Invictus - Carlin [99]
Soon, local music producers were calling Moyane too. Within ten days he had recorded and produced his own version of “Shosholoza” with a choir from Soweto. “Suddenly I was signing autographs in shops. The song was a smash hit.” All this was astounding enough, but nothing compared with what was to come. A week before the final, after South Africa had beaten France, the World Cup organizers invited him to lead the fans in song at Ellis Park an hour before the game against the All Blacks.
Dan Moyane did not seem, at first sight, like a natural for such a rabble-rousing occasion. Of medium height and trim build, he had soft, round features and a gentleness of manner at odds with the predominant mood and physiognomy of the average white South African rugby fan. Yet he rose to the moment as if to the manner born.
At 2 p.m., he walked out onto the field. Moyane’s version of “Shosholoza” had been blaring from the sound system as fans filtered into the stadium; now they would all sing it together. Moyane walked up to the microphone and asked, “Do you hear me?”
Sixty-two thousand fans bellowed back, “YES!”
“Okay, to make sure you really are hearing me, can we have some silence now?” Ellis Park went suddenly quiet. Then the Zulu words of the song came up on the two big screens at either end of the stadium.
Into the silence, Moyane declared, “We will sing the song to drown the All Blacks out of the stadium!” and a vast cheer went up. First he read the words aloud with the crowd, and then everyone began to sing.
He led the massed ranks of Piet Retief ’s heirs in two full-throated renditions of the Zulu song. “All kinds of emotions and thoughts flooded through my head,” Moyane said. “Images came to my mind of 1976, of my friends being jailed, people I knew who these very people—or people close to them, at any rate—had tortured and killed. But then I also thought what a gesture on these people’s part! They were repaying us for letting them keep the green jersey. This was a black street song, a soccer song, a migrant workers’ song, a prisoners’ song. It was an amazing example of crossing the lines, of hearts changing.”
And of people revving up for a big game. What came next raised the decibel levels even higher. Blame the protagonist of act two of the pregame show, a South African Airways pilot called Laurie Kay.
Born in Johannesburg in 1945, Kay grew up entirely sheltered from the world Dan Moyane inhabited. He was one of those English-speaking white men who, by a quirk of family circumstances that had affected two million others like him, just happened to have ended up living in the southern tip of Africa. Obsessed with flying from his childhood, he joined not the South African Air Force but Britain’s Royal Air Force, not out of any political conviction, but as a matter of practicality. It turned out to be easier for him to get into the RAF. “I am not proud to say it now,” he said, “but the truth is that I was an utterly apolitical white person who voted Nat.”
The first seedlings of a political conscience emerged within Kay shortly after Mandela’s prison release. They were both on an SAA flight from Rio de Janeiro to Cape Town. It was a Boeing 747 and Kay was the captain. “It was my first and last face-to-face encounter with Nelson Mandela. I got a message that he wished to see me. So I stepped out of the cockpit and found that he was with his wife, Winnie. They were on seats 1D and 1F—I’ll never forget it,” said Kay. “The moment he saw me he stood