Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation (7 page)

As keepers of the food and the guns, the Afrikaners were the protectors of the rest of white South Africa. Or, as P. W. Botha put it once, “The security and happiness of all minority groups in South Africa depend on the Afrikaner. Whether they are English, or German, or Portuguese, or Italian-speaking, or even Jewish-speaking, makes no difference.”

Botha was heavy-handed but he was right. The Afrikaners were apartheid’s lords and protectors. That was why young Justice cheered like mad that day for the New Zealanders, an all-white team known, to the young Justice’s confusion and delight, as the All Blacks (their name comes from their entirely black uniforms). He had plenty to cheer about. Marshaled by a bald, stocky player named Sid Going, the visitors thrashed North West Cape 26-3. Justice, summoning up the childhood memory, rubbed his hands with glee at the manner in which the New Zealanders “murdered” the Upington Boers; those overfed giants who humiliated him, his family, and his friends every day, who insisted always on black people addressing them as “baas.” From that day on, Justice became a rugby fan, if only in the limited, strictly vindictive sort of way that millions of black South Africans were. He enjoyed the game only when the foreign rivals were good enough to beat the Boers.

Justice became a politically alert adolescent who understood how important rugby was to the Afrikaners; how it was the closest they got, outside church, to a spiritual life. They had their Old Testament Christianity, otherwise known as the Dutch Reformed Church; and they had their secular religion, rugby, which was to Afrikaners as soccer was to Brazilians or American football (rugby’s shoulder-padded first cousin) was to the residents of Green Bay, Wisconsin. And the more right-wing the Afrikaners were, the more fundamentalist their faith in God, the more fanatical their attachment to the game. They feared God, but they loved rugby, especially when played in a Springbok jersey.

Successive South African national teams had built up a reputation during the twentieth century as the most bruisingly physical rugby players in the world. Mostly they were Afrikaners, though occasionally an unusually hefty, or tough, or fast “Englishman” (as the Afrikaners called them, when they were being polite) would sneak into the national side. And mostly, being Afrikaners, they were big-boned men of horny-handed famer stock, who as children learned the game playing barefoot on hard, dry pitches where if you fell, you bled.

As a metaphor for apartheid’s crushing brutality, the Boks worked very well. That was why their distinctive green jersey had become as detestable to blacks as the riot police, the national flag, and the national anthem, “Die Stem” (The Call), whose words praised God and celebrated the white conquest of Africa’s southern tip.

It was on such indignities that Justice dwelled in that fateful month of November 1985. Mandela, unimaginably, was meeting secretly with Kobie Coetsee, but Justice himself was in less mood for compromise than ever before. He seethed with the dark indignation of a man who knew that, because he was born black, he would never be able to exploit his natural gifts to the full. He had always been an unusually bright pupil, way ahead of his peers and of his parents (his mother never learned to read) by the age of fifteen. But the Upington authorities, who ran Paballelo, did not provide schooling for black children beyond that age. They stuck by the spirit and the letter of apartheid’s chief architect, Hendrick Verwoerd, who in 1953, as head of the Department of Native Affairs, came up with a school curriculum designed, as he put it, for “the nature and requirements of black people.” Verwoerd, who would go on to become prime minister, stated that the aim of his Bantu Education Act was to stop blacks from receiving an education that might make them aspire to positions above their station. The deeper purpose was to uphold the apartheid system’s giant, covert job-protection scheme for whites. Justice’s father, determined to do what he could to short-circuit the system, sent him far across the country to the Eastern Cape, to a Methodist school called Healdtown that Mandela himself had attended.

Justice spent the next ten years shuttling back and forth between Upington and the Eastern Cape, six hundred miles across country, in an often frustrating search for an education that would help him achieve his dream of becoming a doctor. He was beginning to get close, passing all the right exams to be admitted eventually to study medicine, when, at the end of 1985, disaster struck. He fell for a girl and made her pregnant. He was twenty-five years old but the Christian educational establishment he now attended found such behavior intolerable. He was expelled, returning home to Paballelo on the first week of November, burning with frustration.

Justice’s return coincided with the township’s first serious episode of what the apartheid authorities called “black unrest.” It was happening all over the country but was a novel phenomenon for a backwater like Paballelo, where until now political resistance had dwelled underground. During Justice’s first weekend back, on Sunday, November 10, his township erupted. The “unrest” followed the grim choreography that was by now familiar to viewers of television news everywhere in the world, except for South Africa, where such images were censored. A group of black people gathered in an open space in Paballelo to denounce the latest litany of social injustices. The local police had been fearing for some time that their hitherto tame blacks (“our blacks” was the phrase they would use, ignorant of the rebellious thoughts that swirled inside their heads) were in danger of following the violent lead of their uppity cousins in Johannesburg and Cape Town. Certain now that the dread day had finally come, they followed the script of their unrest-hardened metropolitan peers and fired tear gas into the small crowd of protestors. Justice was not actually present that day, but there was no shortage of other angry young blacks around to respond by hurling stones at the police, who replied by hurling themselves into the crowd, setting their dogs on the stone-throwers, chasing them, and beating those they caught with their truncheons.

The police were unprepared to cope with the ensuing mayhem, in which rioters burned houses and vehicles owned by those perceived as black collaborators, people such as the black town councilors paid by the regime to give it a veneer of democratic respectability. The police opened fire, killing a pregnant black woman. They said later she had been throwing stones at them. But the truth, as far as Paballelo was concerned, was that she had simply stepped out of her house to buy some bread.

The revolution had finally come to Upington. Over the next two days, Monday and Tuesday, Paballelo residents engaged in running battles with the police, this time with Justice at the forefront.

On Tuesday afternoon, police reinforcements arrived from Kimberley, the nearest city, 180 miles away. At the head of them was a certain Captain van Dyk, who proposed peace talks. That evening Justice and other local leaders met with him in the township. No resolution was reached, but they agreed to meet again the next morning, this time with the whole community present, at the dusty local soccer field. The idea, to which Captain van Dyk assented, was that the residents of Paballelo should air the grievances that had occasioned all the trouble in the first place. If the police captain were able to provide some sort of satisfaction, some sense that the matters raised would be addressed at a political level, then tempers might cool and they would avoid the violent confrontation that loomed. Justice and his fellow leaders were encouraged by Van Dyk’s reasonable manner. He was a different breed from the uncouth variety of policeman they had grown accustomed to in Upington.

The next morning, November 13, thousands turned up at the soccer field. Again, the choreography followed a familiar pattern, replicating the sequence of events at thousands of other such protest meetings nationwide. Observed by a phalanx of riot police in gray-blue uniforms and a column of clunky yellow armored vehicles with huge wheels called Casspirs, an orderly crowd of black people gathered at the center of the football field. The proceedings began, as always, with the official anthem of black liberation, “Nkosi Sikelele iAfrika.” The words, in Mandela’s language, Xhosa, meant :

God Bless Africa
May her glory rise high
Hear our pleas
God bless us
Us your children
Come Spirit
Come Holy Spirit
God we ask you to protect our nation
Intervene and end all conflicts
Protect us
Protect our nation
Let it be so
Forever and ever

It was generous, mournful, defiant, and had the iterative power of an ocean wave. To black South Africans and those who sympathized with their cause, it was a call to courage. To the apartheid authorities, and in particular to the young white policemen whom the anthem had in its immediate sights, it was a menacing expression of the vast black sea that might rise and engulf them.

After “Nkosi Sikelele” came a Christian prayer. While the thousands addressed themselves to their God, heads bowed, and before anyone had even begun to broach the political matters at hand, a local police officer, Captain Botha, wrested command away from Captain van Dyk. Botha was from Upington.

To Van Dyk’s dismay, Botha lifted a bullhorn to his lips and announced, in a cry familiar to all veterans of black protest in South Africa, that the crowd had “ten minutes to disperse.” The only thing that was unusual about the warning was that it should have come quite so early on, before the prayers had even finished. Captain van Dyk might well have reached the same point himself, but he would have observed the religious decencies a little more, and might have at least gone through the motions of seeking a negotiated outcome.

Captain Botha didn’t wait for the full ten minutes to tick by. Before two minutes had passed he ordered his troops to open fire with tear gas and rubber bullets, to let loose their snarling dogs. Some of the younger blacks hurled stones, but most of the crowd ran off, the screams of the women drowned out by the fearsome revving of the pursuing Casspirs. Most routes had been blocked off by policemen carrying guns, stroking truncheons, or cracking sjamboks, thick leather whips, on the stony ground. Seeing a gap, Justice led a group of about 150 people—men and women, young and old—down Pilane Street, leaving the white policemen behind them.

Suddenly, from one of the small gray-brick houses on the street, shots rang out. A child fell, seriously wounded. Then a man charged out of a house with a gun above his head. Straight into the anger, the fear, the chaos ran the man who had fired the shots. His name was Lucas Sethwala. He was that peculiarity in apartheid South Africa, a black policeman; he and other “collaborators,” the butt of the rioting on Sunday night. Somewhere at the back of Justice’s mind, driving him on, were the images that had shaped him, Robben Island and the suffering of “our leaders,” the transient joy of watching the All Blacks murder the Upington rugby team, the Separate Amenities Act, the Group Areas, the schooling that ended at age fifteen, the thrilling example of the hero who stabbed the white policeman to death . . . all those memories and more ate away at him. But at that moment, as he broke away on his own and chased after police constable Lucas Sethwala, the foremost sensation was frenzy; the sole purpose was revenge.

“ There was no time to stop and think. There was no rational choice made. It was pure emotion,” Justice remembered.

The fact that Sethwala still had the gun in his hand and Justice carried no weapon, that Sethwala turned around as he ran down the road and fired at Justice, showed just how irrational Justice’s response was. But the shots missed and Justice caught him, forced the gun out of Sethwala’s hand, and beat Sethwala over the head with it. He only hit him twice, but twice was enough. He lay still, dead. Justice got up and kept running, but the group behind him, who had celebrated Sethwala’s capture and pummeling with a cry, did as black South African crowds ritually did too often in such circumstances. They kicked Sethwala’s inert body and then someone ran off to get a can of gasoline. Justice did not see this; he was told about it later. About a hundred people gathered round the body, whooping with delight. It was a victory at last, or something that in the madness of the moment felt very much like it for Paballelo. They doused the body with gasoline, scratched a match, and set it alight.

Justice fled across the border to Windhoek, the capital of Namibia. But then it was not yet an independent country; it still belonged to South Africa. Six days later, on November 19, he was arrested and brought back to Upington, where he and twenty-five others were jailed and charged with murder. The law of Common Purpose, as it was called, allowed for the prosecution not only of the person or persons directly responsible for a crime, but also of all those who might have shared in the desire to commit it, who had lent their moral support. Given such a loose definition, the police could have rounded up two people, or five, ten, twenty, or sixty-two. They opted for twenty-six, charging them all with the murder of the one man. Among the defendants was a married couple in their sixties who had eleven children between them and no criminal—or even mildly political—record. The police investigators made no effort to distinguish between the old couple’s degree of guilt and Bekebeke’s. They didn’t know that Bekebeke had been the one who had administered the decisive blows. Nor would they find out in the course of the long trial that followed. If found guilty, the “Upington 26” would face the same sentence Mandela had prepared for when he had stood at the dock in Pretoria twenty-one years earlier: death by hanging.

CHAPTER IV

BAGGING THE CROC

1986-89

Kobie Coetsee had succumbed more quickly than either he or Mandela would have expected. But Mandela doubted his next target would roll over quite so easily. His ultimate goal—a meeting with Botha himself—could only be attained after, or if, he won over the man guarding the presidential door, the head of the National Intelligence Service, Niël Barnard. Barnard, who had studied international politics at George-town University in Washington, D.C., acquired a reputation in his twenties as a boy genius. Botha first heard about him when Barnard was a lecturer in political science at the University of the Orange Free State. Impetuously, Botha hired him out of the university, aged thirty, to head up the NIS. That was on June 1, 1980. Barnard was to remain in the job until January 31, 1992, serving Botha for nearly ten years and his successor, F. W. de Klerk, for two.