Invictus - Carlin [21]
The Afrikaners, of Dutch descent mostly, speaking a language that most modern Dutch people could understand, made up 65 percent of South Africa’s five million white people. The other 35 percent spoke English at home, were of mostly British descent (though there were a number of Portuguese, Greeks, and Lithuanian Jews), and were dominant in the business world, especially big business—which in South Africa meant the gold, diamond, and platinum mines. But in terms of political power, the Afrikaners ruled supreme. They ran the state—every cabinet minister, every army general, every police general, every senior intelligence officer was an Afrikaner—and they owned and farmed the land. So complete was the association between the Afrikaners and the land that the word “Boer,” meaning “farmer” in Afrikaans, was almost synonymous in practice with Afrikaner. This was hardly surprising given that 50,000 white farmers owned twelve times as much arable and grazing land as the country’s 14 million rural blacks.
As keepers of the food and the guns, the Afrikaners were the protectors of the rest of white South Africa. Or, as P. W. Botha put it once, “The security and happiness of all minority groups in South Africa depend on the Afrikaner. Whether they are English, or German, or Portuguese, or Italian-speaking, or even Jewish-speaking, makes no difference.”
Botha was heavy-handed but he was right. The Afrikaners were apartheid’s lords and protectors. That was why young Justice cheered like mad that day for the New Zealanders, an all-white team known, to the young Justice’s confusion and delight, as the All Blacks (their name comes from their entirely black uniforms). He had plenty to cheer about. Marshaled by a bald, stocky player named Sid Going, the visitors thrashed North West Cape 26-3. Justice, summoning up the childhood memory, rubbed his hands with glee at the manner in which the New Zealanders “murdered” the Upington Boers; those overfed giants who humiliated him, his family, and his friends every day, who insisted always on black people addressing them as “baas.” From that day on, Justice became a rugby fan, if only in the limited, strictly vindictive sort of way that millions of black South Africans were. He enjoyed the game only when the foreign rivals were good enough to beat the Boers.
Justice became a politically alert adolescent who understood how important rugby was to the Afrikaners; how it was the closest they got, outside church, to a spiritual life. They had their Old Testament Christianity, otherwise known as the Dutch Reformed Church; and they had their secular religion, rugby, which was to Afrikaners as soccer was to Brazilians or American football (rugby’s shoulder-padded first cousin) was to the residents of Green Bay, Wisconsin. And the more right-wing the Afrikaners were, the more fundamentalist their faith in God, the more fanatical their attachment to the game. They feared God, but they loved rugby, especially when played in a Springbok jersey.
Successive South African national teams had built up a reputation during the twentieth century as the most bruisingly physical rugby players in the world. Mostly they were Afrikaners, though occasionally an unusually hefty, or tough, or fast “Englishman” (as the Afrikaners called them, when they were being polite) would sneak into the national side. And mostly, being Afrikaners, they were big-boned men of horny-handed famer stock, who as children learned the game playing barefoot on hard, dry pitches where if you fell, you bled.
As a metaphor for apartheid’s crushing brutality, the Boks worked very well. That was why their distinctive green jersey had become as detestable to blacks as the riot police, the national flag, and the national anthem, “Die Stem” (The Call), whose words praised God and celebrated the white conquest of Africa’s southern tip.
It was on such indignities that Justice dwelled in that fateful