Marley and Peter Tosh's Get Up, Stand Up. The video below shows a rehearsal for this plus the video that opened the show:

This was following a couple of local acts, and then, of course, the five main acts. We'll get to these in Part 4.