Love & Passion Quote by Nina Simone

Nina Simone doesn’t flatter Nelson Mandela here so much as she stages devotion as performance, and that’s the point. The line begins with a disarming confession - “This may be a dream” - a little shield against anyone who might call it too much. Then she pushes it into “anyway,” the pivot that marks Simone at her most stubborn: she’s going to risk embarrassment to tell the truth she feels.

The abandoned wedding becomes a political prop. A gown meant for private romance gets repurposed as ceremonial attire for a freedom fighter, collapsing the distance between the intimate and the historical. Simone isn’t just saying Mandela is admirable; she’s saying her own life, her own thwarted milestones, are being re-channeled into the struggle. The train being removed matters: it’s a practical detail that makes the fantasy tactile, but it’s also a stripping-down, an offering. She will alter the symbol of “bride” into something closer to a supplicant or witness.

“Kiss the ground” and “kiss his feet” land like religious language, and Simone knows it. It courts accusations of idolatry, yet it’s also a deliberate reversal of American racial hierarchy: a Black woman of global stature choosing abasement not before a king, but before a man punished for insisting on Black dignity. In the apartheid-era context - and alongside Simone’s own exile and radicalizing politics - the hyperbole reads less like celebrity worship than like protest rhetoric: the kind that makes emotion so vivid it becomes a public act.