Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation (11 page)

The Upington 14, as they soon became known, were bundled into a big yellow police truck and driven off to Pretoria Central, the maximum-security prison more commonly known then in South Africa as Death Row. Brown fingers clung to the vehicle’s metal grille. Led by Bekebeke, the condemned sang “Nkosi Sikelele,” the one gesture of defiance they had left.

They arrived at Death Row on the following afternoon, a Saturday, and at dawn on Monday a woman prisoner was hanged. More prisoners were killed on a weekly basis during the rest of 1989. Since 1985, South Africa had carried out six hundred legal executions. A prisoner would be given a week’s notice of his death, and then placed in a cell known as “the pot,” two cells away from where Justice Bekebeke had his permanent lodging. Before the morning of an execution he would hear the condemned prisoners crying all night long. He would hear the jailers opening the cell at dawn, he would hear prayers being said, he would hear the weeping prisoner led up some stairs to the gallows. When the crying stopped he knew the prisoner was dead. “The horror of it all,” Justice said, “was compounded by the knowledge that next week it could be you.”

It wasn’t him. It was Anton Lubowski. The Upington 14 endured many sorrows on Death Row, but none worse than when they heard on the radio on September 13, 1989, two months after Mandela’s tea at Tuynhuys with Botha, that the previous night Lubowski had been gunned down at the entrance to his home in Windhoek, Namibia. Justice never forgot that moment. “There were six of us from Upington together in my cell that morning. We reacted first with disbelief. It could not be true. Then, as time went by, the truth sank in and we were destroyed, devastated—inconsolable. We knew who had done it. Of course we knew. It was the state.”

CHAPTER VI

AYATOLLAH MANDELA

1990

After years in the wilderness, the myth became man; the aging patriarch made himself visible to his people again, vowing to set them free. The embodiment of revolutionary virtue, he was met everywhere by vast, enraptured crowds. “I will strike with my fists at the mouths of the government,” he cried on the day he returned from his long exile, and within ten days, on February 11, 1979, the state had collapsed and his militias controlled the streets. To rapturous acclaim, the Ayatollah Khomeini proclaimed himself head of a new revolutionary government.

Exactly eleven years later, on February 11, 1990, Nelson Mandela put an end to his own exile, walking out of jail. The coincidence in dates was not lost on the South African government. They feared that in releasing him, and in allowing the ANC to operate legally again after a thirty-year ban, they would unleash what they described to each other, in moments of panic, as “the Ayatollah factor.” Niël Barnard was less worried than most. But even he was concerned, in some corner of his skeptical spy’s heart, that maybe Mandela had taken him for a ride, had conned him. State officials’ nightmare was that after being released in Cape Town, Mandela would set off on a long march north to the political heartland of Johannesburg and Soweto. “There would be a momentum building up and he would be moving through the country,” was how Barnard put it, “and he would get to Johannesburg and it would be almost like the Ayatollah—a rolling momentum . . . hundreds of thousands of people on the rampage, shooting and killing. The anxiety was whether it would be possible for us to go through the first twenty-four, forty-eight, seventy-two hours without a major people’s uprising, without a revolution.”

If the Iranian precedent had given the government pause, it was a more recent foreign episode that impelled the new president, F. W. de Klerk, to push ahead urgently with the work P. W. Botha had initiated. The fall of the Berlin Wall, which had happened barely two months earlier, offered grounds to believe that, whatever happened in South Africa, communism would never again be viable, whether in Eastern Europe or South Africa. Besides, if apartheid had been an embarrassment before, now it was internationally unsustainable. It was fortunate for De Klerk that his predecessor had had the wisdom to pave the way for Mandela’s release and for the start of negotiations.

But on that day, February 11, 1990, De Klerk dwelled less on his good fortune than on the perils that might lurk around Mandela’s release. It didn’t help his or anybody else’s state of mind in the government that Mandela’s release, for reasons that De Klerk watching on television did not at first understand, went wildly beyond schedule. A battery of television cameras was perched at the entrance to Victor Verster prison and millions of people were watching worldwide, but two hours had passed after the advertised time of his appearance, and still nothing.

When Mandela eventually emerged, striding purposefully out of the main gate of the prison in bright midafternoon sunlight, the triumphant smile he wore, happy as a soldier back from war, masked the fact that a little while earlier he had been fuming. His wife, Winnie, looking not quite so cheerful next to him, was the reason. The delay had been on her account, for she had arrived late that morning from Johannesburg, having been detained by a hairdresser’s appointment. One consequence was that Mandela gave her a stern reprimand; another was that tensions were rising dangerously at the Parade, the great open square in Cape Town where Mandela was due to deliver his first address as a free man. A huge crowd had gathered under the hot sun, many among them black youths who had little reason to be well inclined toward the host of white policemen on Ayatollah watch. Scuffling broke out, tear gas was fired, stones thrown. It was not a bloodbath, or anything close to it, but enough to send people running in all directions.

Word reached Mandela’s retinue, by now in a convoy of cars, that they had better wait for things to calm down. It was not the most auspicious start, but prison had taught Mandela patience. His security people told him the wisest course would be to stop the convoy and wait, and he agreed. They chose to park on the city’s outer periphery, in a genteel, politically liberal white suburb called Rondebosch, where lived a young doctor called Desmond Woolf with his wife, Vanessa, and their twin baby boys Daniel and Simon.

The Woolfs were watching the day’s events on television, with Dr. Woolf ’s mother. Dr. Woolf and his wife belonged to a small, politically sensitive sector of white society that was warmly in favor of Mandela’s release. They had even debated among themselves whether they should go and join the crowds down at the Parade. The question right now, though, was whether Mandela himself would make it. From what they were saying on the television, no one seemed to quite know where he was.

Suddenly there was a knock at the door. A friend of Vanessa Woolf ’s told them that Mandela was sitting in a car outside their house. “Come on, don’t be ridiculous!” Dr. Woolf said. “No,” said the friend. “He is right here. Come outside, quick!.”

The couple went out with their two children and Dr. Woolf ’s mother, and before them they saw a line of five parked cars. “And there he was,” as Dr. Woolf would tell it, “sitting in the middle car. We stood . . . and gazed at him in astonishment. The whole world’s attention was focused on him and there he was outside our house, when he was supposed to be somewhere else. And we just stood and watched and he rolled down the window, beckoned us towards him, and said, ‘Please, come over.’ ”

Dr. Woolf introduced himself and Mandela introduced himself and they shook hands. Dr. Woolf was carrying Simon, who was barely one, and Mandela reached out to touch the child’s hand before asking his father’s permission to pick him up and take him through the open window into the car. “He bounced him on his knee for a while and he asked what his name was. Then he wanted to know why we had called him Simon, whether there was any particular significance in the name. He seemed very pleased to be able to hold a child.” Vanessa Woolf introduced herself and Mandela exchanged Simon for Daniel. Then Dr. Woolf ’s mother came up to say hello, completing the cheerful Sunday afternoon scene.

Another Rondebosch resident, Morné du Plessis, had also been debating earlier in the day whether to go to the Parade, deciding eventually that yes, he would. One of the most famous people in the crowd—and certainly the most famous white one—to Afrikaners he was something of a god.

Du Plessis had been captain of the Springboks in the bad old days, as had his father before him. Felix du Plessis led the South African rugby team to four famous victories over New Zealand in 1949, the year after the National Party’s first electoral victory, the one that entrenched apartheid in South African life for the next forty years. Morné, who was also born in 1949, would end up improving on his father’s record, not only inflicting similar punishment on the All Blacks but retiring in 1980 with an international record of eighteen victories in twenty-two games. Under his captaincy South Africa won thirteen matches and lost only twice. He was an Afrikaner national hero during the nine years he played for his country and, as such, the most visible expression of the racial oppression that the green Springbok jersey symbolized for black South Africans. Unlike some of his teammates, he was not blind to it. He never forgot how in really big games in 1974 against the British Lions and in 1976 against the New Zealand All Blacks the few black people in the stadium were, as he put it, “fanatical in their support of the other side.”

It was thus only partly surprising—Du Plessis was quite possibly the tallest of the tens of thousands of people gathered at the Parade—that a black man, apparently drunk, came up to him that afternoon and told him in abusive language to go away, that this was a ceremony at which he did not belong. “But it wasn’t the guy’s threatening behavior that stayed with me,” Du Plessis said. “It was the fact that immediately another black man admonished him. Then others joined in, angry that he should have treated me that way, and escorted the man away.” They were poor people who spoke in Xhosa, Mandela’s language, but Du Plessis understood that they had the political sophistication to see that the more whites who could be persuaded to join the Mandela release celebrations, the better for everybody.

Du Plessis was here today because he had a keen sense of the historical significance of this moment and he wanted to be part of it. But the deeper explanation went all the way back to the man who first steered the political course he would take, his father. Felix du Plessis was Springbok captain during the first flush of National Party power, but he was always a supporter of the gentler, more liberal—or, at any rate, less illiberal—United Party, which the National Party had defeated in 1948. He had also fought in the Second World War with the Allies, another factor that set him in opposition to the anti-British, in some cases ambiguously pro-Nazi, Nats. Morné’s mother was an English-speaking white South African, and if anything more decidedly anti-Nat than her husband. This did not mean they favored majority rule. The United Party were against apartheid because they found it to be too crudely racist, but the Du Plessis parents never questioned the fundamental desirability of white power.

Neither did their son, who was born in the same town as François Pienaar, Vereeniging, a surprising coincidence given that not only did they both end up as Springbok captains but also that exactly five years after Mandela’s release Du Plessis would go on to become manager of Pienaar’s World Cup team. Where the coincidence ended was in the relative political enlightenment of the better-off Du Plessis family, though in truth, politics counted for little more in the young Morné’s life than it did in the young Pienaar’s.

In 1970, however, Du Plessis came across a man who nudged those faint embers of rebellion his parents had sparked in him. His name was Frederik van Zyl Slabbert. A sociology lecturer at Stellenbosch University, where Du Plessis was studying, Slabbert was a progressive thinker, brilliant academically but notorious in the eyes of the Afrikaner establishment, who also happened to be a good provincial-level rugby player. The combination of the two—a rugby man who was in favor of one-man-one-vote—was startling. Du Plessis made the eye-opening discovery that it was actually possible to admire someone who thought apartheid was wicked.

If Slabbert gave Du Plessis a gentle nudge, his Springbok debut on a 1971 tour to Australia proved a blunt eye-opener. In sporting terms it was a great success. South Africa beat Australia three times out of three and Du Plessis became an instant hero back home, heralded as rugby’s new bright star. But Morné’s debutant joy was dampened by the hostility of the reception the team received from a broad chunk of the Australian public. “It was staggering to see such ferocity of feeling in people so far away,” he recalled. “The images of those enraged Australian faces, the way they seemed actually to hate us, never left me.”

A notion was born inside Du Plessis that something was “seriously amiss” in his country. But it was one thing to feel uneasy, quite another to let politics distract him from his rugby career. He never made a stand—as he might have done, to sensational effect—during his nine years as a Springbok star. He never spoke up about his misgivings, or even about his support for the Progressive Federal Party, to which Helen Suzman, Mandela’s old prison visitor belonged and which Slabbert joined, becoming a member of parliament for Rondebosch in the mid-seventies and soon thereafter party leader. Viewed as oddball free-thinkers within the insular little world of white South Africa, the “Progs” were conservative by global standards. Representing what was largely a well-heeled English-speaking constituency, ready to tut-tut the Boers’ rough treatment of the poor blacks but unlikely ever to go into a township to meet them, the PFP nevertheless had the merit of offering a legal public voice opposed to apartheid inside South Africa, as well as a bridge to ease the transition toward the changes that would come later. Slabbert himself would become a critical intermediary in early secret contacts between the government and the ANC in 1987, soon after Mandela’s first prison encounters with Kobie Coetsee.