Books
Rugby, 5 Apartheid, 0
Published 04 September 2008
Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game that Made a Nation
John Carlin
Atlantic Books, 288pp, £18.99
Sport - what is it good for? Is it a distraction from the process of reflection and political action? A representation of the most obviously admirable in collaborative and individual endeavour? Or something in between? Whatever you may think, there is no doubt that the 1995 Rugby World Cup was an extraordinary example of its ability to seep into the consciousness of a nation.
The tournament was held in a South Africa on the brink of catastrophically violent disorder. A year previously, the country's first all-race elections had voted the ANC into power and led to the creation of a government of national unity. The newly elected President Mandela's philosophy was one of reconciliation, and yet a significant number of white right-wingers had not yet embraced the idea of one person, one vote. Worse still, nearly 100,000 Boers were - according to their leader, General Constand Viljoen - building a "massive military capability" in preparation for a "bloody conflict" and the establishment of a Boerestaat, or independent Afrikaner homeland within South Africa.
"Don't address their brains. Address their hearts," was Mandela's response, and central to this strategy was the use of rugby, the "opium of the Boer", as an instrument of political persuasion. "Up to now," he said, "rugby has been the application of apartheid in the sports field. But now things are changing, we must use sport for the purpose of nation-building and promoting all the ideas we think will lead to peace and stability in the country." During apartheid, the ANC had encouraged an international boycott of South African rugby. Now, to this new end, Mandela embraced the white man's game and offered public support to the national team - and that diehard emblem of the white supremacists - the Springboks.
The result of this unique approach was a tournament in which the once-hated 'Boks enjoying an unprecedented level of popular support among black South Africans, the mainly Afri kaner crowds embracing the anthem and the flag of the new South Africa, and the unlikely spiking of the politically outclassed Viljoen's guns.
This is an amazing story. It is told through the first-person testimony of a stupendous cast of characters. Carlin has done his research and clearly knows his subject. There are many eyebrow-raising moments, too, not least when he writes of Mandela's displeasure at the sharing of the Nobel Peace Prize with the former president F W de Klerk. Yet there are also many faults within the narrative.
First there are the lessons Carlin draws from the story. The events he describes lead to the final of the tournament, and with that the book ends. In purely sporting terms, the final was anticlimactic - South Africa winning a scrappy game by three points - and so is the analysis. There is no word of the legacy of Mandela's efforts. Was the remarkable transformation of white, rugby-playing and black, rugby-hating South Africans and the rapprochement between the two a phenomenon that began and ended with the tournament? Or was it one that would endure? How much of it was due to Mandela's charisma and will, and how much to a significant cultural volte-face? There is no mention, for example, of Geo Cronje, a white Springbok expelled from the 2003 World Cup squad for refusing to share a hotel room with a black team-mate, or the subsequent shitstorm of prevarication and racial suspicion that this provoked.
Second, there is the inconsistency of some of Carlin's observations. When we are introduced to Francois Pienaar, the Springbok skipper, Pienaar says "we were a typical . . . working-class Afrikaner family''. Later, however, the author places him in the "large rump of middle-class white South Africa".
Carlin also informs us that the Pan-Africanist Congress, the theoretically radical black consciousness movement which promised "one settler, one bullet" and polled only 1 per cent in the 1994 election, was "South Africa's Hamas". This is a poor analogy.
Then there is the prose style. The "fresh memory" of a thwarted Springbok tour of New Zea land "injected an added vitality into the hammy forearms of the Afrikaner riot police as they thumped their truncheons down on the heads of their black victims". Rugby is "like a giant chess match played at speed, with great violence". Boer rugby watchers are twice reduced to "drink-sodden", shorts-wearing, boerewors-munching caricatures.
It is sometimes difficult to tell whether the writing in this book is aimed at the political animal, the sports fan or a combination of the two. Here, prior to his release, Mandela has been moved to a house inside the grounds of a prison and has been meeting regularly with General Willie Willemse, the head of the South African Prison Service:
As he dressed up for a night out at the home of that nice Willemse couple, as he messed about with his microwave oven, discussed wine with his butler, splashed in his pool, and admired the view from his garden, the most powerful men in the country - the very ones with whom he would sit and sip those genteel cups of tea - would sneak out of the back door and put on their vampire suits, venting the furies on the people Mandela had dedicated his life to setting free.
If the image of those "vampire suits" boils your potatoes, then this is the book you should choose to tell you this extraordinary story.
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