Invictus - Carlin [114]
It was dusk now, around 6:30 in the evening. Mandela set his bodyguards free. “Chaps,” he said, “go out and enjoy yourselves.”
They took him at his word. “I got home, through the baying crowds,” Moonsamy said, “and then my brother-in-law and his wife and kids and me and my family, we went down to Randburg Waterfront where the crowds were gathering to celebrate, and there I saw South Africa become one. Whites and blacks hugging and laughing and crying, late, late into the night.”
Mandela opted for a quiet night in. “I came back from the rugby and I stayed here at home, happy and reflecting”—and following his inviolable routines. He watched the TV news in English at 7 p.m., then again in Xhosa at seven-thirty. At ten to eight he sat down for his habitual light dinner—chicken leg on the bone with the skin on, sweet potato, and carrots. Nothing more. Before going to bed, one hour later, he sat down in his living room alone to take stock, as he would do in his prison cell every evening before falling asleep. What surprised and gratified him was the degree to which he had ended up being the focus of attention. For he understood that behind that spontaneous clamor from the white Ellis Park crowd—that “Nelson! Nelson!”—lay eloquent and convincing evidence that his hard toil had paid off. In paying homage to him, they were rendering tribute to the high value of “non-racialism” for which he had endured twenty-seven years of prison. They were crying out for forgiveness and they were accepting his, and through him, black South Africa’s generous embrace. It had begun with Kobie Coetsee that day in the hospital in November 1985, the first of his enemies whose heart and mind he conquered. Then Niël Barnard, then P. W. Botha, then the Afrikaans media, De Klerk and his ministers, the high command of the SADF, Constand Viljoen and his fellow bitter-ender generals in the Afrikaner Volksfront, Eddie von Maltitz, John Reinders and the rest of the staff at the Union Buildings, Morné du Plessis, Kobus Wiese, François Pienaar: one after another succumbed as he widened and widened his embrace until the day of the rugby final when he embraced them all.
John Reinders understood it perfectly. “The Rugby World Cup final was him at his best; that was him all over,” he said. “That was the day that the man we had seen in private the whole country now saw in public. It was the day that everybody, especially white South Africa, got to see him as he really was.”
“It was a day to remember,” Mandela said, with a smile that lit up the very living room where he had sat and tasted victory that night of June 24, 1995. “I never imagined that the winning of the World Cup would have such an impact directed towards an individual. I never expected that. And all that I was doing was continuing my work of mobilizing South Africans to support rugby and to influence the Afrikaners, especially towards nation-building.”
“Influencing” was one way of putting it. The great task of his presidency, securing the foundations of the new nation, “making South Africans,” had been accomplished in not five years but one. At a stroke, he had killed the right-wing threat. South Africa was more politically stable now than at any point since the arrival of the first white settlers in 1652.
Die Burger summed it up well. Noting that “sports isolation was one of the main pressures that precipitated political change,” the newspaper said, “Isn’t it ironic that rugby should be such a uniting force when for so long it served to isolate us from the world? For there is no longer any doubt that the Springbok team has united the land more than anything else since the birth of the new South Africa.”
John Robbie, who had warlike right-wingers calling his radio show every day, put it more simply: “From that day on we knew everything was going to be all right.”
So, more to the point, did Constand Viljoen. Those worries that had tormented him, the thought that he had been wrong to choose elections instead of a Boer freedom war, or that