Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
Against the giants of the sport, the Springboks’ chances of victory were remote. But their chances of capturing the hearts of most South Africans seemed remoter still, as they had long been the embodiment of white supremacist rule. During apartheid, the all-white Springboks and their fans had belted out racist fight songs, and blacks would come to Springbok matches to cheer for whatever team was playing against them. Yet Mandela believed that the Springboks could embody—and engage—the new South Africa. And the Springboks themselves embraced the scheme. Soon South African TV would carry images of the team singing “Nkosi Sikelele Afrika,” the longtime anthem of black resistance to apartheid.
As their surprising string of victories lengthened, their home-field advantage grew exponentially. South Africans of every color and political stripe found themselves falling for the team. When the Springboks took to the field for the championship match against New Zealand’s heavily favored squad, Mandela sat in his presidential box wearing a Springbok jersey while sixty-two-thousand fans, mostly white, chanted “Nelson! Nelson!” Millions more gathered around their TV sets, whether in dusty black townships or leafy white suburbs, to urge their team toward victory. The Springboks won a nail-biter that day, defying the oddsmakers and capping Mandela’s miraculous ten-year-long effort to bring forty-three million South Africans together in an enduring bond.
John Carlin, a former South Africa bureau chief for the London Independent, offers a singular portrait of the greatest statesman of our time in action, blending the volatile cocktail of race, sport, and politics to intoxicating effect. He draws on extensive interviews with Mandela, Desmond Tutu, and dozens of other South Africans caught up in Mandela’s momentous campaign, and the Springboks’ unlikely triumph. As he makes stirringly clear, their championship transcended the mere thrill of victory to erase ancient hatreds and make a nation whole.
It seems Mandela was very wily in his dealings with the white minority. This John Carlin book, Playing the Enemy, describes how he used sport to pull the country together.
John Carlin’s book focuses on this extraordinary sporting event, the Rugby World Cup final in 1995. Rugby was, in South Africa, a game primarily for whites. Some black South Africans played, but it was very much a game dominated by the Afrikaners.
I think it’s fair to say that for many Afrikaners the belligerence of rugby matches and the physicality of it was what gave them a sense of themselves: a pugnacious race who pulled off any attempts to undermine them and so on.
So it was an unlikely game for Mandela to use as a way of binding the nation together, but he did. He recognized that it meant a lot to Afrikaners and so he embraced it wholeheartedly, not just in a slapdash political way – you know, just turning up for a photograph.
He made it perfectly clear that he knew a lot about the game, he turned up at the opening match, he gave a ringing endorsement of the Springboks, the all-white national team - I think there was one player of mixed race, who played some of the games, but not all – basically it was a white team supported by the whites and Mandela endorsed it right at the outset of the tournament and the message went through all South Africa.
It’s a tribute too to large numbers of black South Africans who were a little bit skeptical about this whole rugby thing, I mean, why in hell should they back this game of the white man? But they followed Mandela’s lead.
I remember listening to this amazing radio broadcast; there was a young black woman on the phone who was saying she’d never been remotely interested in the game and then she turned on the television one day and had a look at the big white men running around, throwing this ball, and she suddenly thought, ‘Yes! This is my nation too.’ And that’s what Mandela pulled off.
As with Patti’s book, John’s is a moment in time that is easy to forget now, because race relations remain pretty awkward in South Africa. But they were more awkward than they are now and that rugby tournament, and in particular the final when Mandela turned up wearing the Springbok jersey and embraced the Springbok captain, the imagery of that final did a huge amount to reassure white Africans that South Africa remained their home. It was a very, very important moment.
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Alec Russell is World News Editor at the FT, and former Johannesburg bureau chief. He was nominated for the 2008 Pulitzer Prize and Britain's Foreign Correspondent of the Year for his reporting from South Africa in 2007.
