Invictus - Carlin [110]
CHAPTER XIX
LOVE THINE ENEMY
“When the game ended,” Morné du Plessis said, “I turned and started running towards the tunnel and there was Edward Griffiths, who had invented the ‘One Team, One Country’ slogan, and he said to me, ‘Things are never going to be the same again.’ And I agreed instantly, because I knew right there that the best was behind, that life could offer nothing better. I said to him ‘We’ve seen it all today.’ ”
But Du Plessis was wrong. There was more. There was Mandela going down onto the pitch, with his jersey on, with his cap on his head to hand over the cup to his friend François. And there was the crowd again—“Nelson! Nelson! Nelson!”—enraptured, as Mandela appeared at the touchline, smiling from ear to ear, waving to the crowd, as he prepared to walk toward a little podium that had been placed on the field where he would hand the World Cup trophy to François Pienaar.
Van Zyl Slabbert, the liberal Afrikaner surrounded in the stadium—as he put it—by beer-bellied AWB types, was amazed at the new South African passion of his born-again compatriots. “You should have seen the faces of these Boers all around me. I remember looking at one of them and there were tears rolling down his face and he kept saying, in Afrikaans, ‘ That’s my president . . . That’s my president . . .’ ”
And they applauded with still more tears when Pienaar offered what would be the first of two memorable moments of impromptu eloquence. A reporter from SABC television approached him on the field and asked, “What did it feel like to have 62,000 fans supporting you here in the stadium?”
Without missing a beat, he replied, “We didn’t have 62,000 fans behind us. We had 43 million South Africans.”
Linga Moonsamy, walking onto the field one step behind Mandela, looked up at the crowd, at the old enemy screaming his leader’s name, and he battled to remember that he was working today, that while all those around him were losing their heads, he had to keep his. But he preserved enough professional sangfroid to remember that before the game began he had seen in the right-hand corner of the stadium those old South African flags. So he shot a glance toward that area again. “But no,” he said, “those flags were gone now. There were only new South African flags. And the people in that sector of the crowd were crying and hugging, like everybody else. So I let go a little and allowed myself to think how huge this moment was for the country, how I myself had done what I had done when I was younger, had taken risks, had fought for this, never imagining it would express itself on such a scale.”
Tokyo Sexwale, who was there in the stadium, shared Moonsamy’s sentiments. “You sit there and you know that it was worthwhile. All the years in the underground, in the trenches, self-denial, away from home, prison, it was worth it. This was all we wanted to see. And then again, ‘Nelson! Nelson! Nelson!’ We stood there, and we didn’t know what to say. I was proud to be standing next to this man with whom I had spent time in prison. Look how high he is now! And you are just proud, so proud, to have supped with the gods . . .”
The gods at that moment were Mandela and Pienaar, the old man in green, crowned king of all South Africa, handing the cup to Pienaar, the young man in green, anointed that day as the spiritual head of born-again Afrikanerdom.
As the captain held the cup, Mandela put his left hand on his right shoulder, fixed him with a fond gaze, shook his right hand and said, “François, thank you very much for what you have done for our country.”
Pienaar, meeting Mandela’s eyes, replied, “No, Mr. President. Thank you for what you have done for our country.”
Had he been preparing for this moment all his life, he could not have struck a truer chord. As Desmond Tutu said, “That response was made in heaven. We human beings do our best, but those words at that moment, well