Invictus - Carlin [84]
The evolution in the way Williams was treated by his fellow Springboks between becoming a Springbok in 1993, the year the Volksfront was formed, and the World Cup two years later mirrored the abrupt change in the way white people generally, and Afrikaners in particular, engaged with their darker-skinned compatriots. “It was a difficult time for me,” Williams said, referring to his first days as a Springbok. “People did not accept me. You tried to make conversation but you were left on your own.”
In a book Williams co-wrote, he went further, claiming that James Small, among others, would call him “kaffir” and suggest he was in the team not on merit, but because he was “a token black.” Small was hurt by these claims and Williams went some way to retracting them. According to Small, Williams apologized later in front of the whole team and the two eventually made up. In an interview some time after the dust had settled, Williams looked a little sheepish about some of the things that had appeared in the book, conceding there might have been some exaggerations. But he did insist that he had been discriminated against. “It was only as time passed that I found that people changed, that they included me more and more, and by 1995 I had been fully accepted as a member of the team, on merit.”
The team, in a way, was left with little choice, Chester Williams having been selected by South African rugby’s marketing people as the Rainbow Nation’s face of the tournament. It was an odd situation for him to find himself in, given his retiring character, but to his astonishment, and that of his teammates, everywhere they went in South Africa his face stared down at them from huge roadside billboards. It would have been a little confusing, and not entirely convincing, to black South Africans too—not only because Williams was a “Coloured” (like it or not, and the ANC did not, these labels often persisted), but because he was a sergeant in the South African Defence Force, an institution he had served during apartheid. Williams, whose relationship with black South Africans would have been minimal, whose languages he did not understand, would have understood all this better than the marketing people, whose ploys made more impact on whites than on blacks, on foreign visitors than on South Africans generally. At an auction in early May, Williams stared in bafflement as he saw a portrait of himself selling for what was then the equivalent of $50,000. South Africa was selling an image of itself to the world that the world wanted to buy.
The dream Joel Stransky had had, when watching Mandela’s release on TV in a French bar, of South Africa being welcomed back into the global fold had been fulfilled, and indeed surpassed. Not only was he playing for his country at rugby, he was playing in a World Cup. And he was in the pivotal position of fly half, which in his case also included the vast responsibility of taking the penalty kicks on which the outcome of big games so often turned. He needed steely nerves to do what he did, in addition to physical fearlessness, for at five foot ten and 190 pounds he had to endure the most brutal charges from men far bigger than he. Yet he was anxious going into the singing class, wishing he could be somewhere else. “I’m one of those people who hates singing,” he said. “It’s almost a phobia.” But he surprised himself. “We all knew the politics behind that song and we’d heard about it so often and then there I was learning the words and it felt really special.”
Hennie le Roux, one of the more serious-minded members of the team, and a close friend of François Pienaar’s, applied himself earnestly to Anne Munnik’s lessons. A talented jinking runner, the most versatile of the Springbok backs, Le Roux was no more political than anyone else on the team but for him the national imperative to learn “Nkosi Sikelele” was now clear. He had seen it, as other Springboks had, on arrival at their Cape Town hotel a few days earlier when the mostly black staff came out to greet them