Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation (27 page)

“The Rugby World Cup has led to a spectacular upsurge of national reconciliation among all races in South Africa, researchers and social scientists reported this week.” The article then quoted a well-known Afrikaner academic named Willie Breytenbach saying that the right-wing terrorism threat had been “virtually annihilated” and that the clamor for a separate Afrikaner state had been substantially weakened. “At the same time the mainly black streets of Johannesburg have become remarkably empty when the Springboks play. Township dwellers flock home to watch the matches on TV. . . . Rugby, the remarkable new nation-building phenomenon, has amazed analysts as all races eagerly seize on the event which has released a wave of latent patriotism through the sport traditionally associated in South Africa with white Afrikaner males.”

The
Argus
then listed the five “key factors” that enabled rugby to become “a unifying catalyst”: Mandela’s vociferous support for “our boys” and his wearing of the Springbok cap; Archbishop Tutu’s public support; the rugby team acting in concert with the “One Team, One Country” slogan; the team’s success on the field; the singing of the new combined anthem and the waving of the new flag.

Here was the fruit of all Mandela’s behind-the-scenes orchestration, and he was thrilled to see patriotic variations on the same points made in all the papers. He was pleased to see black newspapers entering into the spirit of the thing. The big-selling
Sowetan
was especially memorable because it was they who coined a new South African word that would catch the imagination of the whole of black South Africa—“AmaBokoBoko,” a new word for the Springboks, one that at last gave black people ownership of them too. But what gave Mandela special satisfaction were the Afrikaans newspapers, for they could barely contain their euphoria at the manner in which black South Africa had embraced the Springboks.
Die Burger
quoted a statement from the famously radical ANC Youth League that said, “Bring the cup home, Boks! We’re waiting!”
Beeld
quoted the ANC’s chief negotiator in the constitutional talks, former trade union chief Cyril Ramaphosa, declaring, “We’re proud of our national team, the Springboks.” Mandela especially enjoyed seeing himself quoted on the front pages of both
Beeld
and
Die Burger.
“I have never been so proud of our boys,” Mandela read himself saying. “I hope we will all be cheering them on to victory. They will be playing for the entire South Africa.”

That word “hope” revealed a glimmer of concern. The crowd he would face today would be the most daunting of all his life. Down at Newlands Stadium in Cape Town, for the first game against Australia, it had been a different matter. The Cape was South Africa’s white liberal stronghold. The Afrikaners there were softer, gentler. They were the descendants of those Boers who had decided not to head off on the Great Trek north, who had not taken such grave offense at the British Empire’s decision to abolish slavery. But the Transvaalers at Ellis Park, they had Piet Retief and the Battle of Blood River written into their DNA. These were the people, many of them, who would have cheered the attack on the World Trade Centre, for some of whom, as Bekebeke had bitterly observed, the phrase “Give way, kaffir!” had been the habit of a lifetime. These were the people who had “voted Nat” all their lives and who had, in some cases, since shifted their allegiances to the far right. Of the 62,000 at Ellis Park that afternoon, many, if not the majority, would look as if they had stepped straight out of a Boer defiance rally. They’d be sporting their game-warden khaki outfits, their long woolen socks, their big bellies, home to countless Castle lagers and innumerable
boerewors
sausages. Mandela had been the chief attraction at more mass gatherings than anyone alive, but he had never ventured into a crowd like this.

Glancing out of the window of his living room, Mandela caught sight of his bodyguards outside, in the driveway, muscular men, sixteen of them, checking their weapons, filling out forms, looking under the hoods of the cars, and chatting amiably with each other. He’d noticed that, until a few weeks ago, his black and white bodyguards had offered a bleak picture of apartheid separateness. Now he could see them chatting away together, gesturing emphatically, smiling, laughing.

“We were chatting away about what to do to stop the All Blacks, some reckoning we had no chance, others that we’d be better on the day,” Moonsamy said, “when in the middle of it all the idea popped out that it would be great if the president wore the green-and-gold Springbok jersey to the stadium.” When pressed, Moonsamy admitted it had been he who had come up with the idea. The impact on his colleagues, he admitted, was electric. “We were all really into it. So we agreed that when I went into the house to give him his security briefing, which was always the job of the guy who was ‘number one’ for the day, I should mention the idea to him and see what he said.”

They were due to leave for the stadium at one-thirty. At twelve Moonsamy went inside the house to brief Mandela. The security formalities dispensed with, he said, “Tata”—this was the affectionate name the black bodyguards used with him, meaning Granddaddy—“we were thinking, why don’t you wear the Springbok jersey today’?”

Mandela would usually put on his pensive, sphinx face when someone put forward an entirely novel proposal to him, especially one that carried political repercussions and concerned the always important matter to him of his public image. But this time he did not hesistate in his response. He broke, instead, into a radiant ear-to-ear smile. “He just lit up,” Moonsamy said. “He thought it was a briliant idea.”

Mandela had grasped the value of the gesture immediately. “I decided on this jersey,” he said, “because I thought, ‘When the whites see me wearing that Springbok rugby jersey they will see that here is a man who is now completely behind our team.’ ”

But there was a problem. He did not have a jersey, and there was only an hour and a half left before departure for the stadium. Going straight from Moonsamy to his secretary, Mary Mxadana, he ordered her to phone Louis Luyt, the head of the South African Rugby Football Union, right away. He told her that he wanted not just any jersey but—and this was his own idea—one with Pienaar’s number 6 on it, and a Springbok cap too. (He had left Le Roux’s cap at his residence in Cape Town.)

An hour after Moonsamy had proposed the idea, the jersey was in Mandela’s house, being ironed—at Mandela’s bidding—by his house-keeper. Now Mandela turned his attention to the game itself. His concerns, like those of every Springbok fan and player, focused on a very large black man named Jonah Lomu.

New Zealand had a formidable team, one of the greatest ever. In their captain Sean Fitzpatrick and the veterans Zinzan Brooke, Frank Bunce, Walter Little, and Ian Jones they had players who were not only household names everywhere that rugby was played, they were each the best in their respective positions in the world game. But their secret weapon, being touted already as the most formidable rugby player in history, was the twenty-year-old Jonah Lomu. Of Tongan origin, as dark-skinned as Mandela, he was six foot four and weighed 260 pounds. He was as big as the Springboks’ biggest man, Kobus Wiese, and he could run faster than Williams or Small—100 meters in less than eleven seconds. One newspaper called him “a rhinoceros in ballet shoes.” In the All Blacks’ semifinal against England, one of the favorites in the tournament, he’d proven himself practically unstoppable. He found his way across the line four times, for a total of 20 points. As the London newspapers put it, he made the England team seem like little boys.

Small’s position on the Springbok side meant that he would be the man responsible for keeping Lomu in check. The newspapers produced charts comparing the two players’ vital statistics, as if they were boxers about to step into the ring. Small—for once living up to his last name—was four inches shorter and weighed sixty pounds less than his opponent.

In the newspapers Mandela read himself opining on what to do about the All Black colossus. “Strategically it would be a mistake to concentrate on him, because they must concentrate on the whole team,” Mandela had said, before adding, as if surprised at his temerity in venturing into unfamiliar terrain, “But I am sure the Springboks have worked it out completely.”

Few shared his optimistic view, especially among the neutrals. The Australian coach, Bob Dwyer, was all over the sports pages confidently predicting that the “fit and fast” All Blacks would have the hefty Springbok forwards chasing shadows all afternoon; the
Sydney Morning Herald
had said the soon-to-be “bamboozled” Boks would “come nowhere near winning”; a former All Black star, Grant Batty, seemed to summarize the totality of expert world opinion on the game when he said “only an elephant gun” would keep Lomu and company from victory.

An elephant gun—or a superhuman effort of collective will. And something close to that was what the Springbok players discovered they carried within when they awoke that morning at the Sandton Sun and Towers Hotel, a modern five-star complex in an affluent shopping area of Johannesburg, about ten minutes’ drive north of Mandela’s home.

Big Kobus Wiese was sharing a room with his equally big companion, and fellow choir singer, Balie Swart. Wiese was the one who had uttered that bloodcurdling cry of defiance in the scrum at the semifinal against France, but now he was silent. “The pressure,” said Wiese, “was absolutely hectic. It was massive. The night before I had phoned my mother. Nothing specific, just to hear her voice, which helps me switch off. But now I felt fear—fear that we would disappoint all those millions of fans. We had that sense of expectations from knowing for the first time ever that the whole country was behind us, and it was quite overwhelming. It was frightening, but it also gave you energy. I had a profound sense that everything I had done all my life was now coming to a head.”

The players had breakfast in an atmosphere of unbearable tension and pressure and expectation. They felt as if they were inside a bubble, suspended in time. Or like astronauts about to lift off. They needed to let off steam or they would explode. That was what “the captain’s run” was for. Midmorning, they all gathered at the foyer of the hotel and, with Pienaar leading the way, they went for a two-kilometer jog around the neighborhood of the hotel. As François Pienaar recalled, “There was so much nervous tension among the guys but then we turned left out of the hotel, running in a tight group, and I heard noises and shouts, and four little black kids selling newspapers recognized us and chased after us and started calling our names—they knew almost everyone on that team—and the hairs on my neck stood on end. I don’t even know if these kids were literate, but they recognized who we were and for them it was their team. It was the moment when I saw, more clearly than ever before, that this was far bigger than anything we could ever have imagined.”

Mandela looked at himself in the mirror in his new green jersey, put on his cap, and liked what he saw. Shortly before 1:30, he walked out of the front door of his home, ready to board his gray armored Mercede-Benz to the stadium. Kickoff was at three o’clock. Ordinarily, Ellis Park wouldn’t have been much more than fifteen minutes away, but given the certainty of heavy traffic, they would leave early. The bodyguards were all brisk, silent, muscular efficiency. As the day had worn on they had became progressively less chatty, more solemnly busy, checking their route on a map—a route they had gone over a dozen times in the previous week, alert to every possible vulnerability. They kept in constant touch with the police, making sure the snipers were all in position around the stadium, checking in with the motorcycle escort cops, checking with the security people at Ellis Park that the entrance would be clear for the arrival of the presidential convoy.

But when Mandela stepped out of the house, the entire sixteen-strong bodyguard detail froze, breaking the flow of their intense preparations to gawk at their charge in his new green jersey. “Wow!” Moonsamy heard himself say under his breath. Mandela chuckled at their surprise and bade them all his customarily cheery good afternoon, at which point they all mumbled “good afternoon” back and snapped back into PPU mode, all briskness as they ushered Mandela into his car, slammed the doors shut, took their places in the four-car convoy. Moonsamy’s place, as “number one,” was in the gray Mercedes, stiffly alert, on the passenger seat in front of Mandela. All day long he would never be more than a pace away from the president. The police motorcycles were waiting outside. They drove out, wheels screeching on the driveway. The PPU men wore their humorless bodyguard faces, but inside they glowed. “We looked at him in that green rugby jersey,” Moonsamy said, “and we felt so proud, because he himself looked so proud.”

Mandela was not the only black man in an AmaBokoBoko jersey that day. Black people were seen all over South Africa happily sporting the symbol of the old oppressors, as Justice Bekebeke discovered to his bafflement on the morning of the final.

If Mandela had woken up thinking he had the Springboks’ black support in the bag, he had not reckoned on the man he had almost met on Death Row five years earlier. Mandela was worrying about the white bitter-enders, unaware that such a thing as a black bitter-ender existed.

“At the start of the World Cup I was rooting for the All Blacks with as much passion as I had in the old days, when I rooted for them as a child that time they came to Upington,” Bekebeke said. “I was happy we had made the political deal we had with the whites. I accepted that we had to have a power-sharing government for now, with people like De Klerk in cabinet. Fine. I saw all that. I welcomed it. But, ‘Don’t ask me to support the Springboks!’ was my position. I had no intention of budging. I had forgiven enough.”

The puzzling thing for Bekebeke was that there did not seem to be too many other people in Paballelo who shared his view. Not even Selina, his girlfriend, who had stood by him when he was in prison, who had worked to help finance his studies. On paper, she was more politically radical than he was. She belonged not only to the ANC, but to its hard-line ideological ally, the South African Communist Party. Yet she too had gone along with Mandela, abandoned the justified prejudices of a lifetime and chosen to see the Springboks as “our team.” The players might be practically all white, most of them Boers, but she was going to support them in this afternoon’s game with as much patriotic enthusiasm as if they had been all black, like her.