Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation (24 page)

Wiese, Swart, Kruger, Pienaar, Du Randt, Mark Andrews—these were some of the star players in the forward “pack.” The players who filled the fast-running “three quarters” positions seemed at first sight to belong almost to a different species. Anne Munnik was struck by the contrast. Not only were they more normal-sized, but their faces were less fearsome, their noses less misshapen, their ears not deformed by hours and hours of rubbing against thick, hairy thighs in the sweaty, heaving meat factory of the scrum. They were the Springboks’ matinee idols, rugby’s David Beckhams.

James Small, who modeled clothes when he was not playing rugby, was the bad boy among them, the one who had been banned from the previous year’s tour to Britain after a barroom brawl. But, Munnik noticed, no one sang the song with more feeling than he did. “He was close to tears the whole time,” she said. The ordinary South African rugby fan, aware of his off-field shenanigans, would have struggled to believe it, but his teammates did not. Everybody who knew him had the sense that he lived perilously close to the edge, that had it not been for the partial escape valve rugby provided for his overwrought emotions, he had an uncontrolled, violent personality that could have landed him behind bars. He himself was the first to say so. “I’m so fortunate,” he said. “I was a hard guy, I could have ended up in prison. I’d go to those rough Johannesburg clubs late at night. I could easily have taken a bullet.”

But there was another reason why he got so emotional when he started singing the old black anthem. He had felt what it meant to be marginalized. Apartheid existed within rugby too, among whites. “I know what it’s like to be on the receiving end too,” he said. “I was an Englishman playing a Dutchman’s game. When I began in the game at provincial level I got fucked around badly by the Afrikaner players. I was made not welcome both by my own team and by the rival. Players in my own team tried to get their Afrikaner mates ahead of me in the team selection. They ostracized me, and I was badly beaten too. At my Springbok initiation, they fucked me up so badly my dad wanted to report them to the police. The point was that, for them, it was an Afrikaans game and there was no room for an Englishman. The Englishman was an interloper.” Pienaar had viewed “the Englishmen” precisely as such when he grew up, as shown by his pride in the fact that when he was a teenager his team never lost against a side from an “English” school. “But I used all that to spur me,” Small said, “and I got my way in the end. I became a Springbok. Yet the whole experience taught me an appreciation for the outsider, a sympathy for those in my country who did not have the opportunities that I’d been so lucky to have.”

One Afrikaner who never showed Small anything other than kindness and respect was Morné du Plessis. His influence told too in Small’s response to learning the black anthem. “I saw things a lot differently a year earlier. As we approached the 1994 elections, I was swept along by the fear so many white people had that it was going to be chaos and violence and vengeance. That was why I bought a gun for the first time in my life. I was afraid. And yet, a year later, this . . . Singing ‘Nkosi Sikelele!’ But it wouldn’t have happened without Morné. He was the one who impressed on us that we needed to represent South Africa as a collective, that we had to have a true understanding of being a South African in a South Africa that was just one year old. It was through him that I understood that learning ‘Nkosi Sikelele’ was a part of that.”

Chester Williams was less moved than Small was by the liberation song. Like Small, Williams was a chunky, speedy player who played on the wing. Unlike Small, he was a quiet man whose timidity made him seem cold. Williams was the only nonwhite player in the team, but that didn’t mean he had any greater facility for Xhosa or Zulu than Small did. He was a “Coloured,” according to the rules of the recently defunct Population Registration Act. “Coloureds”—or as the politically correct appellation had it, “so-called Coloured”—were the least politically engaged of the four main apartheid subgroups, the others being Black, White, and Indian. Being a blend of races, they were also the most physically varied. The majority corresponded more to people’s ideas of black African than white European, yet the ethnic group to whom Coloureds typically felt closest to were the Afrikaners, chiefly because at home they spoke the same language as them. It was in this general category that Chester Williams belonged: African-looking, Afrikaans-speaking, nonpolitical.

Not that the Afrikaners gave Coloureds any special respect. F. W. de Klerk’s wife, Marike, ventured some celebrated thoughts on “Coloureds” in 1983 that came back to haunt her later, when her husband was seeking to assume a degree of “non-racial” respectability. “You know, they are a negative group,” the First Lady-to-be had said. “The definition of a Coloured in the population register is someone that is not black, and is not white and is also not an Indian, in other words a non-person. They are the left-overs. They are the people that were left after the nations were sorted out. They are the rest.”

The evolution in the way Williams was treated by his fellow Springboks between becoming a Springbok in 1993, the year the Volksfront was formed, and the World Cup two years later mirrored the abrupt change in the way white people generally, and Afrikaners in particular, engaged with their darker-skinned compatriots. “It was a difficult time for me,” Williams said, referring to his first days as a Springbok. “People did not accept me. You tried to make conversation but you were left on your own.”

In a book Williams co-wrote, he went further, claiming that James Small, among others, would call him “kaffir” and suggest he was in the team not on merit, but because he was “a token black.” Small was hurt by these claims and Williams went some way to retracting them. According to Small, Williams apologized later in front of the whole team and the two eventually made up. In an interview some time after the dust had settled, Williams looked a little sheepish about some of the things that had appeared in the book, conceding there might have been some exaggerations. But he did insist that he had been discriminated against. “It was only as time passed that I found that people changed, that they included me more and more, and by 1995 I had been fully accepted as a member of the team, on merit.”

The team, in a way, was left with little choice, Chester Williams having been selected by South African rugby’s marketing people as the Rainbow Nation’s face of the tournament. It was an odd situation for him to find himself in, given his retiring character, but to his astonishment, and that of his teammates, everywhere they went in South Africa his face stared down at them from huge roadside billboards. It would have been a little confusing, and not entirely convincing, to black South Africans too—not only because Williams was a “Coloured” (like it or not, and the ANC did not, these labels often persisted), but because he was a sergeant in the South African Defence Force, an institution he had served during apartheid. Williams, whose relationship with black South Africans would have been minimal, whose languages he did not understand, would have understood all this better than the marketing people, whose ploys made more impact on whites than on blacks, on foreign visitors than on South Africans generally. At an auction in early May, Williams stared in bafflement as he saw a portrait of himself selling for what was then the equivalent of $50,000. South Africa was selling an image of itself to the world that the world wanted to buy.

The dream Joel Stransky had had, when watching Mandela’s release on TV in a French bar, of South Africa being welcomed back into the global fold had been fulfilled, and indeed surpassed. Not only was he playing for his country at rugby, he was playing in a World Cup. And he was in the pivotal position of fly half, which in his case also included the vast responsibility of taking the penalty kicks on which the outcome of big games so often turned. He needed steely nerves to do what he did, in addition to physical fearlessness, for at five foot ten and 190 pounds he had to endure the most brutal charges from men far bigger than he. Yet he was anxious going into the singing class, wishing he could be somewhere else. “I’m one of those people who hates singing,” he said. “It’s almost a phobia.” But he surprised himself. “We all knew the politics behind that song and we’d heard about it so often and then there I was learning the words and it felt really special.”

Hennie le Roux, one of the more serious-minded members of the team, and a close friend of François Pienaar’s, applied himself earnestly to Anne Munnik’s lessons. A talented jinking runner, the most versatile of the Springbok backs, Le Roux was no more political than anyone else on the team but for him the national imperative to learn “Nkosi Sikelele” was now clear. He had seen it, as other Springboks had, on arrival at their Cape Town hotel a few days earlier when the mostly black staff came out to greet them in the lobby. “They were singing songs and dancing and carrying on, just so happy to see us, so welcoming. It was something we had never seen in our careers, black people right there in front of us, welcoming us with as much excitement as we got from the wildest white rugby crowds. It was a big moment for all of us.” James Small put it more bluntly. “We looked at each other and thought, ‘Fuck, there’s something going on here!’ ” For Le Roux it was the moment he understood he had to give something back. “If they were so willing to stand with us the least we could do was make an effort to learn their song. Remembering those scenes at our arrival when we were there learning the song made it all so much more moving for me.”

Pienaar was as moved as his friend, but his motivation was even more personal. He was the only Springbok to have sat down with Mandela one-on-one, and he was particularly anxious that his team project an image that would please Mandela. But he was also thinking, as he did always with relentless detail, what the team did off the field might improve their performance on it. And as he heard himself and his teammates singing, his rugby brain clicked into action. He understood that victory in a top-class rugby game was 50 percent psychology, and saw a sporting value in the song, beyond the politics. “I made up my mind right there and then that this was an unexpected plus that Morné had given us; that it could give us something special going into a game, if we respected it and felt the energy of it,” Pienaar said, before adding, with a smile and a shake of the head, “but . . . it’s amazing to think about. The Afrikaans boys singing that anthem!”

Anne Munnik was about to wrap up the lesson when the team’s three largest players, Kobus Wiese, Hannes Strydom, and Balie Swart, made a request: could they sing the song one more time, just the three of them? “I said, ‘Of course!’ And then they began, like three giant choirboys, softly at first, rising, rising to the high notes. They sang it so, so beautifully! The other players just stood there with their mouths open. No laughing, no jokes. They just stood and stared.”

For the big men, singing this song had the power of an epiphany. “That was my innocent ignorance shattered!” Wiese exclaimed. “When I learnt the words of that song, doors opened for me. Ever since then, when I hear a whole group of black people sing ‘Nkosi Sikele,’ it’s, like, stunning, man. It’s so beautiful.”

You could be as dubious about the Springboks as Justice Bekebeke or as generous-minded as Mandela, but any black South African who walked into that room at the moment when this Boer trio burst into song would have been stunned too.

CHAPTER XIV

SILVERMINE

On May 25, 1995, the Springboks would meet the reigning world champions, Australia, in the first match of the World Cup in Cape Town. The day before, the team was gathered at Silvermine, an old military base inside a mountainous nature preserve on the Cape Peninsula, where they had established a temporary training camp. On the eastern half of the peninsula’s narrow waist, Silvermine was one of the most beautiful spots in South Africa. Looking north, you saw the totemic monolith of Table Mountain. Looking south, you saw the rocky extremity where the Indian and Atlantic oceans met. All around were cliffs, forests, valleys, and sea.

The team had just finished an afternoon training session when they looked up and saw a big military helicopter throbbing down from the sky. Morné du Plessis, who had been tipped off about the visit, had put on a suit and tie. As they gawked up at the flying machine descending toward the field, he announced that this was Mandela on his way to see them. They continued to stare as Mandela himself stepped out from under the rotor blades in a bright red and orange shirt, worn loose below the waist, in what had become his trademark presidential style. As Mandela strode smiling toward them, the players crowded forward, jostling each other like photographers at a press conference, craning their necks to get the best view.

Mandela made some light remarks, raising some laughs, and then Du Plessis called for quiet so that the president could address the team.

Somewhat to their surprise, Mandela started by taking up the same lofty themes he generally did when addressing white people. (His audience was all white that day, as Chester Williams was away nursing an injury.) He reminded them that the ANC had promised that the new government would keep the commander of the army, the national commissioner of police, the Reserve Bank governor, and the minister of finance. He then pointed out that, a year after the elections, his government had remained true to its word. As Afrikaners, they had nothing to fear from the ANC. Nor, Mandela added, breaking into a grin, from their opponents the next day.

“You are playing the World Cup champions, Australia. The team who wins this match will go right through to the end,” he predicted, before returning to a solemn tone. “You now have the opportunity of serving South Africa and uniting our people. From the point of view of merit, you are equal to anything in the world. But we are playing at home and you have got an edge. Just remember, all of us, black and white, are behind you.”