Invictus - Carlin [83]
But there was another reason why he got so emotional when he started singing the old black anthem. He had felt what it meant to be marginalized. Apartheid existed within rugby too, among whites. “I know what it’s like to be on the receiving end too,” he said. “I was an Englishman playing a Dutchman’s game. When I began in the game at provincial level I got fucked around badly by the Afrikaner players. I was made not welcome both by my own team and by the rival. Players in my own team tried to get their Afrikaner mates ahead of me in the team selection. They ostracized me, and I was badly beaten too. At my Springbok initiation, they fucked me up so badly my dad wanted to report them to the police. The point was that, for them, it was an Afrikaans game and there was no room for an Englishman. The Englishman was an interloper.” Pienaar had viewed “the Englishmen” precisely as such when he grew up, as shown by his pride in the fact that when he was a teenager his team never lost against a side from an “English” school. “But I used all that to spur me,” Small said, “and I got my way in the end. I became a Springbok. Yet the whole experience taught me an appreciation for the outsider, a sympathy for those in my country who did not have the opportunities that I’d been so lucky to have.”
One Afrikaner who never showed Small anything other than kindness and respect was Morné du Plessis. His influence told too in Small’s response to learning the black anthem. “I saw things a lot differently a year earlier. As we approached the 1994 elections, I was swept along by the fear so many white people had that it was going to be chaos and violence and vengeance. That was why I bought a gun for the first time in my life. I was afraid. And yet, a year later, this . . . Singing ‘Nkosi Sikelele!’ But it wouldn’t have happened without Morné. He was the one who impressed on us that we needed to represent South Africa as a collective, that we had to have a true understanding of being a South African in a South Africa that was just one year old. It was through him that I understood that learning ‘Nkosi Sikelele’ was a part of that.”
Chester Williams was less moved than Small was by the liberation song. Like Small, Williams was a chunky, speedy player who played on the wing. Unlike Small, he was a quiet man whose timidity made him seem cold. Williams was the only nonwhite player in the team, but that didn’t mean he had any greater facility for Xhosa or Zulu than Small did. He was a “Coloured,” according to the rules of the recently defunct Population Registration Act. “Coloureds”—or as the politically correct appellation had it, “so-called Coloured”—were the least politically engaged of the four main apartheid subgroups, the others being Black, White, and Indian. Being a blend of races, they were also the most physically varied. The majority corresponded more to people’s ideas of black African than white European, yet the ethnic group to whom Coloureds typically felt closest to were the Afrikaners, chiefly because at home they spoke the same language as them. It was in this general category that Chester Williams belonged: African-looking, Afrikaans-speaking, nonpolitical.
Not that the Afrikaners gave Coloureds any special respect. F. W. de Klerk’s wife, Marike, ventured some celebrated thoughts on “Coloureds” in 1983 that came back to haunt her later, when her husband was seeking to assume a degree of “non-racial” respectability. “You know, they are a negative group,” the First Lady-to-be had said. “The definition of a Coloured in the population register is someone that is not black, and is not white and is also not an Indian, in other words a non-person. They are the left-overs. They are the people that were left after the