Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation (2 page)

For that reason, apartheid was the only political system in the world that at the height of the Cold War many countries—the United States, the Soviet Union, Albania, China, France, North Korea, Spain, Cuba—agreed was, the United Nations definition, “a crime against humanity.” Yet from this epic injustice an epic reconciliation arose.

I pointed out to Mandela that in my journalism work I had met many people striving to make peace in the Middle East, in Latin America, in Africa, in Asia: for these people South Africa was an ideal to which they all aspired. In the “conflict resolution” industry, burgeoning since the end of the Cold War, when local conflicts started erupting all over the globe, the handbook for how to achieve peace by political means was South Africa’s “negotiated revolution,” as someone once called it. No country had ever shepherded itself from tyranny to democracy more ably, and humanely. Much had been written, I acknowledged, about the nuts and bolts of “the South African miracle.” But what was missing, to my mind, was a book about the human factor, about the miraculousness of the miracle. I envisioned an unapologetically positive story that displayed the human animal at its best; a book with a flesh-and-blood hero at its center; a book about a country whose black majority should have been bellowing for revenge but instead, following Mandela’s example, gave the world a lesson in enlightened forgiveness. My book would include an ample cast of characters, black and white, whose stories would convey the living face of South Africa’s great ceremony of redemption. But also, at a time in history when you looked around the world’s leaders and most of those you saw were moral midgets (the sphinx did not flinch at this), my book would be about him. It wouldn’t be a biography, but a story that shone a light on his political genius, on the talent he deployed in winning people to his cause through an appeal to their finer qualities; in drawing out, in Abraham Lincoln’s phrase, the better angels of their nature.

I said I meant to frame the book around the drama of a particular sporting event. Sport was a powerful mobilizer of mass emotions and shaper of political perceptions. (Another nod, short and sharp.) I gave as examples the Berlin Olympics of 1936, which Hitler used to promote the idea of Aryan superiority, though the black American athlete Jesse Owens upset those plans badly by winning four gold medals; Jackie Robinson, the first black man to play major league baseball, helping set in motion the necessary change of consciousness that would lead to big social changes in America. I mentioned also America’s unexpected ice hockey victory against the Soviet Union in the Winter Olympics of 1980, all the sweeter because it was played on home soil.

I then reminded Mandela of a phrase he had used a year or two earlier when handing over a lifetime achievement award to the Brazilian soccer star Pelé. He had said, and I read from some notes I had brought, “Sport has the power to change the world. It has the power to inspire, the power to unite people that little else has. . . . It is more powerful than governments in breaking down racial barriers.”

Finally coming to the point, I told Mandela what the narrative heart of my book would be, why it was that I would need his support. I told him that there had been one sporting occasion that outdid all the ones I had just mentioned, one where all the themes I had been touching on during this conversation had converged; one that had evoked magically the “symphony of brotherhood” of Martin Luther King’s dreams; one event where all Mandela had striven and suffered for during his life converged. I was referring to the final of the—

Suddenly, his smile lit up the room and, joining his huge hands in happy recognition, he finished the sentence for me: “. . . the 1995 Rugby World Cup!” My own smile confirmed his guess, and he added, “Yes. Yes. Absolutely! I understand exactly the book you have in mind,” he said, in full voice, as if he were not eighty-two but forty years younger. “John, you have my blessing. You have it wholeheartedly.”

In high spirits, we shook hands, bade each other farewell, and agreed we’d arrange another meeting soon. ln that second interview, with the tape recorder running, he explained how he had first formed an idea of the political power of sport while in prison; how he had used the 1995 Rugby World Cup as an instrument in the grand strategic purpose he set for himself during his five years as South Africa’s first democratically elected president: to reconcile blacks and whites and create the conditions for a lasting peace in a country that barely five years earlier, when he was released from prison, had contained all the conditions for civil war. He told me, often with a chuckle or two, about the trouble he had persuading his own people to back the rugby team, and he spoke with esteem and affection about François Pienaar, the big blond son of apartheid who was the captain of the South African team, the Springboks, and the team manager, another mountainous Afrikaner, Morné du Plessis, whom Mandela described, in a courtly, old-fashioned British way he has, as “an excellent chap.”

After Mandela and I spoke that day, all sorts of people agreed to talk to me for the book. I had already accumulated much of the raw material for my story during the six eventful years I worked in South Africa, 1989 to 1995, as bureau chief of the London
Independent
, and I had been going back to South Africa over the next ten years on journalistic missions. But I started seeing people specifically with this book in mind only after I had talked to Mandela, beginning with a star of that championship Springbok team named Hennie le Roux. You don’t expect to emerge feeling warm and sentimental after interviewing a rugby player. But that was what happened to me, because Le Roux had been so moved as he spoke about Mandela and the role he, a decent enough but politically unversed Afrikaner, had found himself playing in his country’s national life. We spent about two hours together in an otherwise empty office floor, as dusk fell, and three or four times he had to stop in midsentence, choking back sobs.

The interview with Le Roux set the tone for the dozens of others I did for this book. In many cases there was a moment when the eyes of my interlocutor moistened, especially when it was someone from the rugby crowd. And, in all cases—whether it was Archbishop Desmond Tutu, or the far-right Afrikaner nationalist General Constand Viljoen, or his left-leaning twin brother, Braam—they relived the times we discussed in a buoyant mood that bordered at times on euphoria.

More than once people remarked that the book I was going to write felt like a fable, or a parable, or a fairy story. It was a funny thing to say for those who had been the real-life protagonists of a blood-and-guts political tale, but it was true. That it was set in Africa and involved a game of rugby was almost incidental. Had it been set in China and the drama built around a water buffalo race, the tale might have been as enduringly exemplary. For it fulfilled the two basic conditions of a successful fairy story: it was a good yarn and it held a lesson for the ages.

Two other thoughts struck me when I took stock of all the material I had accumulated for this book. First, the political genius of Mandela. Stripped to its essentials, politics is about persuading people, winning them over. All politicians are professional seducers. They woo people for a living. And if they are clever and good at what they do, if they have a talent for striking the popular chord, they will prosper. Lincoln had it, Roosevelt had it, Churchill had it, de Gaulle had it, Kennedy had it, Martin Luther King had it, Reagan had it, Clinton and Blair had it. So did Arafat. And so, for that matter, did Hitler. They all won over their people to their cause. Where Mandela—the anti-Hitler—had an edge over the lot of them, where he was unique, was in the scope of his ambition. Having won over his own people—in itself no mean feat, for they were a disparate bunch, drawn from all manner of creeds, colors, and tribes—he then went out and won over the enemy. How he did that—how he won over people who had applauded his imprisonment, who had wanted him dead, who planned to go to war against him—is chiefly what this book is about.

The second thought I caught myself having was that, beyond a history, beyond even a fairy tale, this might also turn out to be an unwitting addition to the vast canon of self-help books offering people models for how to prosper in their daily lives. Mandela mastered, more than anyone else alive (and, quite possibly, dead), the art of making friends and influencing people. No matter whether they started out on the extreme left or the extreme right, whether they initially feared, hated, or admired Mandela, everyone I interviewed had come to feel renewed and improved by his example. All of them, in talking about him, seemed to shine. This book seeks, humbly, to reflect a little of Mandela’s light.

CHAPTER I

BREAKFAST IN HOUGHTON

June 24, 1995

He awoke, as he always did, at 4:30 in the morning; he got up, got dressed, folded his pajamas, and made his bed. All his life he had been a revolutionary, and now he was president of a large country, but nothing would make Nelson Mandela break with the rituals established during his twenty-seven years in prison.

Not when he was at someone else’s home, not when he was staying in a luxury hotel, not even after he had spent the night at Buckingham Palace or the White House. Unnaturally unaffected by jet lag—no matter whether he was in Washington, London, or New Delhi—he would wake up unfailingly by 4:30, and then make his bed. Room cleaners the world over would react with stupefaction on discovering that the visiting dignitary had done half their job for them. None more so than the lady assigned to his hotel suite on a visit to Shanghai. She was shocked by Mandela’s individualist bedroom manners. Alerted by his staff to the chambermaid’s distress, Mandela invited her to his room, apologized, and explained that making his bed was like brushing his teeth, it was something he simply could not restrain himself from doing.

He was similarly wedded to an exercise routine he’d begun even before prison, in the forties and fifties when he was a lawyer, revolutionary, and amateur boxer. In those days he would run for an hour before sunrise, from his small brick home in Soweto to Johannesburg and back. In 1964 he went to prison in Robben Island, off the coast of Cape Town, remaining inside a tiny cell for eighteen years. There, for lack of a better alternative, he would run in place. Every morning, again, for one hour. In 1982 he was transferred to a prison on the mainland where he shared a cell with his closest friend, Walter Sisulu, and three other veterans of South Africa’s anti-apartheid struggle. The cell was big, about the size of half a tennis court, allowing him to run short, tight laps. The problem was that the others were still in bed when he would set off on these indoor half-marathons. They used to complain bitterly at being pummeled out of their sleep every morning by their otherwise esteemed comrade’s relentlessly vigorous sexagenarian thump-thump.

After his release from prison at age seventy-one, in February 1990, he eased up a little. Instead of running, he now walked, but briskly, and still every morning, still for one hour, before daybreak. These walks usually took place in the neighborhood of Houghton, Johannesburg, where he moved in April 1992 after the collapse of his marriage to his second wife, Winnie. Two years later he became president and had two grand residences at his disposal, one in Pretoria and one in Cape Town, but he felt more comfortable at his place in Houghton, a refuge in the affluent, and until recently whites-only, northern suburbs of Africa’s richest metropolis. An inhabitant of Los Angeles would be struck by the similarities between Beverly Hills and Houghton. The whites had looked after themselves well during Mandela’s long absence in jail, and now he felt that he had earned a little of the good life too. He enjoyed Houghton’s quiet stateliness, the leafy airiness of his morning walks, the chats with the white neighbors, whose birthday parties and other ceremonial gatherings he would sometimes attend. Early on in his presidency a thirteen-year-old Jewish boy dropped by Mandela’s home and handed the policeman at the gate an invitation to his bar mitzvah. The parents were astonished to receive a phone call from Mandela himself a few days later asking for directions to their home. They were even more astonished when he showed up at the door, tall and beaming, on their son’s big day. Mandela felt welcomed and comfortable in a community where during most of his life he could only have lived had he been what in white South Africa they used to call, irrespective of age, a “garden boy.” He grew fond of Houghton and continued to live there throughout his presidency, sleeping at his official mansions only when duty required it.

On this particular Southern Hemisphere winter’s morning Mandela woke at 4:30, as usual, got dressed, and made his bed . . . but then, behaving in a manner stunningly out of the ordinary for a creature as set in his ways as he was, he broke his routine; he did not go for his morning walk. He went downstairs instead, sat at his chair in the dining room, and ate his breakfast. He had thought through this change of plan the night before, giving him time to inform his startled bodyguards, the Presidential Protection Unit, that the next morning they could have one more hour at home in bed. Instead of arriving at five, they could come at six. They would need the extra rest, for the day would be almost as much of a test for them as it would be for Mandela himself.

Another sign that this was no ordinary day was that Mandela, not usually prone to nerves, had a knot in his stomach. “You don’t know what I went through on that day,” he confessed to me. “I was so tense!” It was a curious thing for a man with his past to say. This was not the day of his release in February 1990, nor his presidential inauguration in May 1994, nor even the morning back in June 1964 when he woke up in a cell not knowing whether the judge would condemn him to death or, as it turned out, to a life sentence. This was the day on which his country, South Africa, would be playing the best team in the world, New Zealand, in the final of the Rugby World Cup. His compatriots were as tense as he was. But the remarkable thing, in a country that had lurched historically from crisis to disaster, was that the anxiety they all felt concerned the prospect of imminent national triumph.