Invictus - Carlin [43]
One difference between politically astute white South Africans like Rossouw and the average black South African was that the latter didn’t have to process Mandela’s release through the logical part of the brain to understand the happy enormity of the moment. Save for a dangerous redoubt of conservative, time-warped Zulus in the east of the country, no one disputed Mandela’s automatic right to leadership. Not even Justice Bekebeke, who might have felt forgotten or bitterly out of sync with the times. Despite nine months and forty hangings in Death Row, he too suspended all reason, forgot about his own plight, and celebrated as if Mandela’s release had been his own. “We used to have one hour of exercise every day but on that day we all stayed in our cells to listen to the radio. They played a song as we waited and waited. ‘Release Mandela,’ by Hugh Masekela. We sang along, we danced. The moment the radio announced that he was walking out with Winnie, that moment was freedom for us. We forgot where we were.”
Everywhere Mandela went became a mob scene. But he did not speak the language of the mob. He set off on a long march around South Africa in the weeks immediately following his release, and everywhere he went vast numbers of people turned out, hungry to catch a glimpse of him, dreaming they might receive a smile, touch a fingertip when he reached out—from the start he was a bodyguards’ nightmare—into the crowd. Black South Africa reacted to him as if he were a cross between Napoleon and Jesus Christ. Yet while the subtext of what he said was interpreted by Christians like Archbishop Tutu as an entreaty to “love thine enemy,” his arguments were hard-nosed.
To convince the militants who provided the ANC with its political energy, he had to appeal to more than morality; he had to use the tough language of political necessity, and leave sectors of his audience to believe, if they so chose, that there was nothing he would like more than outright revolution the Castro way. So he spoke of the need to reach an accommodation with white South Africa, not its desirability, and he did so in uncompromising language that acted persuasively on the militants, reiterating the nonnegotiability of basic principles. He reminded the government that if they did not accede to full-on, one-person-one-vote democracy, if they thought—as De Klerk did think for a while—that they could come up with some legalistic compromise that continued to entrench white privilege, then they would have a fight on their hands. Nobody of the millions who saw or heard Mandela in those first days after his release would have mistaken him for a Gandhian pacifist.
Mandela had been famous but faceless for many years, but now his image had spread to every corner of the world, and in South Africa he seemed to be everywhere at once. His long march had the air of a giant party, a royal pageant that went from city to city. The first of these mass rallies was two days after his release at Soweto’s “Soccer City” stadium before 120,000 people. It was Mandela’s coronation as king of black South Africa. At every stop from then, the same ceremony was reenacted. In Durban, the biggest city in Natal Province, a similar number of Zulus paid homage to him. In Bloemfontein, the seat of South Africa’s highest court, 80,000 turned up. In Port Elizabeth, capital of the Eastern Cape region where Mandela was born, 200,000.
In each case the frenzy of a pop concert and the passion of a sports final combined with the solemn fervor of high mass. Raptures accompanied his first appearance onstage flanked by Sisulu and other high priests of the struggle. But then a strange order would descend on the proceedings, and there would follow