Invictus - Carlin [52]
Buthelezi, who knew that the limits of impunity guaranteed him by the apartheid state did not extend to killing white people, found himself drawn ever closer to the far-right Conservative Party and their assorted storm troopers, who cheered on the Inkatha impis, celebrated their massacres, and looked forward to the day when they might forge a Zulu-Boer alliance against the ANC. Mandela, meanwhile, was receiving more and more reports from his own intelligence people, as well as from friendly foreign governments, of right-wing mobilization.
By early 1992 there was no sign of the township bloodbath abating and every sign that the far right would violently show their hand. Danger loomed, and Mandela had to dispel it. He needed to appease whites’ fears, to give them some incentive to accept the impending new order. The NEC met and the idea came up to consider converting the political stick that sports had provided them into a carrot: offering to ease up on, or drop altogether, the boycott on rugby. Arnold Stofile, the man jailed in 1985 for his part in stopping an All Black tour, was an active participant in the debate. “This is no ordinary carrot we would be offering white South Africa,” the effervescent Stofile told his colleagues, not all of whom grasped the significance of rugby in the Afrikaner soul. “This is not politics. This is not ideology. It is something much more powerful and primal, and personal! Offering to restore the international rugby games is a way of saying to whites, ‘If you play along with us you will be able to go to Europe and the U.S. and Australia to visit your friends and not be seen at the airport when your passport is checked as pariahs. And they will see it as good for business too and, above all, it would mean being liked again. That’s the bottom line. That will mean so much to them. They’ll be able to exclaim, ‘They like us! They like us!’ In sum, comrades, white South Africa will be able to feel like human beings again, like citizens of the world.”
One member of the NEC who understood exactly what Stofile was talking about was Steve Tshwete, a former Robben Islander who had also played rugby. In fact Tshwete had been arguing in favor of using sports more as a tool of positive change since the time of Mandela’s release. Arrie Rossouw, the political writer of the Afrikaans newspaper Beeld, described how early in 1990 he had flown to Zambia, the ANC’s exile base, and had long chats into the night with Tshwete, already the organization’s Mr. Sports. “Tshwete understood right from the beginning that the restoration of rugby internationals would prompt Afrikaners to rethink their preconceptions about the ANC,” Rossouw said. “He was passionately in favor of using rugby as an instrument of reconciliation.”
He and Stofile argued the point before the NEC. Opinion was divided between the pragmatists who believed the time had come to reach out an undeserved hand of friendship and those who found the idea of rewarding the “Boers’ ” perfidy outrageous. It was the pragmatists who prevailed on Mandela. The idea of using rugby as an inducement for the Afrikaners to board the democracy train could not have been more in keeping with the approach he had rehearsed in prison, most obviously with Major van Sittert in the “hot plate” encounter, and deployed to such valuable political effect since. The whites had plenty of bread, but they had been denied the