Invictus - Carlin [38]
It was thus only partly surprising—Du Plessis was quite possibly the tallest of the tens of thousands of people gathered at the Parade—that a black man, apparently drunk, came up to him that afternoon and told him in abusive language to go away, that this was a ceremony at which he did not belong. “But it wasn’t the guy’s threatening behavior that stayed with me,” Du Plessis said. “It was the fact that immediately another black man admonished him. Then others joined in, angry that he should have treated me that way, and escorted the man away.” They were poor people who spoke in Xhosa, Mandela’s language, but Du Plessis understood that they had the political sophistication to see that the more whites who could be persuaded to join the Mandela release celebrations, the better for everybody.
Du Plessis was here today because he had a keen sense of the historical significance of this moment and he wanted to be part of it. But the deeper explanation went all the way back to the man who first steered the political course he would take, his father. Felix du Plessis was Springbok captain during the first flush of National Party power, but he was always a supporter of the gentler, more liberal—or, at any rate, less illiberal—United Party, which the National Party had defeated in 1948. He had also fought in the Second World War with the Allies, another factor that set him in opposition to the anti-British, in some cases ambiguously pro-Nazi, Nats. Morné’s mother was an English-speaking white South African, and if anything more decidedly anti-Nat than her husband. This did not mean they favored majority rule. The United Party were against apartheid because they found it to be too crudely racist, but the Du Plessis parents never questioned the fundamental desirability of white power.
Neither did their son, who was born in the same town as François Pienaar, Vereeniging, a surprising coincidence given that not only did they both end up as Springbok captains but also that exactly five years after Mandela’s release Du Plessis would go on to become manager of Pienaar’s World Cup team. Where the coincidence ended was in the relative political enlightenment of the better-off Du Plessis family, though in truth, politics counted for little more in the young Morné’s life than it did in the young Pienaar’s.
In 1970, however, Du Plessis came across a man who nudged those faint embers of rebellion his parents had sparked in him. His name was Frederik van Zyl Slabbert. A sociology lecturer at Stellenbosch University, where Du Plessis was studying, Slabbert was a progressive thinker, brilliant academically but notorious in the eyes of the Afrikaner establishment, who also happened to be a good provincial-level rugby player. The combination of the two—a rugby man who was in favor of one-man-one-vote—was startling. Du Plessis made the eye-opening discovery that it was actually possible to admire someone who thought apartheid was wicked.
If Slabbert gave Du Plessis a gentle nudge, his Springbok debut on a 1971 tour to Australia proved a blunt eye-opener. In sporting terms it was a great success. South Africa beat Australia three times out of three and Du Plessis became an instant