Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation (12 page)

Morné du Plessis, brave as he was on the rugby field, did not take any political risks off it. Not till that afternoon of February 11, 1990, at Cape Town’s Parade. He went because he hoped, as Joel Stransky did, that Mandela’s release would heal a country that he had long known to be sick. Stransky watched Mandela’s release on television in a café in France. It was not quite as impressive as turning up at the Parade, but it showed more interest than most of his future Springbok comrades, whose attitude was summed up by one of the team’s giant forwards, Kobus Wiese. Asked much later about his reaction to Mandela’s release, his straightforward reply was, “I wasn’t paying much attention, to be honest.” Yet Stransky felt, as he would recall, “absolutely excited.”

Stransky’s life was consumed by sports, but not so completely as to prevent him from experiencing two fleeting moments of political awakening. The first clue came following an event of which he would hardly have been aware: the Soweto uprising of 1976 by schoolchildren no older than he. One consequence was that his parents began to suspect that their child’s school might be burned down. “I remember my dad having to go and stand guard at our school at night during the riots and the unrest. I’m not sure whether I knew exactly what was wrong because the grown-ups didn’t really talk about it, but it was very clear to me from that moment on that things were messed up in this country.”

Stransky’s second clue came during the Springboks’ riot-strewn 1981 tour of New Zealand, when he was fourteen. He realized that there had to be a good reason why half of New Zealand was outraged by his countrymen. Stransky offered the very image of the effect that Arnold Stofile and his fellow ANC anti-rugby campaigners were hoping to have on the white population. By denying them their happy drug, they were rousing them out of their torpor. They were creating the conditions for political change. In some they found a more receptive audience than others. In Stransky they found the perfect response, for he was thrilled when Mandela got out.

Stransky also suspected that Mandela’s release might be good for his rugby career. He was already recognized as one of the best players in the country. He had become a key player by the age of twenty for Natal Province, one of the four biggest teams in South Africa. Not being the big, powerful, bone-crushing type, he had to be brave and resilient enough to take a pounding from Pienaar-sized rivals a dozen times a game. But Stransky occupied the one position in a rugby team where neither unnatural speed nor unnatural bulk were required—fly half. The equivalent in American football would be the quarterback, the player who dictates play, in whom brains and ball skill are paramount. He also kicked like a dream.

And he was ambitious. That was why when the South African rugby season ended in October 1989, at the start of spring, he played club rugby in France. The game there was not quite as manically intense as it was in South Africa, but it allowed him to keep in shape over the South African summer so that when the season resumed in April 1990 he could hit the ground running, physically fit and match fit. It worked. After Stransky’s return from France, Natal Province ended up national champions. Mandela’s release would work for him too, in the way he had hoped. For Stransky, a free Mandela meant liberation for the Springboks from the international boycott. Sitting in that French café, he imagined that one day he might play rugby in the colors of his country.

Mandela had been expected at the Parade at around three in the afternoon, but such was the pandemonium that he eventually made it nearly five hours later, arriving as dusk fell. And, adding to an odd sense of anticlimax that dulled the day’s historic proceedings, he gave a speech that fell short of expectations, failed to stir.

The next morning, the first on which he had awoken a free man in twenty-seven years and six months, held what would have seemed a stiffer test: a news conference before the world’s press. There were two hundred journalists there, many of them TV news anchors who were household names in their own countries: Peter Jennings, Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw, and their equivalents worldwide. South Africa did not have television when Mandela went to jail. He himself had appeared before a TV camera only once—a one-on-one interview with a British reporter a year before his arrest, in 1961. By 1990, every politician alive had undergone a course on how to handle himself before the cameras. And here was Mandela, who was as famous as he was bereft of experience in the mass media age, about to face the exercise politicians everywhere dreaded, a no-holds-barred news conference. He had no way of knowing what the journalists might ask. And his less than charismatic speech the night before had created doubts as to the quality of his performance this morning. After all, he was seventy-one years old, and had spent almost three decades in prison. How well could he be? How sharp?

The news conference was held early in the morning at the garden of the official Cape Town residence of the head of South Africa’s Anglican Church, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who until that moment, as the winner of the 1984 Nobel Peace Prize, had been the most visible face of resistance to apartheid around the world. The mansion, in the gabled Cape Dutch style, sat on the steep, thickly wooded foothills of Table Mountain, the monolith whose rectangular outline Mandela would gaze upon across the water from Robben Island. With Mandela the 4.30 a.m. riser it was always an early start: reporters had to be there by 6:30. When he emerged from the house, his wife, Winnie, by his side, the dew still lay on the leaves. Mandela and wife smiled and waved their way down a set of stone steps to the lawn where the press awaited. Tutu, jigging with delight, happy no longer to have to play the part of world’s most prominent anti-apartheid celebrity, led the way. There was just the one jolt, when Mandela stopped at his table and glanced at an artillery of furry cylinders that would be arrayed before him when he sat down. One of his aides whispered something in his ear, to which Mandela responded with a nod and an “Oh, I see . . .” The furry objects were microphones.

From that moment on it was smooth sailing. He placated his own supporters and fellow leaders in the ANC by restating his symbolic commitment to the armed struggle and to the hoary old ANC policy (soon to be ditched) of nationalizing the country’s mineral wealth. At the same time he signaled his resolve to show strong leadership by taking the bold step of describing President F. W. de Klerk—a twenty-year veteran of apartheid government who had just come to power in yet another whites-only “general” election—as “a man of integrity”; and he reached out reassuringly to white South Africa at every possible opportunity.

There was an acknowledgment of his kinder jailers—the Christo Brands and the Jack Swarts and the Willem Willemses—when he was asked the big obvious question that had to be asked, whether he felt any bitterness after his twenty-seven and a half years in captivity. He also offered a fleeting but potent recognition of the value prison had played in shaping his political strategy. “Despite the hard times in prison, we had also the opportunity to think about programs . . . and in prison there have been men who are very good, in the sense that they understood our point of view, and they did everything to try and make you as happy as possible. That,” Mandela said, emphatically, as if underlining the sentence as he spoke it, “has wiped out any bitterness that a man could have.”

Asked what had most surprised him upon reentering the world, he declared that he was “absolutely surprised” by the number of white people who had been on the streets to greet him the day before. Most important of all, Mandela stated that the way to a negotiated solution lay in a simple-sounding formula: reconciling white fears with black aspirations. “The ANC is very much concerned to address the question of the concern Whites have over the demand of one person, one vote,” he said. “They insist on . . . guarantees . . . to ensure that the realization of this demand does not result in the domination of whites by blacks. We understand those feelings and the ANC is concerned to address that problem and to find a solution which will suit both the blacks and whites of this country.”

Hearing in public those words that he had heard so often in private, Niël Barnard heaved a sigh of relief. This was not the language of insurrection. This was not an Ayatollah smashing fists into people’s mouths. When the press conference ended, forty-five minutes after it had begun, all the earlier anxieties seemed absurdly misplaced. Mandela had transformed what had been advertised as his first public grilling into the balmy outdoor equivalent of a cozy fireside chat. He had planted the seed of a notion among some white South Africans that a black man might be capable of touching their hearts. François Pienaar, still far from a political animal, found himself surprisingly moved by the sight of Mandela on TV. “I cannot recall any emotion other than sadness,” he told me. “I felt sad that he had been in jail for so long and, although his face brimmed with pride, I felt that he had lost so much time.”

Other white television viewers would have been less sympathetic, and many would have snarled. A significant chunk of right-wing opinion held that the white establishment had made a mistake not to hang Mandela, whose influence as a source of inspiration to black revolutionaries had endured throughout his captivity. Such people watched Mandela’s release on television and felt only bitterness and contempt toward De Klerk and what they perceived as his traitorous government for selling out white South Africa, for releasing the terrorist in chief onto the streets.

He had a very different effect on those journalists standing before him on Archbishop Tutu’s lawn on the morning of February 12, 1990. All it took was those forty-five minutes for Mandela to wrap the world’s media in his astute embrace. The journalists did not quite realize it then, for they were too benumbed, but in due course they would understand that Mandela was a canny strategist, a talented manipulator of mass sentiment. His gift for political theater was as sophisticated as Bill Clinton’s or Ronald Reagan’s. At that news conference, Mandela pulled off a coup that both Clinton and Reagan would have envied. The session ended with all two hundred assembled journalists doing something that they had never done before. The human being within all of them got the better of the journalist and they found themselves, to their confusion and surprise, breaking into spontaneous applause.

Getting the Afrikaans press on his side was not quite so simple. Because whites generally and Afrikaners in particular were uncertain and afraid of the consequences of his release, they seized on the more alarming things he said—the policy on nationalization; the “armed struggle”; the ANC’s loyalty to its Communist Party allies—while failing to register the esteem he expressed for his prison guards or his desire to reach an accommodation acceptable to all. He faced a comparable challenge in keeping his own people on board, both at leadership level, where there had been some complaints about his unilateral decision to engage in secret talks with the government, and among the great mass of the population, for whom Mandela was a powerful myth but, as flesh-and-blood leader, an unknown quantity.

To address both these challenges, Mandela flew up to Johannesburg, two hours away, on the morning of the news conference, and from there drove to Soweto, where that afternoon Arrie Rossouw went to see him at the small family home he had left when he had gone to prison. It was one of those drab little matchbox houses, identical rows and rows of which lined every township in South Africa, almost identical to the place where Justice Bekebeke had lived before he went to prison. Rossouw was the chief political reporter of
Beeld
, the newspaper of the Afrikaans establishment. He was one of five Afrikaner journalists invited to a joint interview inside that little faded red-brick house with the man that their papers had taught readers for decades to see as the incarnation of “swart gevaar,” the “black danger.” Rossouw himself was rather more sophisticated than the average member of the
volk.
Having had contact with the ANC in exile, aware of the need for white South Africa to strike a deal with black South Africa, sufficiently alive to the way apartheid was viewed around the world to feel awkward and ashamed when he traveled abroad, he was ahead of most of his readers—much as Niël Barnard was ahead of the people who voted for the National party. Rossouw, nevertheless, had reason to be nervous. It was still too early to declare the Ayatollah alert conclusively over (a mass rally, as the ANC called it, had been prepared in Soweto the following day).

Instead, Mandela put the same spell on Arrie Rossouw as he had done hours earlier on his foreign colleagues at the news conference in Cape Town. “There he was in the tiny front room of his little brick home and he greeted us like a king, the most charming king imaginable,” Rossouw said. “He actually introduced himself to me. ‘Hello, I am Nelson Mandela, how are you?’ And then I introduced myself and he knew all about me. He knew exactly who I was. He said he had been reading me with great interest for some time and he actually remembered pieces I had written months earlier!”

The Afrikaners were the first group of journalists Mandela saw in such small numbers—before the black press or the white liberal press or the international press. “He deliberately chose us to convey a message that all South Africans had a place in the nation of the future; above all that he was not emerging from prison with revenge in his heart. He saw, of course, that the Afrikaners were the key to a lasting peace, and he sought through us to address their fears literally from day one.”

Rossouw was shrewd enough to understand that Mandela was doing a number on him. But he fell for it anyway. “You could see he had a feel for what made Afrikaners tick. Basically what he told us was, ‘Look, I know you and your people and I know Afrikaners have done much for this country and I know your fears, but let’s discuss them and be friends.’ And as he talked he would make self-deprecating jokes so that you would not feel overawed by him, but at ease. Suddenly I felt a tremendous sense of privilege to be in his presence. I just sat there, looking at this guy, and I remembered there were rumors flying about that he was ill, seriously ill, and I thought, ‘Please God let it not be true!’ Because I understood the vast importance this man would have for the welfare of our country.”