Invictus - Carlin [115]
“To see him, the icon of the black people, being so jubilant wearing that Springbok jersey, to me was deeply reassuring. It had been very difficult for me to make my decision and I never imagined I would see myself justified in a manner that was so spectacular.”
In this sentiment, his brother Braam, the “good” twin, found common ground with Constand at last. “I have been exposed to the wrath of Afrikaner politics all my life and that this could have happened is, to me, a miracle,” he reflected. “The charisma of that man! The leadership of Mandela! He took my brother’s arm, and he did not let it go.”
Did Mandela have any flaws? Sisulu knew him better than anyone. His answer was that his old friend had a tendency to trust people too much, to take their good intentions too quickly at face value. “He develops too much confidence in a person sometimes,” he said. “When he trusts a person, he goes all out.” But then Sisulu thought for a moment about what he had said and added, “But perhaps it is not a failing . . . Because the truth is that he has not let us down on account of that confidence he has in people.”
Mandela’s weakness was his greatest strength. He succeeded because he chose to see good in people who ninety-nine people out of a hundred would have judged to have been beyond redemption. If the United Nations deemed apartheid to be a crime against humanity, then what greater criminals were there than apartheid’s minister of justice, apartheid’s chief of intelligence, apartheid’s top military commander, apartheid’s head of state? Yet Mandela zeroed in on that hidden kernel where their better angels lurked and drew out the goodness that is inside all people. Not only Coetsee, Barnard, Viljoen, and P. W. Botha, but apartheid’s ignorant henchmen—the prison guards, Badenhorst, Reinders—and its heedless accomplices—Pienaar, Wiese, Luyt. By appealing to and eliciting what was best in them, and in every single white South African watching the rugby game that day, he offered them the priceless gift of making them feel like better people, in some cases transforming them into heroes.
His secret weapon was that he assumed not only that he would like the people he met; he assumed also that they would like him. That vast self-confidence of his coupled with that frank confidence he had in others made for a combination that was as irresistible as it was disarming.
It was a weapon so powerful that it brought about a new kind of revolution. Instead of eliminating the enemy and starting from zero, the enemy was incorporated into a new order deliberately built on the foundations of the old. Conceiving of his revolution not primarily as the destruction of apartheid but, more enduringly, as the unification and reconciliation of all South Africans, Mandela broke the historical mold.
Yet, as his reaction to the crowd’s response to him at Ellis Park showed, he surprised himself along the way. He underestimated the strength of his charm.
One Sunday a few weeks after the Springboks’ victory, Nelson Mandela visited a church in Pretoria. This church was Dutch Reformed, the denomination that had once sought to provide biblical justification for apartheid; that had persuaded Constand Viljoen there would be separate heavens for blacks and whites; that had exiled his brother Braam for calling the new doctrine a heresy. “That was the occasion,” Mandela said, his eyes sparkling, “when I saw that the impact of the rugby match was going to last, that the attitude of the Afrikaners towards me really had changed completely.” During the service he addressed the faithful in Afrikaans, and afterward they surrounded him