Songfacts®:

• Labi Siffre was profoundly affected by a television documentary from South Africa showing a white soldier shooting at black children. He came out of self-imposed retirement from music in 1985 to write this protest song against apartheid as a response.
  
  "I sat down at the keyboard," he recalled to Mojo magazine. "I played an ordinary C chord. I put my head back and I sang the first two lines straight out and cried. I realized I was writing about me as a gay man. And as the song progressed, I realized I was also writing about apartheid. I was also writing about being disabled and writing about being a woman in most places in the world. I was writing about a myriad of things. This was all in seconds (laughs)."
  
  Siffre originally intended to give the song to another artist to sing but was convinced to release it himself. It became one of the biggest successes of Siffre's career, peaking at #4 in the United Kingdom.
• Artists who have covered the song include:
  
  Kenny Rogers as the title track to his 1989 album,
  
  Michael Ball, whose 1996 version reached #40 in the UK
  
  Pop Idol contestant Rik Waller peaked at #25 in the UK with his version in July 2002.
• The song featured in a 2001 UK advertisement for the Peugeot 307.
• This was used in Alice Walker and Pratibha Parmar's 1993 documentary against female genital cutting, Warrior Marks.
• "(Something Inside) So Strong" won Siffre the 1988 Ivor Novello Award for Best Song Musically and Lyrically.