Features
South African AIDS Concert Canceled
The concert, scheduled Feb. 2 on Robben Island, was to feature Bono, Elton John, Shaggy, Youssou N’dour, Macy Gray and other entertainers.
John Samuel, chief executive of the Nelson Mandela Foundation, said in a statement released to the South African Press Association: “The concert cannot take place since the proposed producers were not able to come to a satisfactory agreement with the foundation.”
Calls placed to the foundation by The Associated Press Friday were not immediately returned.
The daylong concert was to have been televised around the world, with all funds raised going to the foundation, the U.N. agency UNAIDS and the Robben Island Museum.
Robben Island is a rocky outcrop off the coast of Cape Town where Mandela was imprisoned for almost two decades by the apartheid regime.
Mandela, 84, emerged from prison to become South Africa’s first black president in 1994. He stepped down in 1999 and has since become a vocal activist in the fight against AIDS.
One in five adults in South Africa is estimated to be infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, and a recent study by the Medical Research Council warned that up to 7 million people in the country could die of the disease by 2010.