Invictus - Carlin [111]
Maybe a Hollywood scriptwriter would have had them giving each other a hug. It was an impulse Pienaar confessed later that he only barely restrained. Instead the two just looked at each other and laughed. Morné du Plessis, standing close by, looked at Mandela and the Afrikaner prodigal together, he saw Pienaar raise the cup high above his shoulders as Mandela, laughing, pumped his fists in the air, and he struggled to believe what his eyes were seeing. “I’ve never seen such complete joy,” Du Plessis said. “He is looking at François and just, sort of, keeps laughing . . . and Francois is looking at Mandela and . . . the bond between them!”
It was all too much for the tough-minded Slabbert, hard-nosed veteran of a thousand political battles. “When François Pienaar said that into the microphone, with Mandela there listening, laughing and waving to the crowd and raising his cap to them, well,” said Slabbert, “everybody was weeping. There wasn’t a dry eye in the house.”
There wasn’t a dry eye in the country. The groot krokodil’s old minister of justice and prisons, down in his crowded bar in Cape Town, was sobbing like a child. Kobie Coetsee could not stop thinking back to his first meeting with Mandela ten years earlier. “It went beyond everything else that had been accomplished. It was the moment my people, his adversaries, embraced Mandela. It was a moment comparable, I felt then, to the creation of the American nation. It was Mandela’s greatest achievement. I saw him and Pienaar there and I wept. I said to myself, ‘Now it was worth it. All the pain, anything that I have experienced, it was worth it. This endorses the miracle.’ That’s how I felt.”
Far away in dusty Paballelo, Justice Bekebeke felt the same. Five years earlier he had been sitting on Death Row, sent there by one of Coetsee’s judges, but that suddenly seemed very remote now. “I was in heaven!” he said.
“When Joel Stransky scored the drop goal the rest of the guys were celebrating and shouting their heads off and so was this Doubting Thomas. I felt 100 percent South African, more South African than I ever had done before. I was as euphoric as everyone else in the room. We were all going absolutely nuts. And after the final whistle blew, after Mandela handed Pienaar the cup, we were running in the streets. So was everybody else in Paballelo. Horns were blaring and the whole township was out dancing, singing, celebrating.”
These were the same streets where Bekebeke had killed the policeman who had opened fire on a child; where the riot cops had gone berserk the night before the death sentences were passed on the Upington 14, clubbing everyone in sight, sending twenty people to the hospital.
“It was unreal. And to imagine that these scenes were being repeated all over black South Africa only five years since Nelson Mandela’s release, two since Chris Hani’s assassination. To have imagined then that I’d be celebrating a victory of the Springboks would have been the most unlikely thing in the world. Yet, looking back, I cannot believe my indifference on that morning of the final, that I did not care. Because there was only one way to describe my feelings now: extreme euphoria.”
In Paballelo, in Soweto, in Sharpeville, and a thousand other townships, groups of youths were charging up and down the treeless streets performing their own Haka, the old war dance, the Toi Toi. But they weren’t defiant now; they were seized by multicolored national pride, celebrating the victory of the AmaBokoBoko.
Reports washed in from the affluent suburbs of Cape Town, Durban, Port Elizabeth, and Johannesburg that white matrons were shedding generations of prejudice and restraint and hugging their black housekeepers, dancing with them on the leafy streets of prim neighborhoods like Houghton. For the first time, the parallel apartheid worlds had merged, the two halves had been made whole, but nowhere more manifestly so than in Johannesburg itself, and especially around Ellis Park, where the Rio carnival met the liberation of Paris in a riot