Invictus - Carlin [20]
Three childhood memories had a lasting effect on the man Justice Bekebeke would become. The first dated from early in his childhood when he visited Cape Town with his family. Looking out over the Atlantic Ocean, he spotted a speck of land not far offshore. His father, who was barely literate but knew where he stood politically, told him that this was the place where “our leaders” were. The speck was Robben Island. Justice begged his father for a coin to put into a shoreline telescope so he could catch a glimpse of his leaders. He did not succeed, the island being seven miles away, but he saw the outlines of the buildings where the cells were—enough for him to construct a fantasy in his mind that he had actually been to the island. He went back home and recounted the fantasy as fact, impressing his school friends so much that before he knew it he had acquired the status in Paballelo as a leader himself, as someone from whom his young peers were prepared to take political direction.
Thanks to that episode, and thanks to the influence of his father, Justice allied himself from an early age with Mandela’s African National Congress rather than with its rival, the more radical Pan Africanist Congress. The PAC was an openly, vengefully racist party that counted “one settler, one bullet” and “throw the whites into the sea” among its slogans, and almost became the dominant force in black politics during the 1960s. The PAC was South Africa’s Hamas.
Imagine Yassir Arafat convincing Hamas to succumb to his leadership and unite the Palestinian people under the banner of his Fatah party and you have a sense of what Mandela achieved with his own much larger and more tribally disparate constituency. In black South Africa there were Zulus, there were Xhosas, there were Sothos and six other tribal groups, all of whom spoke different languages at home, most of whom had some history of animosity toward one another. Mandela, whom everybody knew to be a Xhosa of the royal house, ultimately won over ninety percent of all black South Africans.
Bekebeke’s second defining memory was sealed when he was ten. He heard about a black man who had been arguing with a white policeman. The dispute grew more and more heated until the policeman pulled out his gun and shot the black man, who, as he fell, thrust at the policeman with a knife and stabbed him to death. Justice didn’t know the black man, but the story had the force of a parable on him. “I adored that man,” he blazed, recapturing the mood of his youth, when he told the story much later. “I hero-worshiped him for standing up to the white policeman, for fighting back.”
If that memory suggests the challenge Mandela would face in persuading his people to accept a negotiated end to apartheid, Justice’s third great childhood memory illustrated how tough it would be to persuade them to support the Springboks. It concerned a rugby game in Upington in 1970, also in his tenth year.
Like most black children, he had little interest in the game. It was the brutish, alien pastime of a brutish, alien people. But this time curiosity, and the prospect of gloating over a rare defeat for his white neighbors, urged him on to the local rugby stadium. The New Zealand rugby team was on a tour of South Africa and had come to Upington to play against the big provincial team, North West Cape. The stadium was small, with a capacity of nine thousand, and space—where the sun beat