Invictus - Carlin [39]
A notion was born inside Du Plessis that something was “seriously amiss” in his country. But it was one thing to feel uneasy, quite another to let politics distract him from his rugby career. He never made a stand—as he might have done, to sensational effect—during his nine years as a Springbok star. He never spoke up about his misgivings, or even about his support for the Progressive Federal Party, to which Helen Suzman, Mandela’s old prison visitor belonged and which Slabbert joined, becoming a member of parliament for Rondebosch in the mid-seventies and soon thereafter party leader. Viewed as oddball free-thinkers within the insular little world of white South Africa, the “Progs” were conservative by global standards. Representing what was largely a well-heeled English-speaking constituency, ready to tut-tut the Boers’ rough treatment of the poor blacks but unlikely ever to go into a township to meet them, the PFP nevertheless had the merit of offering a legal public voice opposed to apartheid inside South Africa, as well as a bridge to ease the transition toward the changes that would come later. Slabbert himself would become a critical intermediary in early secret contacts between the government and the ANC in 1987, soon after Mandela’s first prison encounters with Kobie Coetsee.
Morné du Plessis, brave as he was on the rugby field, did not take any political risks off it. Not till that afternoon of February 11, 1990, at Cape Town’s Parade. He went because he hoped, as Joel Stransky did, that Mandela’s release would heal a country that he had long known to be sick. Stransky watched Mandela’s release on television in a café in France. It was not quite as impressive as turning up at the Parade, but it showed more interest than most of his future Springbok comrades, whose attitude was summed up by one of the team’s giant forwards, Kobus Wiese. Asked much later about his reaction to Mandela’s release, his straightforward reply was, “I wasn’t paying much attention, to be honest.” Yet Stransky felt, as he would recall, “absolutely excited.”
Stransky’s life was consumed by sports, but not so completely as to prevent him from experiencing two fleeting moments of political awakening. The first clue came following an event of which he would hardly have been aware: the Soweto uprising of 1976 by schoolchildren no older than he. One consequence was that his parents began to suspect that their child’s school might be burned down. “I remember my dad having to go and stand guard at our school at night during the riots and the unrest. I’m not sure whether I knew exactly what was wrong because the grown-ups didn’t really talk about it, but it was very clear to me from that moment on that things were messed up in this country.”
Stransky’s second clue came during the Springboks’ riot-strewn 1981 tour of New Zealand, when he was fourteen. He realized that there had to be a good reason why half of New Zealand was outraged by his countrymen. Stransky offered the very image of the effect that Arnold Stofile and his fellow ANC anti-rugby campaigners were hoping to have on the white population. By denying them their happy drug, they were rousing them out of their torpor. They were creating the conditions for political change. In some they found a more receptive audience than others. In Stransky they found the perfect response, for he was thrilled when Mandela got out.
Stransky also suspected that Mandela’s release might be good for his rugby career. He was already recognized as one of the best players in the country. He had become a key player by the age of twenty for Natal Province, one of the four biggest teams in South Africa. Not being the big, powerful, bone-crushing