Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation Read Free Page A

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