Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation by John Carlin Page B
Authors: John Carlin
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home, most of whom had some history of animosity toward one another. Mandela, whom everybody knew to be a Xhosa of the royal house, ultimately won over ninety percent of all black South Africans.
Bekebeke’s second defining memory was sealed when he was ten. He heard about a black man who had been arguing with a white policeman. The dispute grew more and more heated until the policeman pulled out his gun and shot the black man, who, as he fell, thrust at the policeman with a knife and stabbed him to death. Justice didn’t know the black man, but the story had the force of a parable on him. “I adored that man,” he blazed, recapturing the mood of his youth, when he told the story much later. “I hero-worshiped him for standing up to the white policeman, for fighting back.”
If that memory suggests the challenge Mandela would face in persuading his people to accept a negotiated end to apartheid, Justice’s third great childhood memory illustrated how tough it would be to persuade them to support the Springboks. It concerned a rugby game in Upington in 1970, also in his tenth year.
Like most black children, he had little interest in the game. It was the brutish, alien pastime of a brutish, alien people. But this time curiosity, and the prospect of gloating over a rare defeat for his white neighbors, urged him on to the local rugby stadium. The New Zealand rugby team was on a tour of South Africa and had come to Upington to play against the big provincial team, North West Cape. The stadium was small, with a capacity of nine thousand, and space—where the sun beat hardest—for only a few hundred blacks. But Justice went along, trusting that the local team, the pride of Afrikaner Upington, would receive a good drubbing.
The Afrikaners, of Dutch descent mostly, speaking a language that most modern Dutch people could understand, made up 65 percent of South Africa’s five million white people. The other 35 percent spoke English at home, were of mostly British descent (though there were a number of Portuguese, Greeks, and Lithuanian Jews), and were dominant in the business world, especially big business—which in South Africa meant the gold, diamond, and platinum mines. But in terms of political power, the Afrikaners ruled supreme. They ran the state—every cabinet minister, every army general, every police general, every senior intelligence officer was an Afrikaner—and they owned and farmed the land. So complete was the association between the Afrikaners and the land that the word “Boer,” meaning “farmer” in Afrikaans, was almost synonymous in practice with Afrikaner. This was hardly surprising given that 50,000 white farmers owned twelve times as much arable and grazing land as the country’s 14 million rural blacks.
As keepers of the food and the guns, the Afrikaners were the protectors of the rest of white South Africa. Or, as P. W. Botha put it once, “The security and happiness of all minority groups in South Africa depend on the Afrikaner. Whether they are English, or German, or Portuguese, or Italian-speaking, or even Jewish-speaking, makes no difference.”
Botha was heavy-handed but he was right. The Afrikaners were apartheid’s lords and protectors. That was why young Justice cheered like mad that day for the New Zealanders, an all-white team known, to the young Justice’s confusion and delight, as the All Blacks (their name comes from their entirely black uniforms). He had plenty to cheer about. Marshaled by a bald, stocky player named Sid Going, the visitors thrashed North West Cape 26-3. Justice, summoning up the childhood memory, rubbed his hands with glee at the manner in which the New Zealanders “murdered” the Upington Boers; those overfed giants who humiliated him, his family, and his friends every day, who insisted always on black people addressing them as “baas.” From that day on, Justice became a rugby fan, if only in the limited, strictly vindictive sort of way that millions
Bekebeke’s second defining memory was sealed when he was ten. He heard about a black man who had been arguing with a white policeman. The dispute grew more and more heated until the policeman pulled out his gun and shot the black man, who, as he fell, thrust at the policeman with a knife and stabbed him to death. Justice didn’t know the black man, but the story had the force of a parable on him. “I adored that man,” he blazed, recapturing the mood of his youth, when he told the story much later. “I hero-worshiped him for standing up to the white policeman, for fighting back.”
If that memory suggests the challenge Mandela would face in persuading his people to accept a negotiated end to apartheid, Justice’s third great childhood memory illustrated how tough it would be to persuade them to support the Springboks. It concerned a rugby game in Upington in 1970, also in his tenth year.
Like most black children, he had little interest in the game. It was the brutish, alien pastime of a brutish, alien people. But this time curiosity, and the prospect of gloating over a rare defeat for his white neighbors, urged him on to the local rugby stadium. The New Zealand rugby team was on a tour of South Africa and had come to Upington to play against the big provincial team, North West Cape. The stadium was small, with a capacity of nine thousand, and space—where the sun beat hardest—for only a few hundred blacks. But Justice went along, trusting that the local team, the pride of Afrikaner Upington, would receive a good drubbing.
The Afrikaners, of Dutch descent mostly, speaking a language that most modern Dutch people could understand, made up 65 percent of South Africa’s five million white people. The other 35 percent spoke English at home, were of mostly British descent (though there were a number of Portuguese, Greeks, and Lithuanian Jews), and were dominant in the business world, especially big business—which in South Africa meant the gold, diamond, and platinum mines. But in terms of political power, the Afrikaners ruled supreme. They ran the state—every cabinet minister, every army general, every police general, every senior intelligence officer was an Afrikaner—and they owned and farmed the land. So complete was the association between the Afrikaners and the land that the word “Boer,” meaning “farmer” in Afrikaans, was almost synonymous in practice with Afrikaner. This was hardly surprising given that 50,000 white farmers owned twelve times as much arable and grazing land as the country’s 14 million rural blacks.
As keepers of the food and the guns, the Afrikaners were the protectors of the rest of white South Africa. Or, as P. W. Botha put it once, “The security and happiness of all minority groups in South Africa depend on the Afrikaner. Whether they are English, or German, or Portuguese, or Italian-speaking, or even Jewish-speaking, makes no difference.”
Botha was heavy-handed but he was right. The Afrikaners were apartheid’s lords and protectors. That was why young Justice cheered like mad that day for the New Zealanders, an all-white team known, to the young Justice’s confusion and delight, as the All Blacks (their name comes from their entirely black uniforms). He had plenty to cheer about. Marshaled by a bald, stocky player named Sid Going, the visitors thrashed North West Cape 26-3. Justice, summoning up the childhood memory, rubbed his hands with glee at the manner in which the New Zealanders “murdered” the Upington Boers; those overfed giants who humiliated him, his family, and his friends every day, who insisted always on black people addressing them as “baas.” From that day on, Justice became a rugby fan, if only in the limited, strictly vindictive sort of way that millions
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