• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 981 0

lower economic rungs of white South Africa. Choose, say, the family of François Pienaar, who would end up as Springbok captain in the 1995 Rugby World Cup final. Pienaar’s father was a blue-collar worker in the steel industry. His family was not well-off by the standards of white South Africa. Life for them was a financial struggle. Pienaar was embarrassed by the battered old family car, by the presents he received at Christmas, less extravagant than other boys’. Yet the Pienaar family had a home large enough to accommodate two live-in black maids, who would address François and his three younger brothers as “klein baas,” “little boss.” This kind of relationship between six-year-old white boys and maids old enough to be their mothers or grandmothers was normal in white homes—as it had been for a long time. P. W. Botha, once described in an interview with the New York Times his relationship with black people as he grew up. “I was taught by my father to be strict with them,” he said “but to be just.”

Pienaar grew up in an industrial town south of Johannesburg, five hundred miles east of Upington, called Vereeniging. White Vereeniging had the same relationship with its nearest black township, Sharpeville, as white Upington did with Paballelo. Sharpeville occupied a place in the minds of the Pienaar family barely more meaningful to them than Selma, Alabama. Yet Vereeniging weighed heavily on the minds of Sharpeville’s residents. It was the place from which death had been famously visited on them. Sharpeville endured the single worst atrocity of the apartheid era; in 1960 police opened fire on unarmed, fleeing black demonstrators, killing sixty-nine.

There was probably more hatred concentrated toward whites in Vereeniging than anywhere else in South Africa. Sharpeville was the township where the PAC—the “one settler, one bullet” people—had their strongest base of support. Yet Pienaar had little notion that the blacks viewed him as a mortal enemy, and no sense of Sharpeville’s existence, let alone its history, as he grew up. Black people drifted around the fuzzier outside edges of his youthful consciousness. As he would admit, “We were a typical, not very politically aware working-class Afrikaner family who never spoke about politics and believed a hundred percent in the propaganda of the day.”

That was the way it was for practically everybody who grew up in Pienaar’s world. It didn’t cross their minds to question the justness of whites having bigger homes, better cars, better schools, better sports facilities, or the ancestral right to jump the line ahead of black people at the post office. Even more remote for Pienaar, as for the vast majority of Afrikaners of his social class, was the notion that this privileged life whites led had been dubiously acquired, and could be roughly taken away one day. In his adolescence, the notion that black people might organize themselves into a force meriting the title of “enemy” would have seemed far-fetched. The enemy, as far as the rugby-playing François was concerned, were “the Englishmen.” They also played rugby, though never as well as the Afrikaners, whom the English-speaking whites called “Dutchmen.” The young Pienaar took great pride in the fact that during his entire school career, his team never lost once to a school whose predominant language was English.

The gap between the Pienaar family’s passion for rugby and their lack of interest in politics was revealed during the Springboks’ 1981 tour of New Zealand. Ordinarily one of the most politically placid countries in the world, New Zealand was split dangerously down the middle by the tour, such was the strength of feeling between the half of the country that shared the Afrikaners’ blind devotion to the game and the half that abhorred South Africa’s great “crime against humanity.” Never before had the population of the island nation been more polarized. The tour lasted eight tumultuous weeks, and everywhere the Springboks went they were met by frenzied demonstrators, helmeted riot police, soldiers, and barbed wire. The stadiums