Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation (26 page)

When Mandela recalled that rally, he spoke of it in terms almost of a hunter tracking his prey. “Eventually, you know,” he said with a victorious smile, “eventually I got the crowd.” He had been here before, seemingly on the point of losing a crowd, then winning it back. Once it had happened in territory where Inkatha had inflicted terrible loss of life. Standing up to the crowd’s understandable desire for revenge, he appealed to them to take the broader view, to “throw their weapons into the sea.” Another time, in a township outside Johannesburg called Katlehong, where Inkatha had also been on the rampage against the civilian population, he silenced 15,000 people incensed by his refusal to give them weapons by asking them if they wished him to continue being their leader. Because unless they did as he asked, and strove to make peace with people whom he described as not so much evil as misguided, he would step down. This they didn’t want, and by the end of his address they were singing his name and dancing in triumph—celebrating the successful appeal he had made to the wiser part of their natures.

Almost as difficult was convincing people that the Springboks really could win the World Cup. All rugby experts agreed that it was a vain hope. “When I went to see the team in Silvermine and told them that I was sure they would win I did not want to be proved wrong,” Mandela said. “Personally, it was very important for me because I knew that victory would mobilize the Doubting Thomases. That is why I was so keen that South Africa should come out tops! It would be reward for all the hard work—going around the country, being booed down . . .”

He spoke of “hard work”; previously he had used the word “campaign”: indications of how deliberately he had set about his objective of using rugby as a political instrument. Nicholas Haysom, Mandela’s legal adviser in the presidency, was a lifelong rugby fan and former player who became Mandela’s in-house rugby buddy at the Union Buildings. Haysom acknowledged that Mandela had seen quite clearly how powerful an instrument the World Cup would be regarding “the number one strategic imperative of his five-year presidency.” But that was not the whole picture. Again, the political and the personal, the calculation and the spontaneity, merged into one. “As the World Cup was getting started,” Haysom recalled, “I would hear him talking to me about ‘the boys,’ as in ‘the boys are in good spirits,’ or ‘the boys are going to win.’ At first I’d ask him, ‘What boys?’ And he’d look at me as if I had asked a puzzlingly silly question and reply, ‘
My
boys,’ by which I soon came to understand that he meant the Springboks.” Although Mandela did not enter the World Cup as a man with a great historical knowledge of rugby, he became ever more informed and passionate as the tournament unfolded. “He saw the political opportunity, yes, but it was not something cold because he too, as an individual, got swept away by the fervor of it all and became just another mad-keen patriotic fan.”

The black half of Mandela’s bodyguard detachment took longer than he did to enter into the spirit of the tournament. That very first game against Australia, Moonsamy recalled, had been a hair-raising ordeal in terms of their professional obligation to keep the president alive. But in sporting terms the game had left them cold.

“After the final whistle went, the white guys were going nuts! We were just looking at them, chuckling, baffled. We did not understand the game, were not interested in it, we were unimpressed. The Springboks were still their team, not ours.” Moonsamy said Mandela’s campaign to de-demonize the Springboks had made an impact on him, but he had yet to move from indifference to outright support. His evolution, together with the rest of the black PPU members, over the four weeks of the World Cup mirrored the evolution black South Africans underwent in their relationship with the old green-and-gold enemy.

“After the Springbok team won its second game, we started to get a little bit curious,” Moonsamy said, referring to a relatively easy game against Romania. “The excitement of our white colleagues inevitably intrigued us and so we started to ask them questions about the game. To our surprise, rugby became a bonding topic between us.” Every two weeks the PPU would go away for a training session to freshen old routines and stay sharp. They would practice shooting, unarmed combat, and other skills. At the session after the Australia match, a big white PPU member named Kallis introduced them to touch rugby. That meant rugby with less extreme physical violence, without the usual ferocity in the collision. “Through these sessions,” Moonsamy said, “the black bodyguard learnt about the details of the game.”

They learned that there were fifteen players on each side; that eight of them were forwards and seven of them backs; that you got five points for a try—which meant transporting the ball physically over the goal line, as in rugby’s cousin sport, American football; that you got two points for a conversion—which meant kicking the ball between the two posts—again, as in American football; that you got three points for a penalty kick between the posts and three if, from loose play, you did the same with a dropkick—making contact between boot and ball on the half volley, at the precise instant it touched the ground. “But, just as important, we started to get a feel for rugby. We’d play touch rugby but we’d go for each other. Sometimes we’d really take each other out. That way we began to understand and, again, to our huge surprise, started actually to quite like the game.”

Images broadcast all over South African TV the day before a game against Canada began to persuade Moonsamy that perhaps he might start to quite like the Springboks too. The entire Springbok squad visited a small township called Zwide outside the big Eastern Cape city of Port Elizabeth. Scenes of huge white men chatting and playing with excited black children moved Moonsamy, as well as everyone else who saw them.

Some three hundred children gathered around a dusty field for a coaching clinic led by Morné du Plessis, who divided the boys up into groups of fifteen, but it was Mark Andrews who attracted all the attention: because he was so huge, and because he also happened to speak Xhosa. Balie Swart was there too, leading the children in passing routines, cheerfully revealing to their flabbergasted elders that big Boers could be friends too. That same evening Du Plessis took a group of players to a rickety stadium where local black teams played. There was a game on and Du Plessis felt it would be appreciated if the Springboks came along to watch. It was, thanks not least to James Small, whose blend of talent and notoriety made him the most recognizable face in the party. Small spent an hour and a half signing autographs, for adults and children alike.

When South Africa beat Canada 20-0 at Port Elizabeth’s Boet Erasmus Stadium, the whole of Zwide cheered and so did Linga Moonsamy. The next game, a quarterfinal game against the tough and talented Western Samoans, big Pacific islander folk fanatical about the game, posed what appeared to be a stiffer challenge. They also presented what ought to have been more of a test to black South African allegiances, since this was a dark-skinned team that they would have really gotten behind in the old days. Chester Williams took care of that, though, living up to what had appeared until now to be his somewhat inflated marquee billing by scoring four tries, or 20 points, in a 42-14 victory. “Whatever doubts I may have had about myself or the rest of the team or anybody else might have had about me disappeared that day—simple as that,” Williams recalled. “I got big support on and off the pitch from François and Morné and from now on I was, in the eyes of everybody, a fully accepted and respected team member. The whole story turned that day. The fact that I wasn’t white was now completely irrelevant.”

One week later was the semifinal, the one Mandela had mentioned in Ezakheni, against one of the pre-tournament favorites, France. The venue was to be Durban’s King’s Park Stadium, where Pienaar had made his Springbok debut two years earlier on the day after the Volksfront’s attack on the World Trade Centre. The political mood in the days leading up to this game could not have been more different.

As the team drove back and forth between their hotel and the training camps, the roads would be lined with crowds of people, more and more of them black as the days passed. James Small remembered that “we looked at each other and thought, Fuck! President Mandela wasn’t kidding: maybe the whole country really was with us.”

Hennie le Roux echoed the point Mandela had made about victory mobilizing the Doubting Thomases. “We could see the country really was uniting around us but it was through winning that we would make that bond stronger. The better we did on the pitch, the wider the ripple effect off it.”

The adversity and high drama before and during the game against France also helped. There was a distinct chance that the game might be called off and a victory would be awarded to France. The balmy Indian Ocean city of Durban had experienced one of its periodic semitropical downpours and the King’s Park field was waterlogged. If the game was not played that day, World Cup rules decreed that France would be declared the winner, owing to South Africa having had a poorer disciplinary record in the tournament so far. (One player had been sidelined for rough play in a fiercely fought game against Canada.) The whole country paid anxious attention as rugby officials and even the armed forces launched a desperate race to get the field fit for play on time. Military helicopters were recruited to fan the field from above, but the day was saved by a battalion of black ladies with mops and buckets whose heroic labors persuaded the referee to let the game proceed.

Despite the cleaning ladies’ efforts, the game itself was a mudbath with a slippery oval ball somewhere in the middle over which large, filthy men violently scrapped. With two minutes to go and South Africa holding on by 19 points to 15, a vast, Kobus Wiese-sized Frenchman of Moroccan extraction called Abdelatif Benazzi thought he had wrested the ball over the line for what would have been the winning try. But instead the referee awarded the French a scrum—the eight biggest from each side in armadillo formation against each other—five yards from the South African line. If the exhausted “Bleus” pushed the exhausted Springboks back over the line, that would be that. France in the final. Show over for the Rainbow Nation. The Springboks were about to go down and take their position in the melee when Kobus Wiese, all six foot six of him in the second-row engine room of the scrum, uttered a battle cry that stirred his team mates. Addressing himself to his best friend Balie Swart, the prop forward in the front row, he said, “Listen, Balie, in this scrum, you are not coming back. You can go forward, you can go up, you can go down or you can go under. But you’re not coming back!”

The Springboks did not go back and South Africa were through to the final. “That game was a battle of wills, more than anything else,” Morné du Plessis said. “It was the game in which we really felt that Mandela magic having an impact on us on the field of play. Because we had found out, you see, about Mandela’s speech the day before there in KwaZulu. We had heard that at a place where people were dying he had given a speech in which he said the time had come for all South Africa to get behind the Springboks, and he said it wearing his Springbok cap. That really moved the team.”

Linga Moonsamy was more moved than he could have imagined. “We were so tense during the game,” he recalled. “We were so close at the end of it. The black and white groups in our unit: we were now indistinguishable. All of us going absolutely crazy with relief and joy.”

Some years later, Morné du Plessis came across Benazzi, the big French forward who nearly won the game for his side. Inevitably, they talked about that game, and Benazzi insisted that it had been a try, that the ball had crossed the line. But Benazzi also told Du Plessis, “We cried like hell when we lost to you guys. But when I went to the final the following weekend I cried again, because I knew that it was more important for us not to be there, that something more important was happening before our eyes than victory or defeat in a game of rugby.”

CHAPTER XVI

THE NUMBER SIX JERSEY

June 24, 1995—morning

On the day before the Rugby World Cup final against New Zealand, just after the Springboks had finished their final training session, François Pienaar was in the locker room about to take his boots off when his mobile phone rang inside his kit bag. “Hello, François, how are you?” It was Mandela calling to wish the team good luck. Morné du Plessis made a point of relaying the news to the press. Mandela was delighted to read Du Plessis in the papers, that morning of the final, giving his spin on the phone call. “Mr. Mandela told François he was almost more nervous than the team,” all the papers quoted Du Plessis as saying. “These calls prove he is now part of our camp and our campaign.”

Everything indicated that this day would turn out well, that South Africans had moved on, that a new era of political maturity loomed—but you never quite knew. If he had talked to Niël Barnard, the old Boer spymaster would have told him that in June 1995 “the political situation was still very raw: many whites felt alienated, out of it.” It was hard to tell how those alienated, many of whom would undoubtedly be at the stadium, might react. That was maybe why Mandela, recalling the tense eve of the game, popped out with the surprising remark, “I have never been very good at predicting things.” It was his way of confessing to the misgivings he felt. What if, for all his best efforts, he had misjudged the mood of the Afrikaners? What if some fans jeered during the singing of “Nkosi Sikelele”? What if people started unfurling the flags of the old South Africa, as they had done in that ill-starred game against New Zealand three years earlier?

Those questions floated through his mind as he sat down to the papaya, kiwi, mango, porridge, and coffee breakfast he always enjoyed at his Houghton home. He was concerned, but it would be a mistake to say that he was consumed by worry. The good news outweighed the bad portents. One of the reasons Mandela dispensed with his 4:30 a.m. walk on the day of the rugby final was to devote more time to the morning papers. Usually he devoured the political pages and skimmed the sports section. This time both demanded his attention. Never had he enjoyed the morning press as much as today. The national consensus he had striven so hard to forge around the Springbok cause was reflected in the celebratory unanimity of the editorials and the political analysts. South Africa was giving itself a huge pat on the back. And while there was caution regarding the game’s outcome, reflected in vast respect for New Zealand’s All Black rivals (
Die Burger
said, “The All Blacks stand like Himalayas before the Boks”), there was a quiet confidence that destiny would be on South Africa’s side. The headline in Cape Town’s main newspaper, the
Argus
, trumpeted the exultant national mood. “Viva the Boks!” it read. “Viva” was a war cry of black protest down the decades, borrowed somewhere along the way from the Cuban revolution. But better than the headline was the story immediately below it by the newspaper’s “political staff.”