Invictus - Carlin [98]
The song was called “Shosholoza.” Mandela knew it very well indeed, as did practically every black South African. Originally sung by black migrant workers who traveled from the rural areas of southern Africa to work at the gold mines around Johannesburg, it was a bouncy, high-energy tune that sought to mimic the rhythm of the steam train. “Shosholoza” was sometimes translated as “Make way,” sometimes as “Move forward,” sometimes as “Travel fast.” Whatever else it was, it was dynamic—hugely popular at soccer matches among the sport’s almost exclusively black fans. Mandela used to sing it along with Walter Sisulu and other inmates when they worked at the lime quarry in Robben Island. He had sung it again only four months earlier when he and a hundred former prisoners made a jolly, ceremonial return to the prison. But now, in yet another sign of the accelerated pace of change in South Africa, Louis Luyt’s rugby union had chosen “Shosholoza” as the official World Cup song, and the white fans had cheerfully adopted it as their own.
They needed a bit of help, though, with both the music and the words. They needed, as the Springboks had with “Nkosi Sikelele,” a singing coach. This was where Dan Moyane entered the picture. Moyane was born in Soweto in 1959 and grew up with no interest in rugby whatsoever, “save to register,” as he said, “that it was a symbol of Afrikaner domination.” Following the student riots of 1976, most of his friends either went into exile or into jail. Harassed by the security police, he fled the country, sneaking over the border to Mozambique where in 1979 he joined the ANC. There he worked as a journalist for BBC radio and Reuters, among others, and, having survived the cross-border commando raids General Constand Viljoen’s special forces were launching in the early eighties, he returned home in 1991, a year after the ANC was unbanned. Almost immediately he got a job on Johannesburg’s Radio 702 (where Eddie von Maltitz would later have his phone-in conversion with Mandela), and soon he was cohosting a 6 a.m. to 9 a.m. radio show with an Irish-born former rugby player called John Robbie who had played for the British Lions against the Springboks in 1980. The duo were very popular, and their blend of easy banter and serious political discussion was one of the more palpable contributions that emerged from civil society to help precipitate South Africa’s political changes. They gently prodded their listeners—especially the white ones—toward a more generous attitude to South Africa’s new realities.
The Rugby World Cup gave them plenty to talk about. For Robbie it was a dream come true, an opportunity to reconcile his two passions, rugby and racial reconciliation in South Africa. Moyane was not so sure at first. Shaking off the associations the Springboks triggered in his mind was no easier for him than it was for any other black person. He and Robbie would argue on air about rugby. Until the inaugural game against Australia.
“When I heard Nelson Mandela was going to be there I struggled to believe it,” Moyane said. “But we put on the TV at home and there he was, and my wife said to me, ‘Well, if Mandela is there supporting the Springboks I suppose we’ll have to too. We’ll have to watch this rugby!’ It was an amazing thought, but it was what happened, and I believe the same conversation, or variations on it, were replayed in black households up and down the land.”
Over the next month much of the morning radio show consisted of Moyane playing the naïve interrogator to Robbie’s worldly-wise rugby man. One day they played “Shosholoza” on air, a version that had been recorded recently by the internationally famous all-male South African singing group Ladysmith Black Mambazo. It was beautifully done, but when Robbie asked Moyane for his opinion, he replied that, for him, the spirit of the song ought to be more raw. “It was a song of encouragement, of hope sung by men far away from their families who were working hard