Invictus - Carlin [44]
First came the cry from the master of ceremonies onstage, “Amandla!” which meant “power” in Xhosa. To which the assembled throng replied, “Awethu!”—“To the people!”—repeated three or four or five times, in crescendo.
Then came what black leaders had always called the “national anthem,” “Nkosi Sikelele,” whose dirgelike cadences the audience infused now, right fists raised, with a triumphant note never quite heard before. They sang this anthem with the polish of a professional choir, as if they had been practicing for the event all their lives, which in a sense they had, in one protest rally after another for years. Not only did everyone, all 120,000 or 200,000 people, know all the words, but the men knew where to keep quiet and let the women sing, and the women knew when to let the deeper voices of the men ring through.
Then more “Amandla! Awethus!” then “An injury to one!” which brought the reply, “Is an injury to all!” followed by “Viva ANC, Viva!” “Viva!” and “Viva ANC, Viva!” and then “Long live Nelson Mandela!” “Long live!”
Then followed more singing and then dancing, a teeming mass disco, and then more “Long live Nelson Mandela!” and then finally the man himself would stand up, seeming taller than his six feet one inch, raise his fist high, and necks would crane and elated faces would turn toward him as if in worship and he would cry, “Amandla!” and receive in reply the loudest “Awethu!” roar of the day and people would point and exclaim and scream, because they had glimpsed him, at last, in the distance, which was what they had come for. And then he would speak. But he was not a good orator, his voice had a metallic monotone quality that never captivated his audiences the way the naturally histrionic Archbishop Tutu did. And in time the crowd would start to fidget, as they did during sermons in church, but when he finished they sprang once more into life, belting out the “Amandlas!” and the “Vivas!” back to another devastatingly moving rendition of “Nkosi Sikelele” and then back home, the coronation over. But the feeling lasted beyond the ferment of the mass rally. Mandela embodied the predicament of all black South Africans. In him they invested all their hopes and aspirations; he had become the personification of an entire people.
CHAPTER VII
THE TIGER KING
“Hang Mandela!” and “Mandela Go Home—to Prison” and “Traitor de Klerk” were some of the politer banners on display at a rally of the white right in Pretoria five days after Mandela’s release. The setting was Church Square, a quadrangle in the heart of South Africa’s capital city dominated at its center by a gray, bird-spattered statue of the Boer patriarch Paul Kruger, dressed up in presidential sash, coat, top hat, and cane. Some 20,000 people attended, as big a percentage of the white population as the 120,000 gathered in Soweto had been of the black.
Feelings were as intense as they had been at Soccer City four days earlier, but the mood could not have been more different. In Soweto the smell of victory had been in the air; at Church Square, quiet despair underlay the defiance. These people feared they were about to lose everything. They were government bureaucrats who feared they would lose their jobs, small businessmen who feared they would lose their shops, farmers who feared they would lose their land. And all feared they would lose their flag, their anthem, their language, their schools, their Dutch Reformed Church, their rugby. And beneath that, coloring everything, was the dread of a vengeance commensurate with the crime.
They had gathered in the South African capital at the behest of the Conservative Party, the political branch of right-wing extremism. The CP, the main opposition party in the all-white parliament, was an offshoot of the National Party, from which it had broken eight years earlier because its leaders considered P. W. Botha to be suspiciously left-wing, and now viewed De Klerk as the devil himself.
The Afrikaner right has its own liturgy, if not quite as elaborate or practiced