In the Presence of Greatness

One of my earliest memories is of my mum scooping me out of the bath and swaddling me, dripping, in a towel; then sitting me on her knee and singing me Harry Belafonte songs: Brown Skin Girl, Come Back Liza and, of course, the Banana Boat Song. So because America has been kind enough to lend him to the United Kingdom for a few days, the two of us went along to hear him speak at St George's Hall in Bristol.

We went expecting an evening of celebrity reminiscences.  Before he appeared we watched a twenty minute film showing highlights from his career.  He was the first person in the world to sell a million records (during the evening he observed dryly that you don't know the meaning of the word power until you have heard fifty thousand Japanese singing "Dai-o...") Asked if he considered himself to be an actor or a singer, he replied "Oh, I'm an actor, a great actor, because I managed to convince the whole world that I'm a singer."

His success in show business was as nothing compared to his achievements as a human rights activist.  He was able to use his influence as a successful singer to enlist friends such as Marlon Brando and Rod Steiger, with whom he had studied drama, into the human rights movement.  He marched to Washington shoulder to shoulder with Martin Luther King, and when the (then) Senator John Kennedy broached him to ask how he could cultivate the black vote he rebuked him to the shallowness of his strategy.

His clear-sighted vision, that change should be achieved by non-violent means, was articulated during the course an uplifting evening, his conversation laid-back, laced with philosophy and interspersed with stories and anecdotes.  At eighty-five, graceful and elegant, he is still involved in humanitarian work, acting as an ambassador with UNICEF. He was completely up to speed with developments in the Arab Spring, observing that oppressors never voluntarily yield power, you have to take it from them.  He should know; he has spent the majority of his life fighting oppression, and sitting listening to him talk in Bristol, whose considerable wealth was built on the back of the slave trade, his humility and his steel lit a flame in all of us who heard him.