Invictus - Carlin [37]
When Mandela eventually emerged, striding purposefully out of the main gate of the prison in bright midafternoon sunlight, the triumphant smile he wore, happy as a soldier back from war, masked the fact that a little while earlier he had been fuming. His wife, Winnie, looking not quite so cheerful next to him, was the reason. The delay had been on her account, for she had arrived late that morning from Johannesburg, having been detained by a hairdresser’s appointment. One consequence was that Mandela gave her a stern reprimand; another was that tensions were rising dangerously at the Parade, the great open square in Cape Town where Mandela was due to deliver his first address as a free man. A huge crowd had gathered under the hot sun, many among them black youths who had little reason to be well inclined toward the host of white policemen on Ayatollah watch. Scuffling broke out, tear gas was fired, stones thrown. It was not a bloodbath, or anything close to it, but enough to send people running in all directions.
Word reached Mandela’s retinue, by now in a convoy of cars, that they had better wait for things to calm down. It was not the most auspicious start, but prison had taught Mandela patience. His security people told him the wisest course would be to stop the convoy and wait, and he agreed. They chose to park on the city’s outer periphery, in a genteel, politically liberal white suburb called Rondebosch, where lived a young doctor called Desmond Woolf with his wife, Vanessa, and their twin baby boys Daniel and Simon.
The Woolfs were watching the day’s events on television, with Dr. Woolf ’s mother. Dr. Woolf and his wife belonged to a small, politically sensitive sector of white society that was warmly in favor of Mandela’s release. They had even debated among themselves whether they should go and join the crowds down at the Parade. The question right now, though, was whether Mandela himself would make it. From what they were saying on the television, no one seemed to quite know where he was.
Suddenly there was a knock at the door. A friend of Vanessa Woolf ’s told them that Mandela was sitting in a car outside their house. “Come on, don’t be ridiculous!” Dr. Woolf said. “No,” said the friend. “He is right here. Come outside, quick!.”
The couple went out with their two children and Dr. Woolf ’s mother, and before them they saw a line of five parked cars. “And there he was,” as Dr. Woolf would tell it, “sitting in the middle car. We stood . . . and gazed at him in astonishment. The whole world’s attention was focused on him and there he was outside our house, when he was supposed to be somewhere else. And we just stood and watched and he rolled down the window, beckoned us towards him, and said, ‘Please, come over.’ ”
Dr. Woolf introduced himself and Mandela introduced himself and they shook hands. Dr. Woolf was carrying Simon, who was barely one, and Mandela reached out to touch the child’s hand before asking his father’s permission to pick him up and take him through the open window into the car. “He bounced him on his knee for a while and he asked what his name was. Then he wanted to know why we had called him Simon, whether there was any particular significance in the name. He seemed very pleased to be able to hold a child.” Vanessa Woolf introduced herself and Mandela exchanged Simon for Daniel. Then Dr. Woolf ’s mother came up to say hello, completing the cheerful Sunday afternoon scene.
Another Rondebosch resident, Morné du Plessis, had also been debating earlier in the day whether to go to the Parade, deciding eventually that yes, he would. One of the most famous people in the crowd—and certainly the most famous white one—to Afrikaners he was something of a god.
Du Plessis had been captain of the Springboks in the bad old days, as had his father before him. Felix du Plessis led the South African rugby team to four famous victories over New Zealand in 1949, the year after the National Party’s first electoral victory,