Why anti-apartheid music was politically effective

Anti-apartheid music worked not because it persuaded governments or lobbied political elites, but because it changed social reality in advance of political decisions. It made apartheid culturally impossible: a system with which one could no longer associate without losing symbolic legitimacy.

Some musicians took an early stand. After the 1960 Sharpeville massacre, the UK Musicians’ Union declared a cultural boycott of South Africa, and artists such as the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and the Walker Brothers refused to perform there. 

Music thus functioned as a mass rehearsal of boycott. Refusing to play Sun City, repeatedly naming Nelson Mandela, publicly calling apartheid evil — these were forms of collective action in which millions of people behaved as if the regime were already illegitimate.

Sanctions did not emerge from a sudden moral awakening among political elites. Rather, they were a belated legal formalization of an already existing moral fact. Music did not so much “pressure” power as strip it of its justifications.

In David Graeber’s terms, this represents a textbook case of prefigurative politics: acting out the world one wants to see rather than waiting for permission from authority. Anti-apartheid musicians did not wait for governments or the United Nations to declare apartheid criminal; they acted as if this were already self-evident, thereby rendering the old order socially fictitious.

Biko

Steve Biko became the first global icon of the anti-apartheid struggle. Nearly half a century after his death, his name remains etched in public memory. In 2025, South African authorities reopened the investigation into Biko’s death (1946–1977), exactly 48 years after police killed the anti-apartheid activist while he was in detention.

Biko was the founder of South Africa’s grassroots Black Consciousness Movement, which campaigned for the end of apartheid and for a transition toward universal suffrage and a socialist economy. Central to his thought was the idea that Black South Africans had to rid themselves of internalized racial inferiority — a principle he popularized through the slogan “Black is beautiful.”

He was only 30 years old when he was arrested in August 1977 and jailed in Pretoria. A month later, he died from extensive brain injuries after police beat him into a coma.

Biko’s death sparked outrage far beyond South Africa. Peter Gabriel began thinking about writing a song in his memory. “Whether anyone was ready to listen to a political song from an ex–public-school, middle-class prog-rocker was something I had doubts about,” Gabriel later admitted. Despite these doubts, “Biko” became one of the most important songs ever written about apartheid.

“Bono called and told me that U2 had learned about apartheid and Africa from the Biko song,” Gabriel recalled.

Often used as his set-closer, Biko opened countless eyes to the brutality of South African apartheid. It functioned both as a stark retelling of Biko’s death in a Port Elizabeth prison cell and as an emphatic call to action: “You can blow out a candle / But you can’t blow out a fire.”

That same year, 1980, the United Nations finally approved a cultural boycott of South Africa, naming Mandela in a resolution for the first time. The name was important. Around the world, numerous petitions had been signed and tributes paid. But public awareness was stuck at a certain level.

Free Nelson Mandela

In 1982, on the 20th anniversary of Mandela’s arrest, the anti-apartheid campaign turned Mandela into an international celebrity.

Mandela himself wryly acknowledged this in his autobiography:

“I am told that when ‘Free Mandela’ posters went up in London, most young people thought my Christian name was ‘Free.’”

In tribute to Nelson Mandela, Jerry Dammers of the band Special wrote the most memorable anti-apartheid song of the 1980s, “Nelson Mandela.” Produced by Elvis Costello and featuring vocals from members of the English Beat and a young Karon Wheeler (later of Soul II Soul), the song combines a serious theme—”His body’s been raped, but his mind’s still free/Are you so blind you can’t see?”—with a light, two-tone ska sound, making it a number 10 hit in the UK.

The anti-apartheid movement became one of the decade’s causes célèbres. Stevie Wonder released the bluntly titled It’s Wrong (Apartheid) and was arrested during a protest outside the South African embassy in Washington DC.

The Nelson Mandela 70th Birthday Tribute was a large-scale popular music concert held on 11 June 1988 at Wembley Stadium in London. The concert is now widely regarded as a landmark in the history of anti-apartheid music. It was broadcast to 67 countries and reached an estimated global audience of 600 million people.

The apartheid government banned the broadcast in South Africa, but news of the event — and its scale — reached Nelson Mandela and other political prisoners. Awareness, however, was not generated overnight.

The concert was the “biggest and most spectacular pop-political event of all time, a more political version of Live Aid with the aim of raising consciousness rather than just money.” (Robin Denselow, BBC)

Over time, its ripple effects helped intensify international pressure on the South African government. Mandela was released 20 months later, after 27 years in prison. While the concert did not cause his release, it contributed to a climate in which continued imprisonment became increasingly untenable.

As David Graeber famously put it:

“Direct action is about acting as if one is already free.”

And, more broadly:

“The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.”

Anti-apartheid music did precisely this: it made an alternative moral world emotionally real first — and forced political and economic institutions to follow later.