Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation by John Carlin Page A

fountains, cinemas, public swimming pools, parks, bus stops, the railway station. Such nonsense, legally required by the Separate Amenities Act of 1953, sometimes generated dark comedy. Should a black woman carrying her “madam’s” white baby travel in the “whites only” or “nonwhites” section of a train? Or would a Japanese visitor who used a “whites only” public toilet be breaking the law? Or what was a bus conductor to do when he ordered a brown-skinned passenger to get off a whites-only bus and the passenger refused, insisting that he was a white man with a deep suntan?
    Often, among the more liberal-minded white set in Cape Town or Johannesburg, these finer points of law were ignored. In places like Upington, deep in the Afrikaner heartland, they were obeyed with Calvinist rigor. Paballelo was poorer, dingier, and more cramped than Upington, but less stifling. There you could escape apartheid’s pettier constraints. You could eat, shop, or sit wherever you pleased. To get to Paballelo from Upington you drove about a mile on the road west toward Namibia, until you reached the municipal slaughterhouse. There you turned left and before you stood a rusting sign that read “Welcome to Paballelo.” The contrast between one place and the other, as always when you crossed over the white world to the black world in South Africa, was staggering, as if you had gone back a century, or stepped straight from suburban Connecticut into Burkina Faso. One was bone-dry, a cramped labyrinth of matchbox houses on a flat expanse of scrub; the other was a man-made oasis of weeping willows, golf-green lawns, lovingly tended rose gardens, and large homes whose owners had not been shy about sucking up the resources of the nearby Orange River. Upington would have been almost gracious, had it been less unnatural, had the greenery not smacked of fake adornment amid the obliterating heat and desert drabness all around, had it not been a place where white people routinely called black people by that most hurtful, shaming of names, “kaffir”—South Africa’s version of “nigger.”
    Three childhood memories had a lasting effect on the man Justice Bekebeke would become. The first dated from early in his childhood when he visited Cape Town with his family. Looking out over the Atlantic Ocean, he spotted a speck of land not far offshore. His father, who was barely literate but knew where he stood politically, told him that this was the place where “our leaders” were. The speck was Robben Island. Justice begged his father for a coin to put into a shoreline telescope so he could catch a glimpse of his leaders. He did not succeed, the island being seven miles away, but he saw the outlines of the buildings where the cells were—enough for him to construct a fantasy in his mind that he had actually been to the island. He went back home and recounted the fantasy as fact, impressing his school friends so much that before he knew it he had acquired the status in Paballelo as a leader himself, as someone from whom his young peers were prepared to take political direction.
    Thanks to that episode, and thanks to the influence of his father, Justice allied himself from an early age with Mandela’s African National Congress rather than with its rival, the more radical Pan Africanist Congress. The PAC was an openly, vengefully racist party that counted “one settler, one bullet” and “throw the whites into the sea” among its slogans, and almost became the dominant force in black politics during the 1960s. The PAC was South Africa’s Hamas.
    Imagine Yassir Arafat convincing Hamas to succumb to his leadership and unite the Palestinian people under the banner of his Fatah party and you have a sense of what Mandela achieved with his own much larger and more tribally disparate constituency. In black South Africa there were Zulus, there were Xhosas, there were Sothos and six other tribal groups, all of whom spoke different languages at