Invictus - Carlin [81]
Du Plessis had not talked politics with any of the players but he had no reason to believe that they were anything but run-of-the-mill Natvoters, with the ignorance and prejudice that entailed. “We had some real through-and-through Afrikaners there and this [“Nkosi Sikele”] was in Xhosa and it was the language of what, for many white South Africans, if not most, had been the enemy. It was quite a thing to ask these guys to sing a song that carried that kind of associations.” Quite a thing too to teach them to pronounce the Xhosa words. Only two players in the team spoke the language. Mark Andrews, six foot seven and 240 pounds, had been raised in the rural Eastern Cape, Xhosa country, and he had been exposed to Mandela’s language from birth. Hennie le Roux, smaller and faster and also from that part of the world, spoke some Xhosa too. As for the other twenty-four players in the squad, not a clue.
Fortunately Du Plessis had a friend who could help, a neighbor in Cape Town called Anne Munnik. She was a trim, attractive, bubbly English-speaking white woman in her thirties who earned her living teaching Xhosa. She had learned the language as a child, also in the Eastern Cape, and had perfected it at the University of Cape Town, where she now taught. She was staggered when Du Plessis suggested she give the Boks a lesson on how to sing “Nkosi Sikelele” and then doubtful, once she thought about it, about the kind of response she would get from those hulking great Boers. But Du Plessis insisted, and, with some misgivings, she agreed.
An evening was fixed in the third week of May 1995 at the hotel in Cape Town where the team was staying in preparation for the opening game of the World Cup against world champions Australia, just days away. The players were ordered to gather after training in what had become known as the Team Room, an anodyne space where typically local banks or marketing companies would hold seminars for their staff, and where now Kitch Christie would lecture the players on strategy and tactics. This time, waiting for them at the head of the room, were Du Plessis and Anne Munnik.
Du Plessis, towering over the choirmistress, introduced her to the freshly showered Springboks as an old friend whom he had known for twenty years. The players reacted like teenagers. Nudges, winks, knowing nods. “When Morné said he had been out to my farm a number of times, that was it,” Anne Munnik recalled. “It was ‘Oohs’ and ‘Aahs’ and giggles and laughter and innuendos and teasing generally.”
But the teasing was good-natured. They quieted down when Du Plessis, turning serious, said, “Come on, guys, by singing the song loudly and with pride you’ll be bringing alive the slogan ‘One Team, One Country.’ ” Anne Munnik gawked at the spectacle before her. She was keen on rugby but nothing that she had seen on TV had prepared her for the size of these men in the flesh. Huge and muscular, they were Hollywood central casting’s overenthusiastic response to a request for twenty-six Roman gladiators. She had seen their classically guttural Afrikaans names on a list that Du Plessis had given her—Kobus Wiese, Balie Swart, Os du Randt, Ruben Kruger, Hannes Strydom, Joost van der Westhuizen, Hennie le Roux—and she sensed that politically too they had to have more in common with the far right than with the ANC, with “Die Stem” than with “Nkosi Sikelele.” But she went ahead and gave each of the players a piece of paper with the words of the song on it, and made them go over it, repeating the difficult