Songfacts®:

• Mandinka is a West African tribe with rich musical traditions. In the song, Sinéad O'Connor feels a kinship with these people, singing, "I do know Mandinka."
• The song was inspired by the miniseries Roots, based on the book by Alex Haley. The series ran in 1977 and drew a huge audience (this was before cable). Set in the 1700s, it follows an African man named Kunta Kinte (played by LeVar Burton) as he is captured and sold into slavery.
  
  "I was a young girl when I saw it, and it moved something so deeply in me, I had a visceral response," O'Connor wrote in her memoir Rememberings. "I came to emotionally identify with the civil rights movement and slavery, especially given the theocracy I lived in and the oppression in my own home."
• O'Connor doesn't rate herself highly as a guitarist, but she was proud of her playing on this track. "'Mandinka' was also a breakthrough for me musically," she wrote. "The recording was the first time I had the courage to play guitar properly."
• Following "Troy," "Mandinka" was the second single from O'Connor's first album, The Lion And The Cobra. The album earned her a great deal of acclaim and put up respectable sales numbers. After it was released, she toured as the opening act for INXS with a band that included Andy Rourke (bass) and Mike Joyce (drums) of The Smiths. Buzz built for her next album, I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got, and when it was released in 1990 it took off thanks to the runaway hit "Nothing Compares 2 U."
  
  Musicians will often look back on their breakout hit as both a blessing and a curse, and for O'Connor, the curse portion was intense. The sudden adulation and attention exacerbated her mental health issues at a time when unusual behavior was stigmatized, especially in women in the public eye. While many artists at this stage would be thinking of how they could create their next hit, O'Connor was thinking about what kind of statement she wanted to make and how she could use her voice. She turned herself into a protest singer, famously boycotting the Grammy Awards and tearing up a photo of the Pope on live TV. She spoke out against racism, domestic abuse, and materialism, earning respect from many fans but scorn from others. Throughout her life, she fought to maintain her sanity, sometimes quite publicly. In 2020 she was the subject of an intervention on the Dr. Phil show.
• The music video was directed by John Maybury, who did all her early videos, including "Nothing Compares 2 U." Even then, O'Connor was shaving her head, which made her less conventionally beautiful but far more unusual - when she came on the screen, you noticed.
  
  She was just 20 years old when The Lion And The Cobra was released, and while she didn't have hair, she did have a baby. The first of her four children, a son named Jake, was born a few weeks before the album was issued.
• O'Connor performed "Mandinka" at the Grammy Awards in 1989, where The Lion And The Cobra was nominated for Best Rock Vocal Performance, Female. She showed up to the ceremony with the Public Enemy logo painted into the side of her head to show support for the group, which along with other hip-hop acts, were boycotting because the inaugural Best Rap Performance award wasn't televised.
  
  Two years later when she was nominated for four awards, she also boycotted the show.
• O'Connor showed up on national TV in America for the first time when she performed this song on Late Night With David Letterman in 1988.