by John Carlin
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 Viljoens 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 Johannesburgs 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 Africas political changes. They gently prodded their listenersespecially the white onestoward a more generous attitude to South Africas 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 well have to too. Well 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 naďve interrogator to Robbies 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 now but would be catching the train home soon enough. Moyane told Robbie that this was not a song designed, in his view, for heavily produced choral arrangements. I felt it as a song to be sung with gusto, with go-for-it street passion, with heart and guts. So Robbie said, Okay, why dont you sing it then, Dan? Show us how its done. And Dan Moyane did. He belted out a couple of bars. It was the first time Id ever sung like that on air, and within seconds the telephone lines into the studio were red-hot. Both black and white people were calling in saying theyd loved it.
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. Moyanes 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 peopleor people close to them, at any ratehad tortured and killed. But then I also thought what a gesture on these peoples 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 Britains 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 Mandelas 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 1FIll never forget it, said Kay. The moment he saw me he stood up. I said, No, please, but he insisted and he stood up and greeted me and shook my hand. It never, ever happened to me before or since with a passenger. For me it was transforming. The courtesy and respect of his gesture. He had floored Kobie Coetsee and Niël Barnard at first sight, as he would General Viljoen. But those men had had some political preconditioning, some notion of what to expect. With Captain Kay, he was writing on a blank page. Yet the effect, again, was automatic. He stood up and I was in his pocket. I had reckoned he was a different kind of man. Until then he was another black face and name who may have been a threat to my way of life. I was exposed to the Afrikaans mentality, and that, while I thought little about politics, was what shaped me.
Often enough Mandela was charming for charms sake. Quite often, too, he sought to receive something in exchange. Sometimes it was purely personal; other times it was political. This time Mandela had a specific favor to ask. He explained that the rest of his delegation were in economy and he wished to see if they could be upgraded. Kay did not hesitate. I immediately gave the order that they be taken upstairs to First.
Mandela had obviously manipulated him. Yet Kays understanding that this had been the case in no way tempered his admiration, partly because, as he said, You should see some of the cold, supercilious, arrogant types you get in first class! But it went deeper. From that day on I changed forever. Hes a magician, no doubt about it. In my mind there is an aura ab
out certain people. Eugene Terreblanche: I walked out to an airplane alongside him once. He had an aura of evil. Mandela has an aura of goodness.
Kays and Mandelas paths collided one more timeor they very nearly didon the day of the Rugby World Cup final.
South African Airways had begun conversations with the rugby union a few weeks earlier to see if there was some way they might extract some marketing advantage from the big event. At first, discussions centered around the notion of getting a small radio-controlled plane with the SAA colors to flyover the stadium. But as the talks progressed the plans became more ambitious, until Kay received a call from an SAA executive asking him if he might be persuaded to fly a 747 jumbo jet on the afternoon of the final match with the words Go Bokke (the Afrikaans plural) painted on the planes underbelly. Kay did not think twice about it. If Mandela had been preparing all his life for this moment, so had he. Not only was he the airlines most experienced 747 pilot, he had spent thirty years as a stunt flyer. He did air acrobatics shows and had even done a turn once in a film starring the Hong Kong martial arts actor Jackie Chan.
The difference this time was that it was not only himself he would be exposing to grave danger. Nor only the 62,000 people inside the stadium but countless more outside. For Ellis Park sat inside the Johannesburg city bowl. All around were residential buildings and office towers.
Laurie Kay spent the week before the final diligently preparing for what would be the most outrageous flyover in history. He, the civil aviation people, and the city authorities, now under the command of the new provincial premier, the charismatic former Robben Islander Tokyo Sexwale, held numerous meetings during the week before the final. We installed a military air traffic control center on the roof of Ellis Park and declared the sky for five nautical miles around the stadium sterile, meaning it was a no-fly zone, on the day of the match, Kay said. He and his colleagues at South African Airlines also had to confer with the SABC, who were broadcasting the event live around the world, to make sure that the flyover occurred at precisely the right moment for maximum TV exposure. They said they wanted me to fly past at exactly 2.32 p.m. and 45 seconds. That was doable. But then they said I had to fly over a second time within ninety seconds. This stumped me, because I did not know if I could maneuver a plane so big so quickly. But I practiced on the simulator and I found that, yes, I could do it.
But there was no program on the simulator that could prepare him for the particular maneuver he had in mind. He had to go out and do some old-fashioned field work. I spent a lot of time on the roof of Ellis Park and on the hills overlooking it to judge the best approach and to get a sense of what the fans would see. Ellis Park is in a depression and difficult to approach. I could see it was going to require an aggressive bit of flying.
There was something of the Wild West about South Africa at that time. With so much radical change under way, the place felt recklessly alive with possibility. It was in such a spirit that Laurie Kay approached the most perilous professional challenge of his life.
The Civil Aviation Authority has rules for flying over built-up areas and public gatherings. I believe the minimum altitude is two thousand feet. Well, obviously, these regulations had been momentarily waived. It was up to me to decide how low to go. Kay and his copilot and engineer took off and headed, like a Second World War bomber crew, toward their target.
We were three guys in the cockpit but as we prepared for our final approach I said, Okay, guys. Ill take full responsibility now. Because it was no good flying on an occasion like this so high they could hardly hear you. So I came down at a low angle to make sure that the words underneath could be read by the spectators, flying at the slowest speed possible short of a stall. At 140 knots. I went slow so that we could generate maximum power to climb once we were over the stadium. So when we got thereour time over target was between two and three secondswe revved up the engines, we really opened up to their maximum sound and thrust so as to put as much noise and as much energy into the stadium as we possibly could.
Kay flew so low he would have been jailed if the CAA hadnt agreed to suspend the rules. He flew only two hundred feet above the stadiums highest seatsthe same distance as the planes wingspan. And we made it back in time nicely, for the second flypast, inside eighty seconds, said Kay, modestly adding, We had factors in our favor. Visibility was terrific. No wind. But above all I wanted us to send a message down to the stadium, that we were strong and we were going to win. And so, yes, we emptied all the power we could muster into the stadium.
The first reaction of the crowd, most of whom did not see the plane coming, was sheer terror. It was as if a huge bomb had gone off inside the stadium. The impact of the Boeing 747s four screaming engines deafened every person in the stadium, making its walls vibrate. Louis Luyt was up in the presidential suite at the time, with Mandela next to him.
How I jumped! Luyt exclaimed. And Mandela jumped too! As did everyone in the stadium. The bastard! grinned Luyt, referring to Captain Kay. He never told us he was going to fly that low. At two hundred feet! I got such a scare! He could so easily have touched the top of the stadium.
Surprise and shock gave way to thunderous elation. That power Captain Kay emptied into the stadium electrified every soul present, and kept the crowd purring right to the games end. But that was nothing compared to the impact of act three of the pregame show.
Five minutes before kickoff, Nelson Mandela stepped out onto the field to shake hands with the players. He was wearing the green Springbok cap and the green Springbok jersey, buttoned up to the top. When they caught sight of him, the crowd seemed to go dead still. It was as if they could not believe what their eyes were seeing, said Luyt. Then a chant began, low at first, but rising quickly in volume and intensity.
Morné du Plessis caught it as he emerged out of the dressing room and down the players tunnel onto the field. I walked out into this bright, harsh winter sunlight and at first I could not make out what was going on, what the people were chanting, why there was so much excitement before the players had even gone out onto the field. Then I made out the words. This crowd of white people, of Afrikaners, as one man, as one nation, they were chanting, Nel-son! Nel-son! Nel-son! Over and over, Nel-son! Nel-son! and, well, it was just . . . The big rugby mans eyes filled with tears as he struggled to find the words to fit the moment. I dont think, he continued, I dont think Ill ever experience a moment like that again. It was a moment of magic, a moment of wonder. It was the moment I realized that there really was a chance this country could work. This man was showing that he could forgive, totally, and now theywhite South Africa, rugby white South Africathey showed in that response to him that they too wanted to give back, and that was how they did it, chanting, Nelson! Nelson! It was awe-some. It was fairy-tale stuff! It was Sir Galahad: my strength is the strength of ten because my heart is pure.
Then I looked at Mandela there in the green jersey, waving the cap in the air, waving and waving it, wearing that big, wide, special smile of his. He was so happy. He was the image of happiness. He laughed and he laughed and I thought, if only we have made him happy for this one moment, that is enough.
Rory Steyn, one of the members of Mandelas presidential bodyguard, also had a front-row seat. He had been deployed as head of security for the All Blacks, which meant he was down on the field with them, by their bench. Mandela, in that single act of generosity, he carried the entire South Africa into one new nation, said Steyn, a former security policeman whose business for years had been to persecute the ANC and its allies. The message from the black population was one we received with gratitude and relief. We share in your elation, they were saying; we forgive you for the past.
With forgiveness came atonement. That was also what the cries of Nelson! Nelson! meant. In paying homage to the man whose prison sentence had been a metaphor for the bondage of black South Africa, t
hey were acknowledging their sin, uncorking their bottled-up guilt.
Linga Moonsamy, standing one step behind Mandela on the grass, drinking it all in, experienced an attack of sensory overload. On the one hand, he was tasting the dream to which he had dedicated his life as a young ANC fighter; on the other, he had a cold-eyed mission to fulfill. There I was, stuck almost to his back, and there was this roar and the cries of Nelson! Nelson! and even though I felt so emotional, more deeply moved than I had ever been in my life, I was also doing a job, I was on full alert, scanning the crowd. And then over to the right-hand corner of the grounds I saw some old South African flags being waved and that caused a totally contrary response in me. The sight sent a chill down my spine. It was a sudden and alarming security alert. I knew we had to keep an eye on that sector of the crowd and I made a note of mentioning it as soon as I could to the rest of the team. Yet I was so torn, because I was absolutely blown away by the understanding of what it meant politically.
The symbolism at play was mind-boggling. For decades Mandela had stood for everything white South Africans most feared; the Springbok jersey had been the symbol, for even longer, of everything black South Africans most hated. Now suddenly, before the eyes of the whole of South Africa, and much of the world, the two negative symbols had merged to create a new one that was positive, constructive, and good. Mandela had wrought the transformation, becoming the embodiment not of hate and fear, but generosity and love.