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

nerves, had a knot in his stomach. “You don’t know what I went through on that day,” he confessed to me. “I was so tense!” It was a curious thing for a man with his past to say. This was not the day of his release in February 1990, nor his presidential inauguration in May 1994, nor even the morning back in June 1964 when he woke up in a cell not knowing whether the judge would condemn him to death or, as it turned out, to a life sentence. This was the day on which his country, South Africa, would be playing the best team in the world, New Zealand, in the final of the Rugby World Cup. His compatriots were as tense as he was. But the remarkable thing, in a country that had lurched historically from crisis to disaster, was that the anxiety they all felt concerned the prospect of imminent national triumph.
    Before today, when one story dominated the newspapers it almost always meant something bad had happened, or was about to happen; or that it concerned something that one part of the country would interpret as good, another part, as bad. This morning an unheard-of national consensus had formed around one idea. All 43 million South Africans, black and white and all shades in between, shared the same aspiration: victory for their team, the Springboks.
    Or almost all. There was at least one malcontent in those final hours before the game, one who wanted South Africa to lose. Justice Bekebeke was his name and contrary, on this day, was his nature. He was sticking by what he regarded as his principled position even though he knew no one who shared his desire that the other team should win. Not his girlfriend, not the rest of his family nor his best friends in Paballelo, the black township where he lived. Everybody he knew was with Mandela and “the Boks,” despite the fact that of the fifteen players who would be wearing the green-and-gold South African rugby jersey that afternoon, all would be white except one. And this in a country where almost 90 percent of the population was black or brown. Bekebeke would have no part of it. He was holding out, refusing to enter into this almost drunken spirit of multiracial fellow-feeling that had so puzzlingly possessed even Mandela, his leader, his hero.
    On the face of it, he was right and Mandela and all the others were not only wrong but mad. Rugby was not black South Africa’s game. Neither Bekebeke nor Mandela nor the vast majority of their black compatriots had grown up with it or had any particular feel for it. If Mandela, such a big fan suddenly, were to be honest, he would confess that he struggled to grasp a number of the rules. Like Bekebeke, Mandela had spent most of his life actively disliking rugby. It was a white sport, and especially the sport of the Afrikaners, South Africa’s dominant white tribe—apartheid’s master race. The Springboks had long been seen by black people as a symbol of apartheid oppression as repellent as the old white national anthem and the old white national flag. The revulsion ought to have been even sharper if, like Bekebeke and Mandela, you had spent time in jail for fighting apartheid—in Bekebeke’s case, for six of his thirty-four years.
    Another character who, for quite different reasons, might have been expected to follow Bekebeke’s anti-Springbok line that day was General Constand Viljoen. Viljoen was retired now but he had been head of the South African military during five of the most violent years of confrontation between black activists and the state. He had caused a lot more bloodshed defending apartheid than Bekebeke had done fighting it, yet he never went to jail for what he did. He might have been grateful for that, but instead he had spent part of his retirement mobilizing an army to rise up against the new democratic order. This morning, though, he got out of bed down in Cape Town in the same state of thrilling tension as Mandela and the group of Afrikaner friends with whom he planned to watch the game on TV that