Invictus - Carlin [89]
CHAPTER XV
DOUBTING THOMASES
“My own supporters: they booed me! They booed me down when I said these boys are now ours, let us embrace them!” Mandela frowned at the recollection. “Oh, it was very difficult . . .”
He was recalling a particular incident near the end of the World Cup competition, an ANC rally deep in rural KwaZulu that captured for him the daunting difficulties he had faced in persuading black South Africans to get behind the Springbok team. Persuading them actively to embrace a symbol so redolent of the pain and indignity they had endured for so long was an exercise in political persuasion almost as implausible as the one he had pulled off with Constand Viljoen. Justice Bekebeke, for one, was not going to roll over easily on this one. As he said, “These Afrikaner rugby people, they were the ones—the very ones—who treated us worst. These were the guys who kicked us off the pavement onto the streets. These were the guys—the big white thugs—who said, ‘Give way, kaffir’ ”
But his present circumstances, in line with the new spirit in the country, had changed. Having escaped the rope, he was on his way in May 1995 toward obtaining his BA degree in law by the end of that year. He approved of the historic compromise Mandela had made, was in favor of his black and white power-sharing government, but there were limits.
“I was a loyal member of the ANC,” he said, “a believer in the philosophy of nonracialism, and an admirer of Mandela. The example Anton Lubowski left me was a rock-solid guarantee I would never be a racist. But the Springboks, that Springbok emblem those people took such pride in: I hated it. It remained for me a potent and loathsome symbol of apartheid.”
That symbol was exactly what ANC supporters at that rally in KwaZulu saw Mandela put on his head in the middle of his address to them. It was the Springbok cap Hennie le Roux had given him. Mandela had come to this town to celebrate the anniversary of the event that sparked the South African revolution, the day in 1976 when Soweto schoolchildren rose up against their apartheid masters. But still they booed.
In choosing this place, Ezakheni, to perform this gesture, Mandela may have been pushing his luck. First, as he pointed out in his speech that day, it was in rural backwaters like Ezakheni that people experienced the old system at its worst. “Here,” Mandela said, “apartheid left communities in conditions that defy description.” Second, a decade of violence between ANC-supporting Zulus and Inkatha-supporting Zulus, continued despite the rise of the new government, prompting Mandela to declare, “The killing of Zulu by Zulu must stop.” Third, the crowd hated the local white farmers, most of whom had been sympathetic to Inkatha.
Buthelezi, the Inkatha leader, was now a cabinet minister in Mandela’s government. Mandela’s generosity toward him was political pragmatism pushed to moral extremes. But here in Ezakheni the wounds remained wide open and fraternizing with the enemy was not well seen. Asking them to love the Springbok was almost indelicate. Yet that was what Mandela did. “You see this cap that I am wearing,” he told his audience, “it does honor to our boys who are playing France tomorrow afternoon.”
That was what set the crowd booing. Mandela would have none of it. “Look,” he admonished them, “amongst you are leaders. Don’t be shortsighted, don’t be emotional. Nation-building means that we have to pay a price, in the same way that the whites have to pay a price. For them to open sports to black people: they are paying a price; for us to say we must now embrace the rugby team is paying a price. That’s what we should do.” As the booing slowly subsided, he continued, “I want leaders amongst you, men and women to stand up and to promote this idea.”
When Mandela recalled that rally, he spoke of it in terms almost of a hunter tracking his prey. “Eventually, you know,” he said with a victorious smile,