Invictus - Carlin [112]
Across the road from Ellis Park were the offices of the black Sunday newspaper, City Press. Khulu Sibiya, the paper’s editor, was agog at the spectacle he beheld from his window. “I have never seen so many black people celebrating on the streets. Never. In fact, our stories the next day had more about the amazing fact of black people celebrating than about Pienaar and the cup itself. It was amazing.”
Archbishop Tutu, who also had a keen nose for news, agreed. The black celebrations were the story. “What we saw that day was a revolution,” said Tutu, joyous that he had lived to see his country give birth to a new model of revolution, one in which the enemy was not eliminated, he was brought into the fold; that instead of dividing a people, uniting them. “If you had predicted just a year—just months—earlier that people would be dancing in the streets of Soweto to celebrate a Springbok victory, most people would have said, ‘You have been sitting in the South African sun too long, and it’s affected your brain,’ ” said Tutu. “ That match did for us what speeches of politicians or archbishops could not do. It galvanized us, it made us realize that it was actually possible for us to be on the same side. It said it is actually possible for us to become one nation.”
The inevitable patriotic hysteria in the South African papers next morning, the sense that the country had changed forever, was summarized in the eight-column front-page headline of a newspaper that had the good fortune to be born that very day, the Sunday Independent. “Triumph of the Rainbow Warriors,” the newspaper’s very first issue screamed. The foreign press got in on the act too, with even the sports-writers almost forgetting to write about the game itself, like the rugby reporter from the Sydney Morning Herald who began his story, “South Africa emphatically became ‘one team, one country’ yesterday as the rainbow nation went into raptures.” Adding, in a reference to the end of World War Two, “It was like a re-enactment of VE Day, involving similar waves of passion, and the feeling that something momentous and unforgettable had just occurred.”
Van Zyl Slabbert, a big man, every inch a Boer, found himself in the thick of the post-match hysteria. “I went out into the streets, which were awash with dancing black people, and I had to find my way home, so I got on a black taxi.” A “black taxi” is a half-bus, half-traditional taxi, a vehicle that one hails down but plies a regular route and carries around a dozen people. It is “black” because in South Africa it was always a form of transport used by black people: whites almost invariably owned their own cars. What Slabbert did, to hail and jump on one, was almost unheard of, especially for inhabitants of the posh northern suburb, not far from Houghton, where he lived. “I got in, and people were cheering and shouting and carrying on with as much passion as the Boers inside Ellis Park. I said to the driver that he could drop me off at the Civic Centre, there in town, but he asked me what my final destination was going to be. I said my home in the northern suburbs but I said that the Civic Centre would be fine, guessing it would probably be on his route. But the driver was very insistent. He said no, he would take me all the way home, which was about half an hour out of his way, and with the traffic and mayhem that day, probably more. Then I said, okay, but what about all these other people in the taxi, which was completely full. They all shouted that no, it was no problem at all. They would enjoy the ride. They were so happy, they said, that nothing else mattered. Eventually we arrived home, and as I got out I asked the driver, ‘How much?’ He smiled at me and said, ‘No. Today nobody pays.’ ”
No one on that taxi, Slabbert reckoned, had anything more than a dim understanding of rugby, but that did not temper