Invictus - Carlin [59]
That still left another three million-plus Afrikaners, and a total of five million white South Africans if you included the “English,” who were not openly aligned with the separatist cause. Where were they? There was a Lubowski minority that actively supported the ANC. There was a large minority, about 15 percent of the whites, who might not vote for the ANC in an election but were sufficiently alert politically to see apartheid for what it was and give their support to the Democratic Party, the new offshoot of the Progressive Federal Party for which Braam Viljoen had stood in the 1987 election. Roughly 20 percent of whites, mostly Afrikaners, quietly went along with the general thinking of the Volksfront, or at least with its fears. And then there was the rest, the large rump of middle-class white South Africa to which François Pienaar and his family belonged, about 60 percent of whom tended to believe that the long-ruling National Party could be relied upon to look after their interests. They did wake out of their torpor, but only sporadically, when events like Hani’s assassination caught their eye and the thought ocurred that there might be consequences for their daily lives.
But this very same rump was also susceptible to Mandela’s appeals. Unfixed in their views, their identities less dependent on ancient prejudices than those of the Volksfront faithful, they responded with pleasant surprise to Mandela’s praise of the Afrikaner lady who noted down the license plate of Hani’s assassin. And they liked his position on rugby, the first fruits of which they would taste on June 26, 1993, when the Springboks kicked off their long and deliberate preparations for the World Cup, still two years away, by playing an international at home against France. It was the game in which François Pienaar made his Springbok debut.
Pienaar, then twenty-six, reacted to the news of his selection as if he were living in a normal country. In his autobiography, Rainbow Warrior, he makes no mention of the charged political context against which he achieved “the over-riding ambition” of his life. The continued killings in the townships, the preparations for right-wing war, the possible imminence of all-race elections: none of it impinged seriously on his consciousness, none of it had any more bearing on his life than the Sharpeville blacks had done when he was growing up. A new era was dawning in South African rugby and the national team needed a new captain. Pienaar was overwhelmed to learn at his first Springbok training session that, in a break with all precedent in all sports, he would be leading South Africa out onto the field against France in his debut game. The game was to be played on a Saturday at Durban’s King’s Park Stadium. On the Thursday before, Pienaar arranged for his parents to fly to Durban, the first plane flight of their lives, and in the evening he drove around to their hotel in a Mercedes-Benz the Springboks’ sponsors had loaned him. As he posed for family photographs in his green Springbok uniform, fit and ready for battle, he was as happy as any Afrikaner had ever been.
That very evening thousands of Volksfront soldiers were polishing their weapons in preparation for the first military action since General Constand Viljoen had been made bitter-ender-in-chief. In a well-organized logistical operation, they began converging overnight by road on Johannesburg, aiming to arrive at dawn at the gates of the World Trade Centre, the site of negotiations between the ANC and the government. They came from all over South Africa, from the Western Cape and the Northern Cape, the Eastern and the Northern Transvaal. Eddie von Maltitz headed a contingent from Ficksburg in the Orange Free State, five hours away. “We organized ourselves a bus and we crammed into it, strong men only, all heavily armed,” as he would recall. “We expected blood. We didn’t just have to stop the ANC, we had to stop De Klerk. We had to stop those negotiations. They were leading us to Armageddon. It was the