Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation (23 page)

Expecting a backlash, Mandela received reports two months later of what sounded like a serious plot against his government. “I discovered that there was a plan amongst the right-wingers to link up with the Inkatha Freedom Party to attack the ANC. Now, when that happened I went to Pretoria. I did not even tell the ANC. I went to Pretoria because this debate was going on in Pretoria. I checked and cross-checked with the intelligence people and this was what I found: One group of right-wingers was saying, ‘Let us join with Inkatha and attack the ANC. The United Nations would not interfere because it would be blacks attacking blacks. They won’t interfere. And we must topple this government because it’s a communist government.’ But other right-wingers were saying, ‘No you can’t do that! Look at what they have done for rugby, look at the international rugby they have given us.’ ”

The conservative paper
Rapport
soon published an article that confirmed what Mandela’s sources had told him. The right-wing coalition was hatching a plot to kill the Zulu king, which was supposed to spark a black rebellion against the ANC. Mandela immediately put his intelligence people and his most trusted police officers on the case. He also went on the political offensive, with rugby once again as his instrument, his carrot. But there was a problem.

Everybody in the ANC leadership, by far the dominant party in the coalition government Mandela was heading, had come around to the idea that staging the Rugby World Cup in South Africa was a good thing. But what many could not stomach was the notion of preserving the Springbok name. They had gotten rid of the old flag, they had half gotten rid of the old anthem, and this, the third great symbol of apartheid, could not be allowed to remain the badge of a team that represented the new South Africa. Word leaked out of the desire of the ANC’s national executive to change the name, and the rugby-loving Afrikaner fraternity was up in arms.

Mandela said he had initially agreed to do away with the Springbok. But the tensions precipitated by the death of Heyns and the sacking of the police chiefs, followed by this latest news of a right-wing plot, made him pause. Looking at the bigger picture, he decided that he had to do something to placate the restless right.

“I decided to act. I made a statement. I suggested that we must retain the Springbok.”

The ANC leadership had responded meekly a year earlier to his chiding on the matter of the anthem, but this time the response was openly rebellious.

“You would not believe it! People like Arnold Stofile! They came out and attacked me! So I called them in one by one and I briefed them. I explained to them the situation.” For Mandela the Springbok was a matter of ultimately cosmetic interest; for the likes of Stofile it was close to their hearts—a source of much accumulated indignation. They could not see the funny side of the argument, as Mandela did.

Mandela phoned Stofile and asked him to stop by his house. “I would like us to talk about this animal,” he said.

“I don’t follow you,” replied Stofile.

“You know, this sports animal.”

They met the next day, and after some hand-wringing, Stofile, informed by Mandela that there was a matter of national security involved, caved in. “In the end,” Stofile said, “we agreed to disagree.” As did the rest of the ANC’s rugby rebels. Mandela had imposed his will once again. In time for the World Cup, the Springbok had been saved.

CHAPTER XIII

SPRINGBOK SERENADE

The question now was whether the Springboks would save Mandela. He had stuck his neck out for the rugby people and now it was up to them to pay him back in kind. Stofile and other members of the ANC National Executive Committee still smarted at the memory of the rugby authorities’ response three years earlier to their decision to allow them to play international rugby again. At the game against New Zealand in 1992, Louis Luyt, the president of the South African Rugby Football Union, had delibarately encouraged the crowd to flout the conditions imposed by the ANC and wave the old flags, sing the old anthem. Luyt, a huge former rugby player himself, had risen from relative poverty in childhood to become a phenomenally rich fertilizer and beer magnate. Humility was not this self-made man’s most immediately striking trait. Now sixty-two years old, he was brash, loud, and bossy. He hated being told what to do by anyone, let alone a black man. Hence his reaction to the rules the ANC had tried to impose on him back in 1992.

But much had changed in South Africa in that short time, and Luyt had changed too. Softened by Mandela the way all Afrikaners seemed to be (“He was so nice, respectful, and charming at the same time, the first time we met,” he said), Luyt had learned a new sense of political responsibility from the international rugby authorities, who did not want the World Cup to become a racially fraught global fiasco. Responding to this need, Luyt made two enlightened appointments. He named Edward Griffiths, a liberal-minded former journalist as CEO of the rugby federation, and Morné du Plessis, the former Springbok captain who had gone to see Mandela at the Cape Town Parade on the day of his release, as manager of the World Cup team. Griffiths earned praise for the deftness with which he ran the World Cup operation, but his most enduring and valuable contribution came in the form of the slogan he invented for the Springbok campaign. “One Team, One Country” not only captured the imagination of South Africans, it conveyed Mandela’s purpose to perfection.

If Griffiths was the brains behind the scenes, Morné du Plessis was the guiding spirit, his job to put theory into practice, to persuade the team to behave in such a way as to convince the country at large, but black South Africa in particular, that the slogan was not just hollow words. Being manager meant a lot of other things too. The job differed from that of the coach, Kitch Christie, who was in charge of everything that had to do with the game itself, with what happened on the field, starting with team selection. Du Plessis’s duties covered everything that happened off the field of play, something along the lines of team administrator: ensuring the travel arrangements were right, the playing equipment was in place, the bills were paid. But in this case, at this time in South African history, the job came to mean a great deal more. It was an opportunity for Du Plessis not only to forge a winning team but also to atone for what he increasingly understood to have been his failure (“one of my life’s greatest regrets,” he later confessed) to rise to the occasion when he had been Springbok captain and do or say something that might have helped improve the lot of black South Africans.

Du Plessis believed his new role to be about more than logistics. He wanted his team to strike the right national chord, get the political atmospherics right, make the players realize that they were playing not just for white South Africa but for the whole country. The one great thing he had going for him was his credibility. A giant of a man, he remained a legend among white South Africans, who never forgot his record as Springbok captain, most famously the leadership and talent he displayed in a famous victory over the old enemy, New Zealand, in 1976.

Luyt’s choice of Du Plessis impressed the ANC, for his liberal political leanings were now well-known. But it was a delicate task he had ahead of him, and he knew it. “I understood almost immediately on taking up the job how easily one could slip up, how one could ruin everything with one silly mistake, by saying the wrong thing, striking the wrong note.”

It was precisely out of his desire to strike the right note that Du Plessis came up with the idea of teaching the Springboks to sing the “black” half of the new national anthem, “Nkosi Sikelele.” He and Mandela shared the same mission impossible: persuading black South Africans to perform a historical about-face and support the Boks. Mandela was doing his bit within the ANC, sending word out to his people that now “they” were “us.” Du Plessis did his bit by urging the players to behave respectfully in public. He knew that things could go terribly wrong if before the start of each World Cup game black people were to see the Springboks singing the Afrikaans and English words of “Die Stem” with gusto but making no effort to sing “Nkosi Sikelele.” If that happened, Mandela’s and Du Plessis’s enterprise would be doomed; the notion of “One Team, One Country” would become a laughing stock. It was clear to Du Plessis what had to be done. The players had to be seen singing the old liberation protest song. This image would upend the conventional black view of the Springboks as Afrikaner louts who sang violent racist songs.

Du Plessis had not talked politics with any of the players but he had no reason to believe that they were anything but run-of-the-mill Natvoters, with the ignorance and prejudice that entailed. “We had some real through-and-through Afrikaners there and this [“Nkosi Sikele”] was in Xhosa and it was the language of what, for many white South Africans, if not most, had been the enemy. It was quite a thing to ask these guys to sing a song that carried that kind of associations.” Quite a thing too to teach them to pronounce the Xhosa words. Only two players in the team spoke the language. Mark Andrews, six foot seven and 240 pounds, had been raised in the rural Eastern Cape, Xhosa country, and he had been exposed to Mandela’s language from birth. Hennie le Roux, smaller and faster and also from that part of the world, spoke some Xhosa too. As for the other twenty-four players in the squad, not a clue.

Fortunately Du Plessis had a friend who could help, a neighbor in Cape Town called Anne Munnik. She was a trim, attractive, bubbly English-speaking white woman in her thirties who earned her living teaching Xhosa. She had learned the language as a child, also in the Eastern Cape, and had perfected it at the University of Cape Town, where she now taught. She was staggered when Du Plessis suggested she give the Boks a lesson on how to sing “Nkosi Sikelele” and then doubtful, once she thought about it, about the kind of response she would get from those hulking great Boers. But Du Plessis insisted, and, with some misgivings, she agreed.

An evening was fixed in the third week of May 1995 at the hotel in Cape Town where the team was staying in preparation for the opening game of the World Cup against world champions Australia, just days away. The players were ordered to gather after training in what had become known as the Team Room, an anodyne space where typically local banks or marketing companies would hold seminars for their staff, and where now Kitch Christie would lecture the players on strategy and tactics. This time, waiting for them at the head of the room, were Du Plessis and Anne Munnik.

Du Plessis, towering over the choirmistress, introduced her to the freshly showered Springboks as an old friend whom he had known for twenty years. The players reacted like teenagers. Nudges, winks, knowing nods. “When Morné said he had been out to my farm a number of times, that was it,” Anne Munnik recalled. “It was ‘Oohs’ and ‘Aahs’ and giggles and laughter and innuendos and teasing generally.”

But the teasing was good-natured. They quieted down when Du Plessis, turning serious, said, “Come on, guys, by singing the song loudly and with pride you’ll be bringing alive the slogan ‘One Team, One Country.’ ” Anne Munnik gawked at the spectacle before her. She was keen on rugby but nothing that she had seen on TV had prepared her for the size of these men in the flesh. Huge and muscular, they were Hollywood central casting’s overenthusiastic response to a request for twenty-six Roman gladiators. She had seen their classically guttural Afrikaans names on a list that Du Plessis had given her—Kobus Wiese, Balie Swart, Os du Randt, Ruben Kruger, Hannes Strydom, Joost van der Westhuizen, Hennie le Roux—and she sensed that politically too they had to have more in common with the far right than with the ANC, with “Die Stem” than with “Nkosi Sikelele.” But she went ahead and gave each of the players a piece of paper with the words of the song on it, and made them go over it, repeating the difficult ones, having a crack at the Xhosa clicking sounds, almost impossible for people who had not learned them from birth. “ Then when the time came to sing,” she said, still surprised, years later, “they did so with great feeling.”

Some more than others. Kobus Wiese, Balie Swart, and Hannes Strydom were naturals. Wiese and Strydom were both six foot six and 250 pounds; Swart was three inches shorter but as wide as a barn door. They were all extraordinarily fit, as they had to be to play the brutally high-voltage kind of rugby that the Boks were famous for. And they loved to sing. Wiese (pronounced “Veessuh”) was one of the team’s funny guys, a man whose sharpness of mind belied his bulk, but whom no one had ever accused of being a progressive thinker. Mandela’s release had moved Du Plessis, had inspired his teammate Joel Stransky, had shaken Pienaar, but, by Wiese’s own admission, it had left him cold. Swart was one of the quietest members of the team, but because he was older than most, as well as bigger, he demanded and inspired respect. Wiese and Swart were best friends. Not only were they both forward players almost physically bound to each other during games inside the frenzied human pileups that rugby dignifies with the names “ruck,” “maul,” or “scrum,” but they had been performing together in a choir for years.

Wiese was amazed at how quickly the music of “Nkosi Sikelele,” the very first time he had ever sung it, swept away all political scruples. “I’d heard the song before, of course,” he said. “I’d seen those television images of huge masses of black people marching and singing and dancing through the streets with sticks and burning tires; throwing stones and burning down houses. And you always had ‘Nkosi Sikelele iAfrika’ playing over the images. For me, and for just about everyone I knew, that song was synonymous with ‘swart gevaar’—the black danger. But, you know, I love singing. Always have. And suddenly I found, to my astonishment, that I was caught up in it; that this song was so lovely.”

Os du Randt, the baby of the team, aged twenty-two, but the heaviest at six foot three and 260 pounds, sang shyly, as if trying not to be seen. Known as “the Ox,” he had served in the army in a tank regiment, though it was a mystery to anyone how he would ever have managed to get into a vehicle so confined. Ruben Kruger, six foot two and weighing a measly 224 pounds, was one of the smaller players in the forward engine room but as strong as a wildebeest, having built up his muscles from an early age in a family business whose chief activity consisted of carrying vast bags of potatoes over the shoulders. Pienaar sought as always to lead by example, and joined in gamely, yet he struggled badly with the pronounciation of the words, and the song itself had registered in his mind far less—“few of us even knew the tune, to be honest”—than it had on the politically unenlightened Wiese.