Invictus - Carlin [74]
Mandela was right. If the apartheid ideologues had had the same inclination for putting art to political use as their Soviet counterparts, they would have chosen Pienaar to depict the model specimen of Afrikaner manhood. Six foot four, he carried his 240 pounds of muscle with the statuesque ease of Michelangelo’s David.
If then, as Mandela said, you considered where he came from, you pictured a boy growing up to manhood in Vereeniging in the seventies and eighties and what you saw, with almost cinematic clarity—as Mandela did—was a faithful representation of 90 percent of the Afrikaner volk: a people conditioned by the particular time and place in which they happened to be born to be straightforward, uncomplicated, hard-working, tough, secretly sentimental, churchgoing rugby fanatics who related to their superabundant black neighbors with a mixture of disdain, ignorance, and fear.
Yet if there was one thing Mandela had learned in his dealings with the Afrikaners it was to see past appearances. “He did not seem to me at all to be the typical product of an apartheid society,” Mandela said. “I found him quite a charming fellow and I sensed that he was progressive. And, you know, he was an educated chap. He had a BA in law. It was a pleasure to sit down with him.”
Pleasure was the last thing on Pienaar’s mind as he stood on the stone steps of the giant Union Buildings on June 17, 1994, preparing to go inside for a meeting to which President Mandela had invited him. Pienaar, now twenty-seven years old but suddenly feeling an awful lot younger, confessed to waiting reporters that he had never been more nervous in all his life; that the prospect of meeting the president was more daunting than any rugby game.
Dressed in dark suit and tie, Pienaar entered through a small door at the buildings’ west wing, ducked through a metal detector, and presented himself before two policemen waiting for him at a desk behind a green-tinted window of thick bulletproof glass. Both being Afrikaners, they immediately started engaging him animatedly on rugby. One of them led him out into a courtyard and down a corridor lined, though he barely noticed the anomaly, with watercolors of scenes from the Great Trek, ox-wagons and men on horses against a background of brown, yellowy veldt. The policeman dropped him off at a small waiting room, bare save for a table and some leather chairs, into which stepped Mandela’s personal assistant, a tall, imposing black lady called Mary Mxadana who asked him to take a seat and wait a moment. He sat in the room alone for five minutes, his palms sweating. “I was incredibly tense as the moment arrived when I would meet him,” he recalled. “I was really in awe of him. I kept thinking. ‘What do I say? What do I ask him?’ ”
Then Mxadana reappeared, asked him if he would like tea or coffee—he said coffee—and bade him follow her. She stepped out of the waiting room into the corridor with the pictures of the ox-wagons, stopped at a tall, dark brown door, knocked sharply, and, in one move, stepped in. She held open the door for Pienaar, whose stage fright only worsened at the sight of the vast room before him, oceanically empty, as at first it seemed, till he crossed the threshold and spotted to his right a tall gray-haired man jumping out of his chair. Mandela was seventy-six but he headed toward Pienaar with the alacrity of a rugby opponent charging in for a tackle—except that he stood erect, had a big smile on his face and his hand outstretched. “Ah, François, how very good of you to come!” Pienaar muttered, “No, Mr. President, thank you so much for inviting me.” Mandela shook his hand warmly, Pienaar registering with surprise that Mandela was almost as tall as he was. “So, how are you, François?” “Oh, very well, Mr. President, and you?” “Ah, very well. Ve-ry well!”
Mandela, smiling all the time, clearly happy to have this big young Boer in his new office, gestured to him to sit down on a sofa at right