Invictus - Carlin [97]
Mandela was not the only black man in an AmaBokoBoko jersey that day. Black people were seen all over South Africa happily sporting the symbol of the old oppressors, as Justice Bekebeke discovered to his bafflement on the morning of the final.
If Mandela had woken up thinking he had the Springboks’ black support in the bag, he had not reckoned on the man he had almost met on Death Row five years earlier. Mandela was worrying about the white bitter-enders, unaware that such a thing as a black bitter-ender existed.
“At the start of the World Cup I was rooting for the All Blacks with as much passion as I had in the old days, when I rooted for them as a child that time they came to Upington,” Bekebeke said. “I was happy we had made the political deal we had with the whites. I accepted that we had to have a power-sharing government for now, with people like De Klerk in cabinet. Fine. I saw all that. I welcomed it. But, ‘Don’t ask me to support the Springboks!’ was my position. I had no intention of budging. I had forgiven enough.”
The puzzling thing for Bekebeke was that there did not seem to be too many other people in Paballelo who shared his view. Not even Selina, his girlfriend, who had stood by him when he was in prison, who had worked to help finance his studies. On paper, she was more politically radical than he was. She belonged not only to the ANC, but to its hard-line ideological ally, the South African Communist Party. Yet she too had gone along with Mandela, abandoned the justified prejudices of a lifetime and chosen to see the Springboks as “our team.” The players might be practically all white, most of them Boers, but she was going to support them in this afternoon’s game with as much patriotic enthusiasm as if they had been all black, like her.
This presented Bekebeke with a dilemma: how to spend the rest of the day. Selina was dead set on watching the game, but he was not sure what he would do. He might do as he had done all his life: support the visiting team in this case, New Zealand. Or maybe he might make an exception this time and simply not care.
“As the morning wore on, as I saw the papers, heard the radio, saw the gathering excitement in my girlfriend, I began to feel torn. A part of me thought it might be best not to watch the damn game. But then, I thought, well, everyone’s going to watch it. My girlfriend is. All my friends are. Even my comrades who were in prison with me. I can’t miss it myself.”
One thing Bekebeke had clear was that he should not watch the game alone with Selina. “I was worried that if we did, we’d get very tense and fight,” he said. “So luckily an opportunity came along to watch the game at the home of some friends. They had organized a braai [a barbecue] for the occasion and so I thought that even if I had to go through this game, there would at least be some compensation in the food.” There were going to be four couples, themselves included, at the braai. The other three men had been in prison with Bekebeke; one of them—Kenneth Khumalo, “Accused Number One”—had been on Death Row with him. This was encouraging news to Bekebeke, sure now that he would not be alone in his doubts about all this Springbok business, confident that Selina’s enthusiasm would stand out in the group. She had gone ahead of him to help with the preparations, and so he arrived on his own, at more or less the time that Mandela was leaving home for the stadium.
“I have never been more astonished in all my life,” Bekebeke said. “The door opens. I go into the house and what do I see? All seven of them, wearing the green Springbok jersey!”
CHAPTER XVII
“NELSON! NELSON!”
June 24, 1995—afternoon
In the sixty minutes between two o’clock, when Mandela arrived at Ellis Park, and three o’clock, when the game began, everything