Madiba in Kerala.
A comrade from the southern Indian state of Kerala shared the following anecdote with my father sometime in the mid-1980’s in New Delhi …
… On a trip to his home state of Kerala, the comrade said,
“…I was on a small fishing boat with some other comrades, we were going to an anti-Apartheid meeting that had been organised in a small town.
During the course of the boat ride, I kept hearing the boat-man’s voice, as he was singing, and quite loudly too, a song in Malayalam,
And I kept hearing what sounded like the name ‘Mandela’, over and over again,
So I asked the boat-man who or what this ‘Mandela’ was?
“You come from the city, and YOU don’t know who MANDELA is?