by Mark Austin
Other things helped. A report came out that radically changed the way football clubs treated their fans, all-seater stadiums became the norm, and through the nineties, hooliganism was hugely reduced – and, of course, Gazza had showed everyone that it was OK to cry. It was quite a tournament. Marco Stin and the BMW only just survived.
If Italia ’90 had consequences beyond what would have been imagined, then the Rugby World Cup in South Africa five years later had an even more dramatic effect.
It is often said that sport and politics should never mix. That’s utter nonsense. Sometimes sport can help shape a country’s politics. And there is no better example of that than in South Africa. First of all, the international sports boycott of that country was one of the most important catalysts for change. Rugby in particular was an essential part of the identity of the apartheid regime’s support base, and denying the country the ability to compete on an international stage was too painful for many in South Africa.
It was, of course, not the reason the country changed so dramatically in the early nineties. That was mainly down to the belated realization among the white leadership that the violent suppression of an overwhelming majority was not only repugnant but also no longer acceptable, practicable or tenable. But the sports boycott hastened that realization, no question about that.
And that wasn’t the end of it. Once the decision had been taken to move to a democratic system of government, sport – and again rugby in particular – played a role of enormous significance.
One sportsman, one shirt and one event were largely responsible. The sportsman was Francois Pienaar, the shirt belonged to him, and the event was the Rugby World Cup final in Johannesburg on the afternoon of 24 June 1995.
I was there, in a seat high in Ellis Park Stadium, which afforded me a privileged view of an event that transcended sport and proved to be an occasion so transformative and emotional that even Hollywood – with all the saccharine romanticism it could throw at it – failed to do it justice.
Nelson Mandela had been president for a year, but South Africa was far from the united rainbow nation he had envisaged. The image of Mandela as a leader of a terrorist organization intent on destroying the power and privilege of the white population still endured for many Afrikaners. Indeed, the potential for white armed resistance to undermine the relatively peaceful transition had not completely receded.
Mandela knew he had work to do. And in the Rugby World Cup he saw the perfect opportunity. But he needed an accomplice.
He identified one in the captain of the South African team, Francois Pienaar, a son of apartheid for whom separatist white attitudes had shaped his thinking when he was growing up.
‘I remember when I heard Nelson Mandela’s name mentioned at barbecues or dinner parties, the word “terrorist” or “bad man” was an umbilical cord almost to his name,’ he once said in an interview with the Observer newspaper.
Anyhow, just a month after becoming president, Mandela invited Pienaar for tea at his office in Pretoria, and set in train a process that was to pay huge dividends the following year. Mandela won over Pienaar in the way he won over most people. Pienaar was putty in the president’s hands.
Less easy was the other part of Mandela’s grand strategy… how to persuade the country’s black population to embrace a sport they all viewed as a much-hated symbol of the apartheid regime.
For them it was very simple. Soccer was the sport of the black townships. Rugby was the sport of the oppressor. And a token ‘coloured’ or mixed-race player in the Springbok line-up was not going to change that. In fact, the likelihood was that it would serve only to reinforce the belief.
The president at first got short shrift at the mere suggestion that blacks should support the Springboks. But somehow, over some months, things changed. He was helped by the willingness of the South African players to learn the words of the new African part of the national anthem, ‘Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika’ (‘God Bless Africa’), and by their realization that they had a huge role to play in helping Mandela unite the country. He also persuaded the Sowetan, the English language newspaper set up to promote the liberation struggle, to back the team, and to urge its readers to set aside suspicion and hatred.
By the time of the final at Ellis Park, Mandela’s work was almost complete. There was just one other thing. Minutes before kick-off, he walked out onto the pitch to shake the players’ hands, wearing the green Springbok shirt given to him by Pienaar. It was a gesture of enormous political bravery and great vision. It was met with a strange silence, as 60,000 overwhelmingly white rugby fans reacted with disbelief. It would soon give way to something quite extraordinary.
A few Afrikaner flags that had been hoisted were rapidly furled, a section of the crowd started chanting ‘Nelson, Nelson, Nelson…!’, and soon the entire stadium was belting it out in unison.
It was the most astonishing moment. Around me, my wife was in tears, Jeremy Thompson’s wife Lynn was in tears, and soon so was I. That much was predictable. What was less expected was that entire rows of burly, unsentimental, Afrikaner rugby diehards were also crying, or fighting desperately hard not to.
Mandela had pulled it off; he’d won over the hardest audience imaginable, and hundreds of millions of people around the world had watched him do it.
At the end of the game, he reappeared to hand over the trophy to his captain and chief collaborator, Francois Pienaar.
‘Francois, thank you very much for what you have done for our country,’ he said.
‘No, Mr President. Thank you for what you have done for our country.’
There were celebrations that night both in the white suburbs and the townships. And that – trust me – is a rarity.
I can’t remember the score; suffice to say South Africa beat New Zealand. It is not the game that mattered in the end; it was everything that went on around it. Sport and politics… sometimes it really is the perfect mix.
The reason I was in South Africa for this historic game was that, just over a year earlier, I had become ITN’s Africa Correspondent based in Johannesburg. One man – Nelson Mandela – was to become a big part of my professional life.
MANDELA
NELSON MANDELA PUSHED open the heavy steel door and ushered me in to the cell that was his home for nearly two decades.
‘You first, Mark,’ he said. ‘After all, I have seen it plenty of times before.’
I walked in ahead of him. It was tiny, barely eight feet wide and seven feet long, with a thin mattress, a hard pillow, a small table and a slop bucket in the corner. Above us was a window with six vertical bars, through which a tall man like Mandela could peer out at the prison courtyard.
‘My God, it’s small,’ I said. ‘How on earth—’
He cut me off. ‘You get used to it, you know.’ He told me there was barely enough room to lie down to sleep. Then he laughed. ‘But it is my fault. I shouldn’t be so tall.’
It was typical Mandela. Dry, funny, self-deprecating, and illustrative of his total lack of bitterness and recrimination.
Mandela had invited me and a camera team to accompany him on a trip back to the prison on Robben Island where he had been incarcerated. And there we were. Mandela and I standing in his cell, chatting away. Just the two of us. I remember thinking to myself how lucky I was. That there are not many jobs like this.
‘Don’t you hate the men who did this to you?’ I asked him.
‘No, no,’ he said. ‘I despised the system, not my jailers.’
Mandela – or Prisoner 46664 (the 466th prisoner to arrive in 1964) − told me that when he and his Africa National Congress comrades landed on Robben Island, a warder’s first words were: ‘This is the island. Here you will die.’
It could have happened like that. It was a gruelling place and a harsh regime. They were forced to crush stones with a hammer to make gravel, and were made to work in a blindingly bright limestone quarry without sunglasses or shade, day in day out.
Mandela not only su
rvived, but the imposing figure standing next to me in that tiny cell in 1994 was now the first black president of South Africa.
To have met Mandela and to have witnessed his role in the transformation of South Africa is one of the great privileges of my lifetime. I was fortunate enough to have interviewed him on many occasions, and I spoke with him privately on many more. Mandela was kind and thoughtful, always seemed to remember your name, and on one occasion saved my professional skin.
When he’d been in office for almost a year, the Queen arrived in South Africa on a state visit. After a reception at Durban City Hall, he took his royal guest on a short walkabout to meet the crowds. My cameraman Andy Rex and I were stuck on the wrong side of the security barriers, and to my horror I noticed the BBC’s royal correspondent Jennie Bond doing a quick interview with a smiling Mandela as they walked along.
This was not at all ideal. How on earth had she got so close to Mandela and the Queen? That was not supposed to happen. I felt a growing sense of panic. I now needed to get an interview of my own, or there would be hell to pay. But how?
It seemed impossible. Andy and I were not even close to them. There was a crowd, five deep, in front of us. We weren’t even remotely in his line of sight, and we were barely within earshot. The crowds were cheering and a military band was playing. As they neared the area where we were stood helplessly, I decided to wave my arms manically and yelled ‘Mr President!’ at the top of my voice. Nothing, not even a glance in our direction.
By now, Mandela was in earnest conversation with Her Majesty (that’s the Queen, not Jennie Bond… The BBC reporter had disappeared with what she no doubt considered to be a well-earned scoop). I pushed my way to the front of the crowd, apologizing as I went, eventually reaching the security ropes. Mandela was about twenty yards away. I resumed the frantic waving and shouting, and finally, mercifully, I caught his eye. I think he must have thought I had temporarily lost my mind. He showed enough concern to come slightly closer and I bellowed a request for a ‘few quick words on this momentous day’. He stopped, realized my predicament and beckoned us through the throng of security men.
‘What the BBC shall have,’ he said, ‘you shall have.’ Short interview secured. Career saved.
I returned to the other side of the security cordon before I realized I had been a few feet from the Queen and had failed to ask her a single question. But that was Mandela for you. Charismatic, warm and, when he wanted to be, considerate.
I relay these personal memories of Mandela because they genuinely do tell you something about the man that he was. They are small moments, trivial details. But even so, they can be every bit as instructive as the grand gestures on the big stage that everyone knows about.
Put simply, Mandela’s ability to put people at ease, to open his heart, even to his enemies, and to make people feel good about themselves was key to the way South Africa was to turn out.
I firmly believe it was the nature of the man that made the new South Africa possible. Without Mandela, without his generosity of spirit and without that precious ability to persuade the country’s black population to set aside all the perfectly natural instincts for vengeance and retribution, the miracle would not have happened when it did or how it did. I am absolutely certain of that.
But it was a close-run thing. When I first arrived in South Africa, a few months before the election, things were very grim indeed. And about to get worse.
I had covered conflicts before, most recently in Bosnia in 1992, but never had I arrived to work, live and set up home with my family in a country where violence and chaos had become the norm. But that was South Africa in early 1994. And in particular, it was Johannesburg in 1994, the city my wife Catherine and one-year-old son Jack would be living in. More than once I questioned what I was doing taking them there.
On our arrival, the turmoil was not immediately obvious. Our flight landed at Jan Smuts Airport − yes, this was still a South Africa that lauded the architects of apartheid. We moved effortlessly through arrivals, hopped into a large four-wheel-drive Land Cruiser and moved comfortably through light traffic until the motorway gave way to the wide, tree-lined avenues of the northern suburbs. This was where people like us – white, affluent and privileged – lived in large houses with extensive gardens, expansive lawns and large blue swimming pools, all neatly nestled behind high security walls, electric gates and barbed wire. Our house, in Dunkeld, was enormous. Six bedrooms for the three of us, and a housemaid and a gardener who both lived on the premises. Welcome to the world of a foreign correspondent in Africa.
What became immediately apparent is what I already knew. There are in fact two South Africas. I say ‘are’ and not ‘were’, because to all intents and purposes, nearly a quarter of a century on from the end of apartheid, there are still two South Africas.
But in early 1994 the difference between them was slightly (yes, only slightly) more pronounced. One South Africa is relatively small and largely white. The other, much bigger and largely black. The first is comfortable, mainly peaceful, relatively prosperous, with modern infrastructure and developed communications. The second is not. It is hideously poor, grossly underdeveloped, with overcrowding, hunger, destitution and violence. And in the early nineties, there was violence like you would not imagine. There were several murders a day, both political and criminal. There was necklacing, where a tyre is put around the neck of the victim and then petrol is poured into it and set alight. There were rapes, robberies, and machete attacks on tribal and political rivals. The police were not only ineffectual, but were often accused of fomenting the violence to give the appearance of chaos. How can these black people run the country if this is what is going on? That was the question the violence was intended to raise in the minds of people inside and outside the country. It was cynical in the extreme.
This South Africa was made up of tribal homelands and townships dotted across the landscape, close enough to the nice, privileged areas to serve the needs of their wealthy inhabitants. But far enough so those inhabitants didn’t have to smell the sewers, or hear the gunfire or the cries of women being raped at knifepoint by gangs of drunken men.
When I arrived in the country, the townships, particularly those to the east of Johannesburg, were engulfed in chaos and murder. The struggle against apartheid was reaching a bloody and dramatic denouement. Nelson Mandela had been released from prison a few years earlier, his African National Congress (ANC) party was no longer a banned organization and South Africa was edging towards the first-ever truly democratic elections. Mandela and the then president, F.W. de Klerk, were deep in negotiations over when and how the transition would happen.
But things were not going well. White extremists and Zulu militants were both threatening to boycott the elections, secede from the new South Africa and plunge the country into civil war. Every day it seemed the news became increasingly bleak. The white right-wingers were blowing up electricity substations and pylons, but by far the worst violence was in the townships, where gun battles and massacres were an all-too-common feature of the intense political rivalry between the ANC and supporters of the Inkatha Freedom Party, led by Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi.
Inkatha began life as a non-political organization designed to preserve Zulu culture and traditions, and initially operated with the full blessing of the ANC. Gradually, however, Buthelezi moved away from the ANC and closer politically to the largely white National Party, who saw an opportunity to fund and arm the group on the premise that ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’. Buthelezi soon made some form of Zulu secession his obsession, and slowly built up a network of fighters and warlords in Natal. The stage was set for a prolonged and deadly war, which would be brutally exploited by elements in the white police force.
Any opportunity to fuel the fighting in the townships was seized upon by the police, and it has long been assumed that rogue units effectively operated as death squads, going on random killing sprees to inflame the conflict that was already costing dozens
of lives every day.
But the violence was principally ‘black on black’, as it became known, and it was not just political in nature. Much of it was criminal, the result of feuds, attempted robberies and street fights. The root cause of most of the murders or serious injuries was, in fact, alcohol. I remember a night spent filming in Soweto’s vast Baragwanath Hospital, where from around midnight the casualties poured in. The vast majority were men with head, neck or back injuries who were wheeled in unconscious and drunk. Quite a lot had gunshot wounds. One Belgian doctor working in the emergency ward told me that he had heard that AK-47 assault rifles could be bought for around twenty dollars. You could organize a ‘hit’ for around thirty dollars more. Guns, drink and lives were all cheap in Soweto.
But, in a sense, even this ‘non-political’ violence had its roots in the politics of South Africa. Decades of oppression and neglect under the apartheid regime had led to poverty, illiteracy and unemployment, all of which contributed to high levels of alcohol and drug use that, in turn, fuelled the high levels of violent crime. It was no surprise to me that the murder rate in South Africa in 1993–94 was the highest it had ever been.
There was a war on. It was just that white South Africans and white visitors were largely immune to it and protected from it. And the worse it got, of course, the more the apartheid government leaders insisted that such chaos disqualified the black majority from any pretence of being able to run the country. Nelson Mandela knew this and knew he had to stop it. But how?
This was the South Africa in which I arrived. A country on the verge of implosion. The peaceful transition to black rule and the emergence of the new rainbow nation envisaged by Mandela looked a distant prospect, despite the continuing negotiations. It was an extraordinary time to be there.
The violence between ANC fighters and Zulu warriors had become so extreme that it was difficult to cover. It was often too dangerous to enter some townships, but sometimes terrible atrocities took place that demanded our attention and coverage.