Invictus - Carlin [77]
The tunnel vision of the Springboks was now total. The only thing in their minds was the World Cup, which began at the end of May next year. Neither Pienaar, nor Small, nor anyone else on the team was paying any attention at all to South African politics, where there was plenty going on.
November 1994 had been the diciest month yet of Mandela’s half-year in power. He left to his ministers the tough business of providing housing, education, electricity, and water to those whom apartheid had deliberately denied the basics of a dignified modern life. His job was to try to become the father of the whole nation; to make everybody feel that he symbolized their identity and values. That was why a part of him always kept a wary watch on the most recalcitrant members of the new family he was seeking to create, the Afrikaner right. This meant also worrying about the police. Mandela was fairly relaxed about the South African Defence Force, whose Afrikaner generals had been joined at the top of the military by former commanders of Umkhonto we Sizwe. The SADF generals were disciplined. The police were looser cannon, and most of the top people from the apartheid era remained at their posts. The government intelligence services, hitherto deployed to monitor the left, concentrated their energies now on that 50 percent of General Constand Viljoen’s former supporters who had not taken part in the April elections, and from whose discontented midst the preelection terrorist bombers had sprung.
The prevailing view among white South Africans in the aftermath of Mandela’s inauguration was one of relief. The apocalypse had come and gone and life remained much as it had been. The guillotine blocks had not gone up and the civil servants remained, for the most part, in their jobs. But white people did not shake off their inbred mixture of guilt and fear overnight. They began to worry whether this might not be the calm before the storm, whether there might be an overnight change of policy on public service jobs for white people, precipitated by the inevitable clamor whites expected from blacks for instant economic gratification. In a measure of how whites continued to underestimate the intelligence of their black neighbors, stories began to do the rounds about black “cleaning girls” and “garden boys” striding into their “madams’ ” and “masters’ ” sitting rooms and demanding the keys of their homes.
The truth was that black South Africans were, for the most part, sufficiently shrewd and sufficiently patient to know that Rome would not be built in a day. They trusted their government eventually to deliver but understood that to drive the whites into the sea would not do anyone any good. That was why they had voted for the ANC instead of the PAC.
The generosity implicit in that choice eluded a large chunk of the white population, few of whom had the slightest sense of what was going on in the minds of black South Africans. General Viljoen, the accidental politician, kept worrying too, still unsure whether he had done the right thing by his people in shelving the Boerestaat option and going along with the bonafides of Mandela’s ANC. He worried also about the potential for violence his well-armed and, in some cases, half-crazed former allies might pose. Mandela, who talked about these matters with Viljoen, with whom he regularly