Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation (10 page)

Arnold Stofile called rugby “the opium of the Boer.” A black man who, like Bekebeke, had not allowed the indignities of apartheid to thwart his powerful personality, he was raised on a farm, joined an ANC front organization in the early sixties, became a theology lecturer at the University of Fort Hare (where Mandela had studied), was ordained a Presbyterian minister, and played rugby, a phenomenon less uncommon among black men from his native Eastern Cape than elsewhere in South Africa. But he did not let his personal passion for the game cloud his view of the bigger political picture. He became one of the most militant organizers of the international sports boycotts. “We always defined sport as apartheid in tracksuits,” Stofile said. “It was a very important element in the foreign affairs of this country, sports icons being de facto ambassadors for South Africa, a key part of the effort to make apartheid less unacceptable. And as far as internal policy was concerned, it was the barrier that kept white youngsters secluded from blacks and so had big support from government, and big business got big tax rebates from supporting sport. So it was the opium that kept whites in happy ignorance; the opium that numbed white South Africa.”

Denying white South Africa the happy drug, and the government its “ambassadors,” was the mission to which Stofile dedicated nearly twenty years of his life. “A workers’ strike, even a bomb, would affect a small group,” he explained. “This affected all of them, every white male, every household in a sports-mad country whose main source of pride regarding the rest of the world was its sports prowess.”

Niël Barnard, on the receiving end of Stofile’s offensive, did not disagree. “The ANC’s policy of international sports isolation, especially rugby isolation, was very painful to us Afrikaners. Psychologically it was a cruel blow, because rugby was one terrain where we felt as a small nation that we could hold our heads high. Preventing us from playing rugby with the rest of the world turned out to be a hugely successful lever of political influence.”

Stofile’s most spectacular success came in 1985, the watershed year in which practically everything seemed to happen in South Africa. He sneaked illegally out of the country and made it, with the help of a former All Black who was his country’s high commissioner in Zimbabwe, into New Zealand. There he lent his weight in a decisive manner to a campaign to stop the All Blacks from mounting a planned tour of South Africa.

New Zealand was so divided and angry that the whole culture of rugby, the country’s pride and passion, was under threat. Parents were refusing to allow their children to play the game at school, and threatening to stop them from ever playing it again, such was the strength of feeling of the antitour camp. Stofile recalled with relish how he went on a propaganda offensive, addressing large crowds, appearing on radio and TV, elevating the national argument beyond abstract notions of black and white, giving the cause a face and a name. When he arrived in New Zealand, support for the sports boycott stood at 40 percent. Three weeks later the figure had climbed to 75 percent. Still, the New Zealand rugby board decided to go ahead with the tour, but then players themselves stepped in, a group of them taking the issue to court. Stofile’s appearance as a witness in the case proved decisive. A chunky fellow who loved rugby as much as the average New Zealander, he argued that there was a higher cause at stake here, and then proceded to give an eloquent firsthand account of the crasser injustices black people endured, making special emphasis on the Separate Amenities Act and what it meant to black people’s daily lives. He concluded by reminding the court that a country with the admirable democratic tradition of New Zealand should be ashamed to collude with a regime that had the cheek to portray a Springbok team drawn from only 15 percent of the population as the authentic representatives of the whole of South Africa. “I was witness number two,” said Stofile, grinning at the memory, “and when I finished the case was won. The tour was called off. It was a great victory.”

Stofile was arrested on his return home and given a twelve-year jail sentence. Black South Africa celebrated his accomplishment as they had celebrated the scenes of Antipodean “white unrest” four years earlier that had so baffled the Pienaar family.

For Pienaar, rugby was just a game, his chief entertainment as a child along with fighting. His life, from a very early age, was violent, but it was never political or criminal in intent, as it was in the ungentle townships; it was violence for violence’s sake. When Pienaar was seven, members of a rival gang hanged him from a tree. Had an adult not passed by he would have died. As it was, the rope left deep welts on his neck. Later, while at university, at around the same time as Bekebeke was killing Sethwala, Pienaar nearly did the same—or feared he had—to a stranger he came across outside a bar on a Johannesburg street late at night. During a drunken brawl he floored the man, who landed with his head on the pavement with a terrible crack. In between those two incidents, he cracked more ribs and broke more teeth, on and off the rugby field, than he could remember.

Viewed from the perspective of Justice Bekebeke’s world, where soccer and dancing were what people did for fun, rugby was a puzzlingly savage sport, one in which players were stretchered off the field like soldiers from battle; in which the inevitably large, inevitably drink-sodden spectators, in their game-ranger Boer uniform of khaki shorts and shirts, heavy socks and boots, chewed with ferocious gusto on their traditional
boerewors
beef sausages and drank their favorite drink, brandy and Coke. As for the boys, they seemed to take their lead in black South African eyes from their dads. Their lives seemed to consist of one bruising, bloody fight after another, in which children were permanently smashing each other over the head with chairs, when they were not hanging their little friends from trees.

Hanging was very much in the mind of an Afrikaner called J. J. Basson on the morning of May 24, 1989. Basson, the judge who had reached the record-breaking verdict in the Upington case, had been listening for almost six months to arguments from the defense lawyers, chiefly Anton Lubowski, in favor of finding extenuating circumstances that might mitigate the death sentences of Justice Bekebeke and the other twenty-four convicted murderers.

Lubowski was a tall, handsome, thirty-seven-year-old Afrikaner raised in Cape Town whose looks suggested, as his name did, a dashing Polish count. An activist deeply immersed in the political struggle against apartheid, he belonged to that less than 1 percent of the white population who not only saw South Africa the way the rest of the world did, but who acted on that understanding—who took risks, who made the conscious decision to swim against the fierce currents of conventional
volk
wisdom. He was that rare white person who really knew his country, all of it; who spent time in the black townships, socializing as well as plotting; who made an effort to learn a smattering of a black language.

Lubowski was a character with whom the journalists covering the trial became friendly during those first months of 1989. Justice Bekebeke was only a face then across a crowded courtroom. But years later it was Bekebeke who talked about that time. “Anton was one of us,” he said, with pained solemnity. “He and we were one. We called him ‘Number 26,’ as if he were the twenty-sixth accused. He was so much more than just our lawyer.” Inside the Upington court building there was a special consulting room where lawyers met with their clients. “But he did not want to meet with us there. He wanted to meet with us in our environment, so he came down to our cells to talk to us. He said he was more comfortable there. He was our comrade. We didn’t see his whiteness, that he was an Afrikaner.”

Lubowski would go down to the cells below the court and sing protest songs with them, join them in their dances of defiance. And then he would stand up for them, imposingly tall in his flowing black advocate’s gown in the desert heat of the courtroom, where the windows stood wide open in the hope of snatching a passing breeze. He would face down Basson, arguing in subdued legal tones or, when all else failed, raging at him. Mandela would have been more ready than Lubowski to forgive Basson, would have been more disposed to see his callousness as the consequence of the world in which he was raised. But Mandela would also have known that Lubowski offered a vision of that better world he wished to create in South Africa, and that it was in large measure thanks to South Africa’s Lubowskis that he could argue convincingly to his black compatriots that because a person was white, it did not mean that he was bad.

Early in the morning of May 24, the day Basson would give his verdict, Lubowski confessed over breakfast that the best one could seriously hope for was a ray of benevolent paternalism to penetrate Basson’s icy heart. Lubowski harbored most hope for the married couple in their sixties, Evelina de Bruin and her husband, Gideon Madlongolwana. “I don’t think even Basson could be so mad as to hang them,” he said. They had ten children, two still of school age. Evelina was a plump domestic servant who walked with a limp. Gideon had worked loyally for South African Railways for thirty-six years. Neither had a criminal record. They would be okay, Lubowski figured. The accused for whom he held out no hope at all was Justice Bekebeke, who was twenty-eight years old at the time, and the most articulate, and militant, member of the group.

If he had been singled out and the rest spared there would have been some harsh logic in that. “The real guilty party was me,” Justice said. “Towards the end of that mitigation phase of the trial Anton came down to the cells and told us our chances. My response was to say to the guys that I felt I should come clean for the sake of the group. They hardly let me finish. They all jumped on me. They were enraged. They said, ‘We would rather kill you ourselves than let them kill you.’ They did not want me to own up to this white judge. It was a question of dignity and solidarity and it was immediately clear to me that there was no possibility of further discussion. Anton was present and he said, ‘Okay, guys, I did not hear this. This conversation never took place.’ ”

As it turned out, Bekebeke’s fellow accused made an immense sacrifice, for Judge Basson surpassed Lubowski’s worst expectations. He ruled that extenuation would apply to only eleven of the accused; that along with Justice Bekebeke, Evelina de Bruin, and Gideon Madlongolwana should be counted among the fourteen in whose behavior he saw no excuse, whose purpose on November 13, 1985, he judged to be murder.

Cries of pain, amazement, and anger filled the courtroom as the accused and their relatives clutched their faces in despair and disbelief, for this was not what their lawyers had told them to expect. Evelina de Bruin leaned against her husband and wept. Basson, impassive, postponed final sentence until the following day. But the emotions he had unleashed in the courtroom spilled onto the streets. Forty or fifty women, youths, and old men gathered, watched by an equal number of heavily armed policemen. They wept, then burst into song, protest songs of the type heard throughout South Africa at funerals, demonstrations, or political trials.

One teenage boy broke from the crowd and exploded into a Toyi Toyi, a war dance symbolic of angry resistance to apartheid. Hissing, “Zaaa!! Za-Zaaa! Zaaa! Za-Zaaa! Zaaa! Za-Zaaa!” and stamping so hard that his knees jerked up to his chin, he spun around and around as if in a trance, arms flailing, fists so clenched they turned white. But he was not carrying a spear and the policemen had guns and dogs baring their fangs, and a video camera pointed right at him.

The women looked at him and shook their heads. They trembled for him. They were right to. That night the police went berserk. Quite why, it was hard to tell. Perhaps it was because the mothers of the condemned had upset the prim, pristine equilibrium of white Upington’s town center by gathering there, to shed their tears and sing their sad songs. Perhaps it was because, in the one moment of light relief on a day of woe, the black women outside the court had burst into hoots of laughter and ribald applause when a police car slammed accidentally into the side of a passing Toyota. Perhaps it was just that Upington had not yet fully sated its revenge, was still outraged by the intrusion of black unrest into the comfortable certainties of their apartheid lives.

For whatever reason, at nightfall that Thursday a police riot squad stormed past the slaughterhouse on the edge of town, turned left into Paballelo, and assaulted everyone who came into view. At least twenty people were severely beaten. Some were clubbed unconscious. Some were stamped on. Some were kicked in the abdomen till they bled. Of the twenty who had to be hospitalized, five were thirteen years old, and four fifteen.

Next day, the final one of the Upington trial, the courtroom was again furnace hot. Yet Justice J. J. Basson, wrapped in his ceremonial red robes, did not break a sweat. He was going to pass death sentences that morning, but it was with an absent voice—like a bureaucrat impatient to head home at the end of a long day—that he invited each of the accused to make a brief address to the court, as the law allowed.

Justice Bekebeke had been asked by the fourteen to speak on their behalf. He had planned to write something but in the end he could not. He just spoke from the heart.

“In a country like South Africa,” he began, addressing himself to Basson, “I wonder how justice can really be applied. I certainly haven’t found it. But, my lord, I would like to ask, Let’s forget our racial hatred. Let us see justice for all humanity. We are striving for each and every racial group to live in harmony. But is it possible, in the name of the Lord? Is it possible in such a country? . . . I would like the Lord to give you many years so that one day you can see me, a black man, walking on the streets of a free South Africa. . . . And, my lord, may the Lord bless you, my lord.”

At those words a small old man standing at the back of the courtroom muttered, “Amen!” He stood erect, propped up with the aid of a wooden ivory-headed cane, impeccably dressed in three-piece suit and tie. He was the father of one of the accused, and—about Mandela’s age—a picture of elderly distinction. But when Judge Basson announced his verdicts, he sat down very slowly and his whole body crumpled, his head in his hands. It was death by hanging for Justice Bekebeke and the thirteen others. Basson made the announcement in a deadpan voice before dismissing the court for the last time. The prisoners went down to the holding cells under the courtroom, where Lubowski joined them. He was devastated. “We were the ones consoling him” recalled Bekebeke.