Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation (28 page)

This presented Bekebeke with a dilemma: how to spend the rest of the day. Selina was dead set on watching the game, but he was not sure what he would do. He might do as he had done all his life: support the visiting team in this case, New Zealand. Or maybe he might make an exception this time and simply not care.

“As the morning wore on, as I saw the papers, heard the radio, saw the gathering excitement in my girlfriend, I began to feel torn. A part of me thought it might be best not to watch the damn game. But then, I thought, well, everyone’s going to watch it. My girlfriend is. All my friends are. Even my comrades who were in prison with me. I can’t miss it myself.”

One thing Bekebeke had clear was that he should not watch the game alone with Selina. “I was worried that if we did, we’d get very tense and fight,” he said. “So luckily an opportunity came along to watch the game at the home of some friends. They had organized a braai [a barbecue] for the occasion and so I thought that even if I had to go through this game, there would at least be some compensation in the food.” There were going to be four couples, themselves included, at the braai. The other three men had been in prison with Bekebeke; one of them—Kenneth Khumalo, “Accused Number One”—had been on Death Row with him. This was encouraging news to Bekebeke, sure now that he would not be alone in his doubts about all this Springbok business, confident that Selina’s enthusiasm would stand out in the group. She had gone ahead of him to help with the preparations, and so he arrived on his own, at more or less the time that Mandela was leaving home for the stadium.

“I have never been more astonished in all my life,” Bekebeke said. “The door opens. I go into the house and what do I see? All seven of them, wearing the green Springbok jersey!”

CHAPTER XVII

“NELSON! NELSON!”

June 24, 1995—afternoon

In the sixty minutes between two o’clock, when Mandela arrived at Ellis Park, and three o’clock, when the game began, everything happened. First there was a song, then a jumbo jet, and finally a shout that shook the world.

The song was called “Shosholoza.” Mandela knew it very well indeed, as did practically every black South African. Originally sung by black migrant workers who traveled from the rural areas of southern Africa to work at the gold mines around Johannesburg, it was a bouncy, high-energy tune that sought to mimic the rhythm of the steam train. “Shosholoza” was sometimes translated as “Make way,” sometimes as “Move forward,” sometimes as “Travel fast.” Whatever else it was, it was dynamic—hugely popular at soccer matches among the sport’s almost exclusively black fans. Mandela used to sing it along with Walter Sisulu and other inmates when they worked at the lime quarry in Robben Island. He had sung it again only four months earlier when he and a hundred former prisoners made a jolly, ceremonial return to the prison. But now, in yet another sign of the accelerated pace of change in South Africa, Louis Luyt’s rugby union had chosen “Shosholoza” as the official World Cup song, and the white fans had cheerfully adopted it as their own.

They needed a bit of help, though, with both the music and the words. They needed, as the Springboks had with “Nkosi Sikelele,” a singing coach. This was where Dan Moyane entered the picture. Moyane was born in Soweto in 1959 and grew up with no interest in rugby whatsoever, “save to register,” as he said, “that it was a symbol of Afrikaner domination.” Following the student riots of 1976, most of his friends either went into exile or into jail. Harassed by the security police, he fled the country, sneaking over the border to Mozambique where in 1979 he joined the ANC. There he worked as a journalist for BBC radio and Reuters, among others, and, having survived the cross-border commando raids General Constand Viljoen’s special forces were launching in the early eighties, he returned home in 1991, a year after the ANC was unbanned. Almost immediately he got a job on Johannesburg’s Radio 702 (where Eddie von Maltitz would later have his phone-in conversion with Mandela), and soon he was cohosting a 6 a.m. to 9 a.m. radio show with an Irish-born former rugby player called John Robbie who had played for the British Lions against the Springboks in 1980. The duo were very popular, and their blend of easy banter and serious political discussion was one of the more palpable contributions that emerged from civil society to help precipitate South Africa’s political changes. They gently prodded their listeners—especially the white ones—toward a more generous attitude to South Africa’s new realities.

The Rugby World Cup gave them plenty to talk about. For Robbie it was a dream come true, an opportunity to reconcile his two passions, rugby and racial reconciliation in South Africa. Moyane was not so sure at first. Shaking off the associations the Springboks triggered in his mind was no easier for him than it was for any other black person. He and Robbie would argue on air about rugby. Until the inaugural game against Australia.

“When I heard Nelson Mandela was going to be there I struggled to believe it,” Moyane said. “But we put on the TV at home and there he was, and my wife said to me, ‘Well, if Mandela is there supporting the Springboks I suppose we’ll have to too. We’ll have to watch this rugby!’ It was an amazing thought, but it was what happened, and I believe the same conversation, or variations on it, were replayed in black households up and down the land.”

Over the next month much of the morning radio show consisted of Moyane playing the naïve interrogator to Robbie’s worldly-wise rugby man. One day they played “Shosholoza” on air, a version that had been recorded recently by the internationally famous all-male South African singing group Ladysmith Black Mambazo. It was beautifully done, but when Robbie asked Moyane for his opinion, he replied that, for him, the spirit of the song ought to be more raw. “It was a song of encouragement, of hope sung by men far away from their families who were working hard now but would be catching the train home soon enough.” Moyane told Robbie that this was not a song designed, in his view, for heavily produced choral arrangements. “I felt it as a song to be sung with gusto, with go-for-it street passion, with heart and guts.” So Robbie said, “Okay, why don’t you sing it then, Dan? Show us how it’s done.” And Dan Moyane did. He belted out a couple of bars. “It was the first time I’d ever sung like that on air, and within seconds the telephone lines into the studio were red-hot. Both black and white people were calling in saying they’d loved it.”

Soon, local music producers were calling Moyane too. Within ten days he had recorded and produced his own version of “Shosholoza” with a choir from Soweto. “Suddenly I was signing autographs in shops. The song was a smash hit.” All this was astounding enough, but nothing compared with what was to come. A week before the final, after South Africa had beaten France, the World Cup organizers invited him to lead the fans in song at Ellis Park an hour before the game against the All Blacks.

Dan Moyane did not seem, at first sight, like a natural for such a rabble-rousing occasion. Of medium height and trim build, he had soft, round features and a gentleness of manner at odds with the predominant mood and physiognomy of the average white South African rugby fan. Yet he rose to the moment as if to the manner born.

At 2 p.m., he walked out onto the field. Moyane’s version of “Shosholoza” had been blaring from the sound system as fans filtered into the stadium; now they would all sing it together. Moyane walked up to the microphone and asked, “Do you hear me?”

Sixty-two thousand fans bellowed back, “YES!”

“Okay, to make sure you really are hearing me, can we have some silence now?” Ellis Park went suddenly quiet. Then the Zulu words of the song came up on the two big screens at either end of the stadium.

Into the silence, Moyane declared, “We will sing the song to drown the All Blacks out of the stadium!” and a vast cheer went up. First he read the words aloud with the crowd, and then everyone began to sing.

He led the massed ranks of Piet Retief ’s heirs in two full-throated renditions of the Zulu song. “All kinds of emotions and thoughts flooded through my head,” Moyane said. “Images came to my mind of 1976, of my friends being jailed, people I knew who these very people—or people close to them, at any rate—had tortured and killed. But then I also thought what a gesture on these people’s part! They were repaying us for letting them keep the green jersey. This was a black street song, a soccer song, a migrant workers’ song, a prisoners’ song. It was an amazing example of crossing the lines, of hearts changing.”

And of people revving up for a big game. What came next raised the decibel levels even higher. Blame the protagonist of act two of the pregame show, a South African Airways pilot called Laurie Kay.

Born in Johannesburg in 1945, Kay grew up entirely sheltered from the world Dan Moyane inhabited. He was one of those English-speaking white men who, by a quirk of family circumstances that had affected two million others like him, just happened to have ended up living in the southern tip of Africa. Obsessed with flying from his childhood, he joined not the South African Air Force but Britain’s Royal Air Force, not out of any political conviction, but as a matter of practicality. It turned out to be easier for him to get into the RAF. “I am not proud to say it now,” he said, “but the truth is that I was an utterly apolitical white person who voted Nat.”

The first seedlings of a political conscience emerged within Kay shortly after Mandela’s prison release. They were both on an SAA flight from Rio de Janeiro to Cape Town. It was a Boeing 747 and Kay was the captain. “It was my first and last face-to-face encounter with Nelson Mandela. I got a message that he wished to see me. So I stepped out of the cockpit and found that he was with his wife, Winnie. They were on seats 1D and 1F—I’ll never forget it,” said Kay. “The moment he saw me he stood up. I said, ‘No, please,’ but he insisted and he stood up and greeted me and shook my hand. It never, ever happened to me before or since with a passenger. For me it was transforming. The courtesy and respect of his gesture.” He had floored Kobie Coetsee and Niël Barnard at first sight, as he would General Viljoen. But those men had had some political preconditioning, some notion of what to expect. With Captain Kay, he was writing on a blank page. Yet the effect, again, was automatic. “He stood up and I was in his pocket. I had reckoned he was a different kind of man. Until then he was another black face and name who may have been a threat to my way of life. I was exposed to the Afrikaans mentality, and that, while I thought little about politics, was what shaped me.”

Often enough Mandela was charming for charm’s sake. Quite often, too, he sought to receive something in exchange. Sometimes it was purely personal; other times it was political. This time Mandela had a specific favor to ask. “He explained that the rest of his delegation were in economy and he wished to see if they could be upgraded.” Kay did not hesitate. “I immediately gave the order that they be taken upstairs to First.”

Mandela had obviously manipulated him. Yet Kay’s understanding that this had been the case in no way tempered his admiration, partly because, as he said, “You should see some of the cold, supercilious, arrogant types you get in first class! But it went deeper. From that day on I changed forever. He’s a magician, no doubt about it. In my mind there is an aura about certain people. Eugene Terreblanche: I walked out to an airplane alongside him once. He had an aura of evil. Mandela has an aura of goodness.”

Kay’s and Mandela’s paths collided one more time—or they very nearly did—on the day of the Rugby World Cup final.

South African Airways had begun conversations with the rugby union a few weeks earlier to see if there was some way they might extract some marketing advantage from the big event. At first, discussions centered around the notion of getting a small radio-controlled plane with the SAA colors to flyover the stadium. But as the talks progressed the plans became more ambitious, until Kay received a call from an SAA executive asking him if he might be persuaded to fly a 747 jumbo jet on the afternoon of the final match with the words “Go Bokke” (the Afrikaans plural) painted on the plane’s underbelly. Kay did not think twice about it. If Mandela had been preparing all his life for this moment, so had he. Not only was he the airline’s most experienced 747 pilot, he had spent thirty years as a stunt flyer. He did air acrobatics shows and had even done a turn once in a film starring the Hong Kong martial arts actor Jackie Chan.

The difference this time was that it was not only himself he would be exposing to grave danger. Nor only the 62,000 people inside the stadium but countless more outside. For Ellis Park sat inside the Johannesburg city bowl. All around were residential buildings and office towers.

Laurie Kay spent the week before the final diligently preparing for what would be the most outrageous flyover in history. He, the civil aviation people, and the city authorities, now under the command of the new provincial premier, the charismatic former Robben Islander Tokyo Sexwale, held numerous meetings during the week before the final. “We installed a military air traffic control center on the roof of Ellis Park and declared the sky for five nautical miles around the stadium ‘sterile,’ meaning it was a no-fly zone, on the day of the match,” Kay said. He and his colleagues at South African Airlines also had to confer with the SABC, who were broadcasting the event live around the world, to make sure that the flyover occurred at precisely the right moment for maximum TV exposure. “They said they wanted me to fly past at exactly 2.32 p.m. and 45 seconds. That was doable. But then they said I had to fly over a second time within ninety seconds. This stumped me, because I did not know if I could maneuver a plane so big so quickly. But I practiced on the simulator and I found that, yes, I could do it.”