Invictus - Carlin [90]
Almost as difficult was convincing people that the Springboks really could win the World Cup. All rugby experts agreed that it was a vain hope. “When I went to see the team in Silvermine and told them that I was sure they would win I did not want to be proved wrong,” Mandela said. “Personally, it was very important for me because I knew that victory would mobilize the Doubting Thomases. That is why I was so keen that South Africa should come out tops! It would be reward for all the hard work—going around the country, being booed down . . .”
He spoke of “hard work”; previously he had used the word “campaign”: indications of how deliberately he had set about his objective of using rugby as a political instrument. Nicholas Haysom, Mandela’s legal adviser in the presidency, was a lifelong rugby fan and former player who became Mandela’s in-house rugby buddy at the Union Buildings. Haysom acknowledged that Mandela had seen quite clearly how powerful an instrument the World Cup would be regarding “the number one strategic imperative of his five-year presidency.” But that was not the whole picture. Again, the political and the personal, the calculation and the spontaneity, merged into one. “As the World Cup was getting started,” Haysom recalled, “I would hear him talking to me about ‘the boys,’ as in ‘the boys are in good spirits,’ or ‘the boys are going to win.’ At first I’d ask him, ‘What boys?’ And he’d look at me as if I had asked a puzzlingly silly question and reply, ‘My boys,’ by which I soon came to understand that he meant the Springboks.” Although Mandela did not enter the World Cup as a man with a great historical knowledge of rugby, he became ever more informed and passionate as the tournament unfolded. “He saw the political opportunity, yes, but it was not something cold because he too, as an individual, got swept away by the fervor of it all and became just another mad-keen patriotic fan.”
The black half of Mandela’s bodyguard detachment took longer than he did to enter into the spirit of the tournament. That very first game against Australia, Moonsamy recalled, had been a hair-raising ordeal in terms of their professional obligation to keep the president alive. But in sporting terms the game had left them cold.
“After the final whistle went, the white guys were going nuts! We were just looking at them, chuckling, baffled. We did not understand the game, were not interested in it, we were unimpressed. The Springboks were still their team, not ours.” Moonsamy said Mandela’s campaign to de-demonize the Springboks had made an impact on him, but he had yet to move from indifference to outright support. His evolution, together with the rest of the black PPU members, over the four weeks of the World Cup mirrored the evolution black South Africans underwent in their relationship with the old green-and-gold enemy.
“After the Springbok team won its second game, we started to get a little bit curious,” Moonsamy said, referring to a relatively easy game against Romania. “The excitement of our white colleagues inevitably intrigued us and so we started to ask them questions