Invictus - Carlin [40]
And he was ambitious. That was why when the South African rugby season ended in October 1989, at the start of spring, he played club rugby in France. The game there was not quite as manically intense as it was in South Africa, but it allowed him to keep in shape over the South African summer so that when the season resumed in April 1990 he could hit the ground running, physically fit and match fit. It worked. After Stransky’s return from France, Natal Province ended up national champions. Mandela’s release would work for him too, in the way he had hoped. For Stransky, a free Mandela meant liberation for the Springboks from the international boycott. Sitting in that French café, he imagined that one day he might play rugby in the colors of his country.
Mandela had been expected at the Parade at around three in the afternoon, but such was the pandemonium that he eventually made it nearly five hours later, arriving as dusk fell. And, adding to an odd sense of anticlimax that dulled the day’s historic proceedings, he gave a speech that fell short of expectations, failed to stir.
The next morning, the first on which he had awoken a free man in twenty-seven years and six months, held what would have seemed a stiffer test: a news conference before the world’s press. There were two hundred journalists there, many of them TV news anchors who were household names in their own countries: Peter Jennings, Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw, and their equivalents worldwide. South Africa did not have television when Mandela went to jail. He himself had appeared before a TV camera only once—a one-on-one interview with a British reporter a year before his arrest, in 1961. By 1990, every politician alive had undergone a course on how to handle himself before the cameras. And here was Mandela, who was as famous as he was bereft of experience in the mass media age, about to face the exercise politicians everywhere dreaded, a no-holds-barred news conference. He had no way of knowing what the journalists might ask. And his less than charismatic speech the night before had created doubts as to the quality of his performance this morning. After all, he was seventy-one years old, and had spent almost three decades in prison. How well could he be? How sharp?
The news conference was held early in the morning at the garden of the official Cape Town residence of the head of South Africa’s Anglican Church, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who until that moment, as the winner of the 1984 Nobel Peace Prize, had been the most visible face of resistance to apartheid around the world. The mansion, in the gabled Cape Dutch style, sat on the steep, thickly wooded foothills of Table Mountain, the monolith whose rectangular outline Mandela would gaze upon across the water from Robben Island. With Mandela the 4.30 a.m. riser it was always an early start: reporters had to be there by 6:30. When he emerged from the house, his wife, Winnie, by his side, the dew still lay on the leaves. Mandela and wife smiled and waved their way down a set of stone steps to the lawn where the press awaited. Tutu, jigging with delight, happy no longer to have to play the part of world’s most prominent anti-apartheid celebrity, led the way. There was just the one jolt, when Mandela stopped at his table and glanced at an artillery of furry cylinders that would be arrayed before him when he sat down. One of his aides whispered something in his ear, to which Mandela responded with a nod and an “Oh, I see . . .” The furry objects were microphones.
From that moment on it was smooth sailing. He placated his own supporters and fellow leaders in the ANC by restating his symbolic commitment to the armed