Invictus - Carlin [53]
In August 1992 South Africa played its first serious international match in eleven years against New Zealand at Johannesburg’s Ellis Park Stadium. A deal was reached beforehand between the rugby authorities and the ANC. We’ll give you the game, the ANC said, so long as you stop the event from being used, as the phrase went, “to promote apartheid symbols.” There was an inbuilt problem, though: the green Springbok jersey itself. Still a potent apartheid symbol for blacks, it was inevitably associated in white minds with the two other symbols the ANC meant when they set out their conditions: the old South African flag, which was still the official national flag, and the old national anthem, “Die Stem,” which was still the national anthem. To ask rugby fans to dissociate one symbol from the others given the inevitable state of inebriation of many by the time they got into the stadium, and their political insensitivity, seemed too much to ask, too soon. And it was.
The old flags flew all around the stadium and Louis Luyt, the big, brash president of the South African Rugby Union, flouted the rules sensationally by ordering the old anthem to be played. The crowd bellowed out the song like a battle cry, converting what the ANC had hoped to be a ritual of reconciliation into a ceremony of defiance. Rapport , the Afrikaans newspaper most anchored in the past, waxed sentimental about “the soft tears of pride” spilled by the volk at Ellis Park, before switching to heroic mode to applaud their uncompromising spirit. “Here is my song, here is my flag,” rhapsodized Rapport. “Here I stand and I will sing my song today.”
Enlightened Afrikaners like Arrie Rossouw, the government’s chief negotiator Roelf Meyer, and Braam Viljoen, the brother of the general, hung their heads in despair. ANC officials lined up to express their indignation. Arnold Stofile felt betrayed. “We were never dogmatic about isolation,” he said. “We turned the stick into a sweet, juicy carrot. But not everybody chewed on it. So when the fans let us down the way they did, singing the apartheid anthem and all the rest of it, our people were really pissed off.”
Yet once the Ellis Park dust had settled, Mandela argued forcefully at NEC meetings for persisting with rugby as an instrument of political persuasion. The case was difficult to make among a group of strong-minded people who had had it with indignities at the hands of white people. But he made it anyway. “Up to now rugby has been the application of apartheid in the sports field,” he told his ANC colleagues. “But now things are changing. We must use sport for the purpose of nation-building and promoting all the ideas which we think will lead to peace and stability in the country.”
The initial response was “very negative,” Mandela recalled. “I understood the anger and hostility of the black population because they had grown up in an atmosphere where they regarded sport as an arm of apartheid, where we supported the foreign teams when they came to play against South Africa. Now suddenly I come out of jail and I’m saying we must embrace these people! I understood their reaction very well and I knew I was going to have a tough time.” The ANC leadership thrashed out the matter over several meetings. Mandela’s most powerful argument was that rugby was worth, as he put it, several battalions. “My idea was to ensure that we got the support of Afrikaners, because—as I kept reminding people—rugby, as far as Afrikaners are concerned, is a religion.”
In January 1993, just five months after the fiasco at the game against New Zealand, Mandela gave white South Africa the biggest, best, and least-deserved gift they could have imagined—the 1995 Rugby World Cup. Not only would South Africa be allowed to take part for the first time, but South Africa would stage the competition. Walter Sisulu headed a small delegation that met at ANC headquarters in Johannesburg with the top people of the International Rugby