Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation (22 page)

Pienaar looked around the large wood-paneled office, vaguely registering a blend of decor old South African and new; ox-wagon watercolors side by side with shields of leather hide and wooden African scupltures. Mandela broke in. “Do you take milk, François?”

In less than five minutes Pienaar’s mood had been transformed. “It’s more than just being comfortable in his presence,” Pienaar recalled. “You have a feeling when you are with him that you are safe.” So safe that Pienaar had the audacity half-jokingly to ask him whether he would accompany the Springboks on a tour to New Zealand the following month. “Nothing would please me more, François!” he smiled. “But most unfortunately I have these people here in this building who drive me very, very hard and I know they will give me orders to remain here and work!”

To Pienaar’s relief, Mandela simply took charge from there, launching into a sequence of reminiscences and stories that made Pienaar feel, as he put it, like a little boy sitting at the feet of a wise old man. One of the stories concerned the theft of a chicken in Qunu, the village in the Transkei where Mandela had been raised and to which he still returned to dispense his ancient chiefly duties. One day when Mandela was visiting, a lady came around to his home to tell him that a neighbor had stolen her chicken. Pienaar picked up the story: “Mandela summoned the neighbor, who confessed he had done it, but only because his family was hungry. Then Mandela called both of them to his house and he ruled that the man had to pay the lady back two chickens. But she argued, she bargained, she wanted more, and they settled on more. But it was a lot for this guy, so Mandela helped him out with the repayment.”

Mandela chuckled throughout as he told the story, a peculiar one for him to choose to tell the Springbok captain at a meeting he had called with the clear purpose of forging a relationship with him in preparation for the following year’s Rugby World Cup. It was peculiarly light and inconsequential, too, given the solemnity of the surroundings, a room where, as Mandela had put it during an interview here a few days earlier, “the most diabolical plans were hatched.” Yet the story of the stolen chicken worked, in that it helped forge precisely the sort of complicit intimacy Mandela wished to establish with the young man. In sharing with him what had been something of a private confidence, a story Pienaar would not have read about in the newspapers, Mandela had found a way to the heart of the overawed rugby captain, making him feel as if he were in the company of a favorite great-uncle. Pienaar would not have guessed it at the time, but winning him over—and through him, enlisting the rest of the Springbok team—was an important objective for Mandela. For what Mandela had reckoned, in that half-instinctive, half-calculating way of his, was that the World Cup might prove helpful in the great challenge of national unification that still lay ahead.

Mandela never made his purpose overt in that first meeting with Pienaar, but he did edge closer to the main theme when he switched the conversation to his memories of the Barcelona Olympic Games, which he had attended in 1992 and recalled with great enthusiasm. “He talked about the power that sport had to move people and how he had seen this not long after his release in the Barcelona Olympics, which he especially remembered for one particular moment when he said he stood up and he felt the whole stadium reverberating,” said Pienaar, in whose mind Mandela was seeking to plant the first seeds of a political idea. Pienaar did not register it as such, but in Mandela’s version of the encounter, warm as it had been, the subtext was crystal clear.

“François Pienaar was the captain of rugby and if I wanted to use rugby, I had to work with him,” Mandela said. “I concentrated in our meeting on complimenting him for the role which he was playing and which he could play. And I briefed him on what I was doing about sports and why I was doing so. And I found him a highly intelligent person.” The time had come, as Mandela explained to his guest, to abandon the old perception of the Springbok rugby team as “enemies” and see them as compatriots and friends. His message was, “Let us use sport for the purpose of nation-building and promoting all the ideas which we think will lead to peace and stability in our country.”

Pienaar had become the latest Afrikaner to be “enveloped,” as he himself put it, in Mandela’s aura; but he did not become an overnight evangelizer. He was a straightforward rugby man, for whom big words like “nation-building” carried little meaning. The message he took away from that meeting was a straightforward one: Get out there and win, wear that shirt with pride, certain of my support. Mandela bade Pienaar good-bye as if they were already the best of friends.

Mandela returned to his job, Pienaar to his, neither realizing the uncanny similarity between the enterprises each faced. Pienaar, new to the captain’s job, viewed with some reservation by a sector of the rugby fraternity that questioned his character and his ability, had a tough task ahead: consolidating his authority and uniting the rugby team. This required a significant measure of political skill, for the Springboks were big men with big egos drawn from provincial teams accustomed to see each other as fierce enemies in the big domestic competition, the South African Super Bowl, the Currie Cup.

The Afrikaans-English divide presented another challenge. Handling James Small, one of the most talented “Englishmen” in South African rugby, proved an early test of Pienaar’s leadership. Small, a relatively short and light member of the team at six feet and two hundred pounds, was one of the team’s fastest sprinters—and most volatile characters. Pienaar’s joy at beating England the week before he met Mandela had been tarnished by the memory of something Small had said to him on the field during the game. A lapse by Small had led to England being awarded a penalty kick. Pienaar rebuked him with a gruff “Come on, James!” to which Small replied, “Fuck off !” Pienaar was shocked. The role of captain in other sports often has a token or ceremonial quality to it, but in rugby it carries real weight. Not only does the captain exercise a great deal of tactical authority during a game, calling moves that in American football, say, would be made by coaches on the sidelines, he also carries, by rugby tradition, a special mystique. The rest of the team is expected to relate to him with something of the deference schoolchildren regard a school principal, or soldiers a commanding officer. Small’s “Fuck off!” was an act of insubordination so serious that, unchecked, it could have ended up corroding Pienaar’s influence over the entire team. After the game, Pienaar, who towered over Small, took him to one side and firmly informed him that he would never, ever swear at him on the field again. Small had a reputation as a barroom brawler way beyond Pienaar’s, even, but he heard his captain loud and clear. He never did swear at him again.

South Africa, making up for the lost years of isolation with a sudden blur of international games, traveled to New Zealand for the first time in thirteen years in July 1994, losing one game narrowly and drawing another against the New Zealand All Blacks, already regarded widely as favorites for the following year’s World Cup. In October the Springboks played two games at home against Argentina, another strong rugby nation, and won both. Small starred in the second game but in the nighttime celebrations that followed found himself caught up in yet another drunken fight. The incident, sparked when a woman in a bar pinched Small’s behind, received much media coverage. He was banned from a tour the following month to Britain, in which the South Africans convincingly beat Scotland and Wales, intimidating all who saw them with the uncompromising ferocity of their play.

The tunnel vision of the Springboks was now total. The only thing in their minds was the World Cup, which began at the end of May next year. Neither Pienaar, nor Small, nor anyone else on the team was paying any attention at all to South African politics, where there was plenty going on.

November 1994 had been the diciest month yet of Mandela’s half-year in power. He left to his ministers the tough business of providing housing, education, electricity, and water to those whom apartheid had deliberately denied the basics of a dignified modern life. His job was to try to become the father of the whole nation; to make everybody feel that he symbolized their identity and values. That was why a part of him always kept a wary watch on the most recalcitrant members of the new family he was seeking to create, the Afrikaner right. This meant also worrying about the police. Mandela was fairly relaxed about the South African Defence Force, whose Afrikaner generals had been joined at the top of the military by former commanders of Umkhonto we Sizwe. The SADF generals were disciplined. The police were looser cannon, and most of the top people from the apartheid era remained at their posts. The government intelligence services, hitherto deployed to monitor the left, concentrated their energies now on that 50 percent of General Constand Viljoen’s former supporters who had not taken part in the April elections, and from whose discontented midst the preelection terrorist bombers had sprung.

The prevailing view among white South Africans in the aftermath of Mandela’s inauguration was one of relief. The apocalypse had come and gone and life remained much as it had been. The guillotine blocks had not gone up and the civil servants remained, for the most part, in their jobs. But white people did not shake off their inbred mixture of guilt and fear overnight. They began to worry whether this might not be the calm before the storm, whether there might be an overnight change of policy on public service jobs for white people, precipitated by the inevitable clamor whites expected from blacks for instant economic gratification. In a measure of how whites continued to underestimate the intelligence of their black neighbors, stories began to do the rounds about black “cleaning girls” and “garden boys” striding into their “madams’ ” and “masters’ ” sitting rooms and demanding the keys of their homes.

The truth was that black South Africans were, for the most part, sufficiently shrewd and sufficiently patient to know that Rome would not be built in a day. They trusted their government eventually to deliver but understood that to drive the whites into the sea would not do anyone any good. That was why they had voted for the ANC instead of the PAC.

The generosity implicit in that choice eluded a large chunk of the white population, few of whom had the slightest sense of what was going on in the minds of black South Africans. General Viljoen, the accidental politician, kept worrying too, still unsure whether he had done the right thing by his people in shelving the Boerestaat option and going along with the bonafides of Mandela’s ANC. He worried also about the potential for violence his well-armed and, in some cases, half-crazed former allies might pose. Mandela, who talked about these matters with Viljoen, with whom he regularly had tea, saw his fears confirmed on the evening of November 5.

On this day, the Springboks had annihilated a Welsh team with such style and passion that the team’s coach, Kitch Christie, declared himself convinced that the Springboks could win the World Cup. Quite possibly Johan Heyns, in common with many other Afrikaners, had formed the same opinion too. But he did not live to see the day. That evening, as he sat at his home in Pretoria playing cards with his wife and his two grandsons, aged eight and eleven, he was shot dead. A gunman outside killed him with one bullet to the back of the head.

Professor Johan Heyns, who was sixty-six, had been a pillar of the apartheid establishment, serving as moderator of the Dutch Reformed Church between 1986 and 1990. But he had also been a motor for political change, having ended thirty years of conflict with Braam Viljoen and the small group of dissenting theologians who thought like him by acknowledging that it was wrong to believe that apartheid enjoyed biblical justification. That was in 1986. His own parting shot as head of the Afrikaners’ biggest church had been boldly to declare in 1990, soon after Mandela’s release, that apartheid was a sin. He had undergone his private conversion during a protracted stay in Europe in the early eighties. “I had grown up with the idea that blacks were culturally inferior to whites,” Heyns had once confessed. “Exposure in Europe to black people of high academic standing had a profound effect on me.”

In 1990, when the first spasms of right-wing resistance were being felt, he had said, “What we’re experiencing now are the birth pangs of the new nation. And—have no doubt—the new nation will be born. But birth is usually accompanied by pain, even death.”

Heyns’s assassination was not in the same order as Chris Hani’s in terms of the immediate dangers that it posed, but it did fill people with foreboding. Who had done it and who might be next? Could it have been a former member of one of the old police or army death squads? It had certainly been a professional job. The murder weapon had been a high-caliber rifle fired through a window from some twenty feet away. No one doubted that it had been an action of the far right. But nobody knew who had done it, or why.

Mandela was outraged. Heyns, whom he had met many times, had been his favorite kind of Afrikaner. Morally and physically brave, honest to the core, he’d had the courage late in life to admit to the error of his ways. Mandela mourned his “loss to the South African nation as a whole, both black and white.” But then, three days after Heyns’s death, he went on the offensive. He announced a crackdown on the far right, accusing the previous government of having not done nearly enough to defuse the right-wing threat. And he began his crackdown by wielding the axe on the police, from whose ranks he suspected complicity in Heyns’s killing, as well as an unwillingness to seriously uncover the culprits. Mandela had hitherto trod gingerly with the police. He had deliberately not done what his heart asked him to do, cut heads at the top. Now he did.

One man who had remained in place six months into the Mandela presidency was the nation’s top cop, Commisioner Johan van der Merwe, a former security police chief who had been suspected of colluding in dirty tricks operations against the ANC, including murder. Mandela was prepared to swallow a lot for the cause of peace, going so far as to name the Inkatha leader, Mangosuthu Buthelezi, minister of home affairs. But Heyns’s death had stretched his patience. “We cannot allow a police force to develop in opposition to government,” he declared, going so far as to accuse segements of the police of “declaring war” on the ANC. Singling out Van der Merwe, who had been chief of the notorious security police in the eighties, he accused him of failing to support the democratic government. A few days later, he acted on his threats and fired him.