Invictus

by John Carlin

  Word reached Mandela’s retinue, by now in a convoy of cars, that they had better wait for things to calm down. It was not the most auspicious start, but prison had taught Mandela patience. His security people told him the wisest course would be to stop the convoy and wait, and he agreed. They chose to park on the city’s outer periphery, in a genteel, politically liberal white suburb called Rondebosch, where lived a young doctor called Desmond Woolf with his wife, Vanessa, and their twin baby boys Daniel and Simon.

  The Woolfs were watching the day’s events on television, with Dr. Woolf ’s mother. Dr. Woolf and his wife belonged to a small, politically sensitive sector of white society that was warmly in favor of Mandela’s release. They had even debated among themselves whether they should go and join the crowds down at the Parade. The question right now, though, was whether Mandela himself would make it. From what they were saying on the television, no one seemed to quite know where he was.

  Suddenly there was a knock at the door. A friend of Vanessa Woolf ’s told them that Mandela was sitting in a car outside their house. “Come on, don’t be ridiculous!” Dr. Woolf said. “No,” said the friend. “He is right here. Come outside, quick!.”

  The couple went out with their two children and Dr. Woolf ’s mother, and before them they saw a line of five parked cars. “And there he was,” as Dr. Woolf would tell it, “sitting in the middle car. We stood . . . and gazed at him in astonishment. The whole world’s attention was focused on him and there he was outside our house, when he was supposed to be somewhere else. And we just stood and watched and he rolled down the window, beckoned us towards him, and said, ‘Please, come over.’ ”

  Dr. Woolf introduced himself and Mandela introduced himself and they shook hands. Dr. Woolf was carrying Simon, who was barely one, and Mandela reached out to touch the child’s hand before asking his father’s permission to pick him up and take him through the open window into the car. “He bounced him on his knee for a while and he asked what his name was. Then he wanted to know why we had called him Simon, whether there was any particular significance in the name. He seemed very pleased to be able to hold a child.” Vanessa Woolf introduced herself and Mandela exchanged Simon for Daniel. Then Dr. Woolf ’s mother came up to say hello, completing the cheerful Sunday afternoon scene.

  Another Rondebosch resident, Morné du Plessis, had also been debating earlier in the day whether to go to the Parade, deciding eventually that yes, he would. One of the most famous people in the crowd—and certainly the most famous white one—to Afrikaners he was something of a god.

  Du Plessis had been captain of the Springboks in the bad old days, as had his father before him. Felix du Plessis led the South African rugby team to four famous victories over New Zealand in 1949, the year after the National Party’s first electoral victory, the one that entrenched apartheid in South African life for the next forty years. Morné, who was also born in 1949, would end up improving on his father’s record, not only inflicting similar punishment on the All Blacks but retiring in 1980 with an international record of eighteen victories in twenty-two games. Under his captaincy South Africa won thirteen matches and lost only twice. He was an Afrikaner national hero during the nine years he played for his country and, as such, the most visible expression of the racial oppression that the green Springbok jersey symbolized for black South Africans. Unlike some of his teammates, he was not blind to it. He never forgot how in really big games in 1974 against the British Lions and in 1976 against the New Zealand All Blacks the few black people in the stadium were, as he put it, “fanatical in their support of the other side.”

  It was thus only partly surprising—Du Plessis was quite possibly the tallest of the tens of thousands of people gathered at the Parade—that a black man, apparently drunk, came up to him that afternoon and told him in abusive language to go away, that this was a ceremony at which he did not belong. “But it wasn’t the guy’s threatening behavior that stayed with me,” Du Plessis said. “It was the fact that immediately another black man admonished him. Then others joined in, angry that he should have treated me that way, and escorted the man away.” They were poor people who spoke in Xhosa, Mandela’s language, but Du Plessis understood that they had the political sophistication to see that the more whites who could be persuaded to join the Mandela release celebrations, the better for everybody.

  Du Plessis was here today because he had a keen sense of the historical significance of this moment and he wanted to be part of it. But the deeper explanation went all the way back to the man who first steered the political course he would take, his father. Felix du Plessis was Springbok captain during the first flush of National Party power, but he was always a supporter of the gentler, more liberal—or, at any rate, less illiberal—United Party, which the National Party had defeated in 1948. He had also fought in the Second World War with the Allies, another factor that set him in opposition to the anti-British, in some cases ambiguously pro-Nazi, Nats. Morné’s mother was an English-speaking white South African, and if anything more decidedly anti-Nat than her husband. This did not mean they favored majority rule. The United Party were against apartheid because they found it to be too crudely racist, but the Du Plessis parents never questioned the fundamental desirability of white power.

  Neither did their son, who was born in the same town as François Pienaar, Vereeniging, a surprising coincidence given that not only did they both end up as Springbok captains but also that exactly five years after Mandela’s release Du Plessis would go on to become manager of Pienaar’s World Cup team. Where the coincidence ended was in the relative political enlightenment of the better-off Du Plessis family, though in truth, politics counted for little more in the young Morné’s life than it did in the young Pienaar’s.

  In 1970, however, Du Plessis came across a man who nudged those faint embers of rebellion his parents had sparked in him. His name was Frederik van Zyl Slabbert. A sociology lecturer at Stellenbosch University, where Du Plessis was studying, Slabbert was a progressive thinker, brilliant academically but notorious in the eyes of the Afrikaner establishment, who also happened to be a good provincial-level rugby player. The combination of the two—a rugby man who was in favor of one-man-one-vote—was startling. Du Plessis made the eye-opening discovery that it was actually possible to admire someone who thought apartheid was wicked.

  If Slabbert gave Du Plessis a gentle nudge, his Springbok debut on a 1971 tour to Australia proved a blunt eye-opener. In sporting terms it was a great success. South Africa beat Australia three times out of three and Du Plessis became an instant hero back home, heralded as rugby’s new bright star. But Morné’s debutant joy was dampened by the hostility of the reception the team received from a broad chunk of the Australian public. “It was staggering to see such ferocity of feeling in people so far away,” he recalled. “The images of those enraged Australian faces, the way they seemed actually to hate us, never left me.”

  A notion was born inside Du Plessis that something was “seriously amiss” in his country. But it was one thing to feel uneasy, quite another to let politics distract him from his rugby career. He never made a stand—as he might have done, to sensational effect—during his nine years as a Springbok star. He never spoke up about his misgivings, or even about his support for the Progressive Federal Party, to which Helen Suzman, Mandela’s old prison visitor belonged and which Slabbert joined, becoming a member of parliament for Rondebosch in the mid-seventies and soon thereafter party leader. Viewed as oddball free-thinkers within the insular little world of white South Africa, the “Progs” were conservative by global standards. Representing what was largely a well-heeled English-speaking constituency, ready to tut-tut the Boers’ rough treatment of the poor blacks but unlikely ever to go into a township to meet them, the PFP nevertheless had the merit of offering a legal public voice opposed to apartheid inside South Africa, as well as a bridge to ease the transition toward the changes that would come later. Slabbert himself would become a critical intermediary in early secret contacts between the government and the ANC in
1987, soon after Mandela’s first prison encounters with Kobie Coetsee.

  Morné du Plessis, brave as he was on the rugby field, did not take any political risks off it. Not till that afternoon of February 11, 1990, at Cape Town’s Parade. He went because he hoped, as Joel Stransky did, that Mandela’s release would heal a country that he had long known to be sick. Stransky watched Mandela’s release on television in a café in France. It was not quite as impressive as turning up at the Parade, but it showed more interest than most of his future Springbok comrades, whose attitude was summed up by one of the team’s giant forwards, Kobus Wiese. Asked much later about his reaction to Mandela’s release, his straightforward reply was, “I wasn’t paying much attention, to be honest.” Yet Stransky felt, as he would recall, “absolutely excited.”

  Stransky’s life was consumed by sports, but not so completely as to prevent him from experiencing two fleeting moments of political awakening. The first clue came following an event of which he would hardly have been aware: the Soweto uprising of 1976 by schoolchildren no older than he. One consequence was that his parents began to suspect that their child’s school might be burned down. “I remember my dad having to go and stand guard at our school at night during the riots and the unrest. I’m not sure whether I knew exactly what was wrong because the grown-ups didn’t really talk about it, but it was very clear to me from that moment on that things were messed up in this country.”

  Stransky’s second clue came during the Springboks’ riot-strewn 1981 tour of New Zealand, when he was fourteen. He realized that there had to be a good reason why half of New Zealand was outraged by his countrymen. Stransky offered the very image of the effect that Arnold Stofile and his fellow ANC anti-rugby campaigners were hoping to have on the white population. By denying them their happy drug, they were rousing them out of their torpor. They were creating the conditions for political change. In some they found a more receptive audience than others. In Stransky they found the perfect response, for he was thrilled when Mandela got out.

  Stransky also suspected that Mandela’s release might be good for his rugby career. He was already recognized as one of the best players in the country. He had become a key player by the age of twenty for Natal Province, one of the four biggest teams in South Africa. Not being the big, powerful, bone-crushing type, he had to be brave and resilient enough to take a pounding from Pienaar-sized rivals a dozen times a game. But Stransky occupied the one position in a rugby team where neither unnatural speed nor unnatural bulk were required—fly half. The equivalent in American football would be the quarterback, the player who dictates play, in whom brains and ball skill are paramount. He also kicked like a dream.

  And he was ambitious. That was why when the South African rugby season ended in October 1989, at the start of spring, he played club rugby in France. The game there was not quite as manically intense as it was in South Africa, but it allowed him to keep in shape over the South African summer so that when the season resumed in April 1990 he could hit the ground running, physically fit and match fit. It worked. After Stransky’s return from France, Natal Province ended up national champions. Mandela’s release would work for him too, in the way he had hoped. For Stransky, a free Mandela meant liberation for the Springboks from the international boycott. Sitting in that French café, he imagined that one day he might play rugby in the colors of his country.

  Mandela had been expected at the Parade at around three in the afternoon, but such was the pandemonium that he eventually made it nearly five hours later, arriving as dusk fell. And, adding to an odd sense of anticlimax that dulled the day’s historic proceedings, he gave a speech that fell short of expectations, failed to stir.

  The next morning, the first on which he had awoken a free man in twenty-seven years and six months, held what would have seemed a stiffer test: a news conference before the world’s press. There were two hundred journalists there, many of them TV news anchors who were household names in their own countries: Peter Jennings, Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw, and their equivalents worldwide. South Africa did not have television when Mandela went to jail. He himself had appeared before a TV camera only once—a one-on-one interview with a British reporter a year before his arrest, in 1961. By 1990, every politician alive had undergone a course on how to handle himself before the cameras. And here was Mandela, who was as famous as he was bereft of experience in the mass media age, about to face the exercise politicians everywhere dreaded, a no-holds-barred news conference. He had no way of knowing what the journalists might ask. And his less than charismatic speech the night before had created doubts as to the quality of his performance this morning. After all, he was seventy-one years old, and had spent almost three decades in prison. How well could he be? How sharp?

  The news conference was held early in the morning at the garden of the official Cape Town residence of the head of South Africa’s Anglican Church, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who until that moment, as the winner of the 1984 Nobel Peace Prize, had been the most visible face of resistance to apartheid around the world. The mansion, in the gabled Cape Dutch style, sat on the steep, thickly wooded foothills of Table Mountain, the monolith whose rectangular outline Mandela would gaze upon across the water from Robben Island. With Mandela the 4.30 a.m. riser it was always an early start: reporters had to be there by 6:30. When he emerged from the house, his wife, Winnie, by his side, the dew still lay on the leaves. Mandela and wife smiled and waved their way down a set of stone steps to the lawn where the press awaited. Tutu, jigging with delight, happy no longer to have to play the part of world’s most prominent anti-apartheid celebrity, led the way. There was just the one jolt, when Mandela stopped at his table and glanced at an artillery of furry cylinders that would be arrayed before him when he sat down. One of his aides whispered something in his ear, to which Mandela responded with a nod and an “Oh, I see . . .” The furry objects were microphones.

  From that moment on it was smooth sailing. He placated his own supporters and fellow leaders in the ANC by restating his symbolic commitment to the armed struggle and to the hoary old ANC policy (soon to be ditched) of nationalizing the country’s mineral wealth. At the same time he signaled his resolve to show strong leadership by taking the bold step of describing President F. W. de Klerk—a twenty-year veteran of apartheid government who had just come to power in yet another whites-only “general” election—as “a man of integrity”; and he reached out reassuringly to white South Africa at every possible opportunity.

  There was an acknowledgment of his kinder jailers—the Christo Brands and the Jack Swarts and the Willem Willemses—when he was asked the big obvious question that had to be asked, whether he felt any bitterness after his twenty-seven and a half years in captivity. He also offered a fleeting but potent recognition of the value prison had played in shaping his political strategy. “Despite the hard times in prison, we had also the opportunity to think about programs . . . and in prison there have been men who are very good, in the sense that they understood our point of view, and they did everything to try and make you as happy as possible. That,” Mandela said, emphatically, as if underlining the sentence as he spoke it, “has wiped out any bitterness that a man could have.”

  Asked what had most surprised him upon reentering the world, he declared that he was “absolutely surprised” by the number of white people who had been on the streets to greet him the day before. Most important of all, Mandela stated that the way to a negotiated solution lay in a simple-sounding formula: reconciling white fears with black aspirations. “The ANC is very much concerned to address the question of the concern Whites have over the demand of one person, one vote,” he said. “They insist on . . . guarantees . . . to ensure that the realization of this demand does not result in the domination of whites by blacks. We understand those feelings and the ANC is concerned to address that problem and to find a solution which will suit both the blacks and whites of this country.”

  Hearing in public those words that he had heard so often in private, Niël Barnard heaved a sigh of relief
. This was not the language of insurrection. This was not an Ayatollah smashing fists into people’s mouths. When the press conference ended, forty-five minutes after it had begun, all the earlier anxieties seemed absurdly misplaced. Mandela had transformed what had been advertised as his first public grilling into the balmy outdoor equivalent of a cozy fireside chat. He had planted the seed of a notion among some white South Africans that a black man might be capable of touching their hearts. François Pienaar, still far from a political animal, found himself surprisingly moved by the sight of Mandela on TV. “I cannot recall any emotion other than sadness,” he told me. “I felt sad that he had been in jail for so long and, although his face brimmed with pride, I felt that he had lost so much time.”

  Other white television viewers would have been less sympathetic, and many would have snarled. A significant chunk of right-wing opinion held that the white establishment had made a mistake not to hang Mandela, whose influence as a source of inspiration to black revolutionaries had endured throughout his captivity. Such people watched Mandela’s release on television and felt only bitterness and contempt toward De Klerk and what they perceived as his traitorous government for selling out white South Africa, for releasing the terrorist in chief onto the streets.