Invictus

by John Carlin

  Table of Contents

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Copyright Page

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  CHAPTER I - BREAKFAST IN HOUGHTON

  CHAPTER II - THE MINISTER OF JUSTICE

  CHAPTER III - SEPARATE AMENITIES

  CHAPTER IV - BAGGING THE CROC

  CHAPTER V - DIFFERENT PLANETS

  CHAPTER VI - AYATOLLAH MANDELA

  CHAPTER VII - THE TIGER KING

  CHAPTER VIII - THE MASK

  CHAPTER IX - THE BITTER-ENDERS

  CHAPTER X - ROMANCING THE GENERAL

  CHAPTER XI - “ADDRESS THEIR HEARTS”

  CHAPTER XII - THE CAPTAIN AND THE PRESIDENT

  CHAPTER XIII - SPRINGBOK SERENADE

  CHAPTER XIV - SILVERMINE

  CHAPTER XV - DOUBTING THOMASES

  CHAPTER XVI - THE NUMBER SIX JERSEY

  CHAPTER XVII - “NELSON! NELSON!”

  CHAPTER XVIII - BLOOD IN THE THROAT

  CHAPTER XIX - LOVE THINE ENEMY

  EPILOGUE

  WHERE ARE THEY NOW?

  Acknowledgements

  A NOTE ON SOURCES

  INDEX

  Invictus

  Out of the night that covers me,

  Black as the Pit from pole to pole,

  I thank whatever gods may be

  For my unconnquerable soul.

  In the fell clutch of circumstance

  I have not winced nor cried aloud.

  Under the bludgeonings of chance

  My head is bloody, but unbowed.

  Beyond this place of wrath and tears

  Looms but the Horror of the shade,

  And yet the menace of the years

  Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

  It matters not how strait the gate,

  How charged with punishments the scroll.

  I am the master of my fate:

  I am the captain of my soul.

  —William Ernest Benley (1849-1903)

  Praise for Invictus

  AWashington PostandFinancial TimesBest Book of the Year One ofThe Independent’s 20 Best Books of the Year

  “This wonderful book describes Mandela’s methodical, improbable and brilliant campaign to reconcile resentful blacks and fearful whites around a sporting event, a game of rugby. . . . There are scenes that will open your tear ducts. . . . If Invictus were not so well written, it would deserve a place among the management tomes and self-help books that dominate business bestseller lists—a guide to leadership that plays to people’s better angels. . . . Don’t wait for the movie.”

  —Bill Keller, The New York Times Book Review

  “I think the way [Carlin] carried out his task in South Africa [in the 1990s] was magnificent. It is easy now for a journalist to criticize everybody, including the government, but in those days you could count journalists with that courage on the fingers of one hand.”

  —Nelson Mandela

  “A triumphant conversion . . . A book that captures both the miracle of South Africa’s transition and the miracle of Mandela the politician. . . . This is not a sports book. It is a portrait of South Africa’s answer to George Washington and it works because Carlin got so close to Mandela and the people Mandela seduced. . . . This is, above all, the book of a great reporter.”

  —Financial Times

  “Mandela’s story never fails to inspire . . . [but John Carlin] is the first to tell the tale through the prism of sport. . . . Carlin brings the story alive. . . . Many writers reveal the nuts and bolts of South Africa’s transformation to non-racial democracy. But few capture the spirit as well as Mr. Carlin.”

  —The Economist

  “One of the best sports books I’ve ever read.”

  —Jim Caple, ESPN

  “If you have any doubts about the political genius of Nelson Mandela, read John Carlin’s engrossing book inspired by a rugby game. . . . The book is a slice of feel-good history. It also is a behind-the-scenes look at Mandela’s tactics in unifying a nation when that seemed impossible.”

  —USA Today

  “Forget rugby: this is an all-knowing portrait of Nelson Mandela by one of the journalists who knows him best.”

  —Financial Times

  “A classic sports-brings-the-community-together story.”

  —The Washington Post

  “[An] absorbing and frequently uplifting tale . . . The book is an imaginative and captivating study of the twentieth century’s greatest African. . . . The magic of Invictus lies in its heart-warming anecdotes. Carlin had access to all the protagonists, including Mandela himself, and he teases some fantastic recollections out of them.”

  —The Christian Science Monitor

  “It’s one of the greatest sports stories of them all—and John Carlin does the perfect job telling it. . . . Carlin . . . is a wonderful and clever storyteller, as anyone who has read his previous work about Real Madrid . . . will probably agree. This is a brilliant and hugely informative read.”

  —BBC

  “This inspiring book captures the power of one person to change a nation, and the redemptive, healing force of sports. Invictus offers a message of tenacity and hope that our society needs now more than ever.”

  —Dave Grossman, author of On Combat and On Killing

  “A stupendously good book.”

  —Irish Examiner

  “The train of events leading up to what has been called South Africa’s epiphany has long been crying out for a multilayered account and it is to John Carlin’s eternal credit that he has written it. This is not so much a sporting volume as a wonderfully crafted and beautifully written work of modern political history.”

  —The Times (London)

  “[A] revelatory examination of Nelson Mandela’s political genius . . . a tight, gripping and powerful book that shines a light on a moment of hope, not just for one nation but the whole world. Given Carlin’s cinematic feel for pace and structure, it’s no surprise to learn that a Hollywood movie is coming soon.”

  —Daily Express (London)

  “This outstanding book is not so much about rugby as about the ability of Mandela to harness the symbolic power of sport. It shows us that sport gains its power not only from the achievements of its players, but also from the dreams of those who watch them.”

  —Daily Telegraph (London)

  “Very few books match the historical sweep and world shaking urgency of this one.”

  —The Independent (London)

  “A fascinating story . . . [an] absorbing account.”

  —Sunday Telegraph (London)

  “[An] excellent book of redemption and forgiveness . . . that depicts how a divided country can be elevated beyond hate and malice to pride and healing.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “A new slant on the familiar but always inspiring saga of Mandela’s rise to power.”

  —Booklist (starred review)

  “Intriguing . . . Nestled within Carlin’s stories are valuable insights into the political genius of Mandela both generally and specifically in his role in converging sport, culture, and politics.”

  —Library Journal

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  INVICTUS

  John Carlin is senior international writer for El País, the world’s leading Spanish-language newspaper, and was formerly the U.S. bureau chief for The Independent on Sunday. He has written for numerous other publications, including The New York Times, Wired, Spin, Condé Nast Traveler, and The Observer (UK).

  FOR MY SON, JAMES NELSON

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  First published in the United States of America as Playing the Enemy by The Penguin Press,

  a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 2008

  Published in Penguin Books as Playing the Enemy 2009

  This edition published s 2009

  Copyright Š John Carlin, 2008

  All rights reserved

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  “Don’t address their brains. Address their hearts.”

  —NELSON MANDELA

  INTRODUCTION

  The first person to whom I proposed doing this book was Nelson Mandela. We met in the living room of his home in Johannesburg in August 2001, two years after he’d retired from the South African presidency. After some sunny banter, at which he excels, and some shared reminiscences about the edgy years of political transition in South Africa, on which I had reported for a British newspaper, I made my pitch.

  Starting off by laying out the broad themes, I put it to him that all societies everywhere aspire, whether they know it or not, to Utopias of some sort. Politicians trade on people’s hopes that heaven on earth is attainable. Since it is not, the lives of nations, like the lives of individuals, are a perpetual struggle in pursuit of dreams. In Mandela’s case, the dream that had sustained him during his twenty-seven years in prison was one he shared with Martin Luther King Jr.: that one day people in his country would be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

  As I spoke, Mandela sat inscrutable as a sphinx, as he always does when the conversation turns serious and he is the listener. You’re not sure, as you blather on, whether he’s paying attention or lost in his own thoughts. But when I quoted King, he nodded with a sharp, lips-pursed, downward jolt of the chin.

  Encouraged, I said that the book I meant to write concerned South Africa’s peaceful transfer of power from white rule to majority rule, from apartheid to democracy; that the book’s span would be ten years, starting with the first political contact he had with the government in 1985 (I got a hint of a nod at that too), while he was still in prison. As for the theme, it was one that would be relevant everywhere conflicts arise from the incomprehension and distrust that goes hand in hand with the species’ congenital tribalism. I meant “tribalism” in the widest sense of the word, as applied to race, religion, nationalism, or politics. George Orwell defined it as that “habit of assuming that human beings can be classified like insects and that whole blocks of millions or tens of millions of people can be confidently labelled ‘good’ or ‘bad.’ ” Nowhere since the fall of Nazism had this dehumanizing habit been institutionalized more thoroughly than in South Africa. Mandela himself had described apartheid as a “moral genocide”—not death camps, but the insidious extermination of a people’s self-respect.

  For that reason, apartheid was the only political system in the world that at the height of the Cold War many countries—the United States, the Soviet Union, Albania, China, France, North Korea, Spain, Cuba—agreed was, the United Nations definition, “a crime against humanity.” Yet from this epic injustice an epic reconciliation arose.

  I pointed out to Mandela that in my journalism work I had met many people striving to make peace in the Middle East, in Latin America, in Africa, in Asia: for these people South Africa was an ideal to which they all aspired. In the “conflict resolution” industry, burgeoning since the end of the Cold War, when local conflicts started erupting all over the globe, the handbook for how to achieve peace by political means was South Africa’s “negotiated revolution,” as someone once called it. No country had ever shepherded itself from tyranny to democracy more ably, and humanely. Much had been written, I acknowledged, about the nuts and bolts of “the South African miracle.” But what was missing, to my mind, was a book about the human factor, about the miraculousness of the miracle. I envisioned an unapologetically positive story that displayed the human animal at its best; a book with a flesh-and-blood hero at its center; a book about a country whose black majority should have been bellowing for revenge but instead, following Mandela’s example, gave the world a lesson in enlightened forgiveness. My book would include an ample cast of characters, black and white, whose stories would convey the living face of South Africa’s great ceremony of redemption. But also, at a time in history when you looked around the world’s leaders and most of those you saw were moral midgets (the sphinx did not flinch at this), my book would be about him. It wouldn’t be a biography, but a story that shone a light on his political genius, on the talent he deployed in winning people to his cause through an appeal to their finer qualities; in drawing out, in Abraham Lincoln’s phrase, the better angels of their nature.

  I said I meant to frame the book around the drama of a particular sporting event. Sport was a powerful mobilizer of mass emotions and shaper of political perceptions. (Another nod, short and sharp.) I gave as examples the Berlin Olympics of 1936, which Hitler used to promote the idea of Aryan superiority, though the black American athlete Jesse Owens upset those plans badly by winning four gold medals; Jackie Robinson, the first black man to play major league baseball, helping set in motion the necessary change of consciousness that would lead to big social changes in America. I mentioned also America’s unexpected ice hockey victory against the Soviet Union in the Winter Olympics of 1980, all the sweeter because it was played on home soil.

  I then reminded Mandela of a phrase he had used a year or two earlier when handing over a lifetime achievement award to the Brazilian soccer star Pelé. He had said, and I read from some notes I had brought, “Sport has the power to change the world. It has the power to inspire, the power to unite people that little else has. . . . It is more powerful than governments in breaking down racial barriers.”

  Finally coming to the point, I told Mandela what the narrative heart of my book would be, why it was that I would need his support. I told him that there had been one sporting occasion that outdid all the ones I had just mentioned, one where all the themes I had been touching on during this conversation had converged; one that had evoked magically the “symphony of brotherhood” of Martin Luther King’s dreams; one event where all Mandela had striven and suffered for during his life converged. I was referring to the final of the—

  Suddenly, his smile lit up the room and, joining his huge hands in happy recognition, he finished the sentence for me: “. . . the 1995 Rugby World Cup!” My own smile confirmed his guess, and he added, “Yes. Yes. Absolutely! I understand exactly the book you have in mind,” he said, in full voice, as if he were not eighty-two but forty years younger. “John, you have my blessing. You have it wholeheartedly.”

  In high spirits, we shook hands, bade each other farewell, and agreed we’d arrange a
nother meeting soon. ln that second interview, with the tape recorder running, he explained how he had first formed an idea of the political power of sport while in prison; how he had used the 1995 Rugby World Cup as an instrument in the grand strategic purpose he set for himself during his five years as South Africa’s first democratically elected president: to reconcile blacks and whites and create the conditions for a lasting peace in a country that barely five years earlier, when he was released from prison, had contained all the conditions for civil war. He told me, often with a chuckle or two, about the trouble he had persuading his own people to back the rugby team, and he spoke with esteem and affection about François Pienaar, the big blond son of apartheid who was the captain of the South African team, the Springboks, and the team manager, another mountainous Afrikaner, Morné du Plessis, whom Mandela described, in a courtly, old-fashioned British way he has, as “an excellent chap.”