Rules of the game

Books John Carlin revisits an iconic moment of national unity for post-apartheid South Africa - and details the patience and fortitude of Nelson Mandela, writes Tony Karon.

"That's my president! That's my president!": Nelson Mandela.

John Carlin revisits an iconic moment of national unity for post-apartheid South Africa - and details the patience, fortitude and strategic genius of Nelson Mandela, writes Tony Karon.
Playing the Enemy - Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation John Carlin Atlantic Books Dh120
"The state of the city, the nation or the world can invest a sporting event with dramatic intensity such as is reached in few theatres," the legendary Trinidadian historian, patriot and cricket writer CLR James once wrote. World Cup football matches have triggered wars (El Salvador-Honduras in 1968) or been postponed in order to avoid them (the Sudan-Chad match of last May). The 1956 Olympic water polo clash between Hungary and the Soviet Union, played one month after Soviet tanks crushed a popular uprising in Budapest, was so violent that the water was tinted red with players' blood by the time officials called it off.

The June 24, 1995 Rugby World Cup final between South Africa and Australia was similarly epic, though not because of any enmity between the two countries. The game hosted an iconic moment heralding South Africa's inclusive post-apartheid nationhood: President Nelson Mandela striding onto the field at Ellis Park in a Springbok rugby jersey, erstwhile symbol of the old regime, while the mostly Afrikaans crowd chanted "Nelson, Nelson, Nelson!"  - lionising a man most of them would have gladly seen hang just a few years earlier.

John Carlin's extraordinary new book, Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Changed a Nation, provides a gripping, intimate account of the game, the events preceding it and their deep relevance to Mandela's political project. Carlin served as the South Africa bureau chief for The Independent from 1989 to 1995, during which time he forged a foreign journalist's intimacy with a wide range of key players across the political spectrum. Here he revisits that period, debriefing Mandela, his allies (including one of his bodyguards), key political and military figures in the apartheid establishment and even the rugby players themselves.

South Africa's peaceful transformation is often hailed as a "miracle" attributable entirely to Mandela's idealism and personal capacity for compromise and forgiveness. But Mandela never compromised on his core demand of democratic majority rule, and his genius lay not so much in forgiving his enemies as in disarming and outmanoeuvring them. His achievements, including the transformation consecrated by the famous rugby final, were the result of a clear-eyed political strategy. Today Mandela is often invoked as an exemplar of non-violent change - nowhere more frequently than in the conflict between the Palestinians and Israel, whose partisans love to bemoan the absence of a "Palestinian Mandela", as if such a figure would be more willing than the current Palestinian leadership to accept Israel's terms. But the South African Mandela has always insisted that in Palestine, just as in South Africa, justice is the key to peace and reconciliation.

Playing the Enemy provides an indispensable guide to how this same principle guided Mandela's engagement with the white South African power structure. For all his moral rectitude and inspirational humanity, Mandela never abandoned the principles that had first caused him to take up arms; he took those very principles to the negotiating table and convinced his adversaries that their best interests lay in accepting them. The mark of Mandela's true genius is the fact that he won.

Carlin takes us back to Mandela's days as a prisoner, where he honed his ability to understand and engage those who held power over him. Even at his 1964 trial, Mandela made a point of honouring the Boers' struggle against Britain; he learnt Afrikaans so he could address his jailers in their own language, a shrewd tactic for dealing with a community that felt it had been culturally persecuted by the British Empire. He even acquainted himself with the vicissitudes of rugby, the Afrikaners' secular religion, to put his interlocutors at ease with small talk. Every encounter Carlin documents between Mandela and an Afrikaner - whether intelligence chief Niel Barnard, justice minister Kobie Coetsee, President PW Botha, or rugby captain Francois Pienaar - begins with Mandela offering them tea, pouring it and deploying his considerable personal charm (in Afrikaans, of course).

But apartheid did not end because Mandela was kind or culturally sensitive. It ended because it had called into being its own negation. The fantasy of its architects had been that black people would be present in the cities ("white South Africa") only insofar as their labour was required by white people; otherwise they would live in "national homelands", a series of rural ghettoes known as Bantustans. But the labour needs of an advanced industrial economy made fast nonsense of that fantasy; the black population of South Africa's cities became unmanageably large as early as the late 1940s, and the efforts required to keep blacks in colonial bondage made apartheid inherently unstable. Although the state managed to violently suppress resistance in the early 1960s - when Mandela and the ANC turned to arms - waves of collective action by black students and unionised labour, who looked to the ANC for leadership, put the regime on the defensive. The state retained the military power to smash any challenge, but it could not restore stability. And the cost of its increasingly violent rule was international isolation and sanctions, which slowly weakened the apartheid regime.

The ANC-led campaign of mass action, supported by the armed propaganda of guerrilla strikes, never mustered anything remotely close to sufficient force to compel the regime's surrender, nor were sanctions sufficient to coerce its leaders to concede to the very people they viewed as a mortal threat to their way of life. But the bloody stalemate at the end of the 1980s - with the regime and the ANC unable to destroy each other - offered Mandela an opportunity.

From inside prison, he sought out the leaders of the regime, and began to persuade them that absent a political settlement with the ANC, the future looked bleak for all South Africans. The regime's leaders could see the logic of the argument, but Mandela had mountains to climb to persuade them that only majority rule would suffice to settle the conflict. As Carlin observes, prison had accustomed Mandela to taking the long view; he rejected several offers of release from prison and various power-sharing compromises until the basic principle of majority rule had been agreed upon.

Even after the regime conceded, there was nothing to stop its base of white supporters from making good on their threats to derail the first majority rule election, held in 1994, with a campaign of violence. Carlin interviews General Constand Viljoen, the retired chief of staff of the South African Defense Force, who had organised a clandestine army of 100,000 men. They had announced their willingness to fight by dispatching 400 armed men to sack the venue where the ANC and government negotiators were meeting to discuss a new constitution in June 1993 - the fact that the state security forces guarding the venue declined to stop them underscored the seriousness of the threat.

So, Mandela invited Viljoen to talk. Viljoen remembers saying to Mandela: "I hope you understand how difficult it is for white people to trust that things are going to go right with the ANC in power. I am not sure if you realise it, but this can be stopped." Mandela replied gravely: "Look, General, I know that the military forces you can muster are powerful and well-armed and well-trained; and that they are far more powerful than mine. Militarily we cannot fight you; we cannot win. If, however, you do go to war, you assuredly will not win either, not in the long run. Because, one, the international community will be totally behind us. And, two, we are too many, and you cannot kill us all. So then, what kind of life will there be for your people in this country? My people will go to the bush [revert to guerrilla warfare], the international pressure on you will be enormous and this country will become a living hell for all of us. Is that what you want? No, General, there can be no winners if we go to war."

"This is so," Viljoen replied. "There can be no winner." "And that was it," writes Carlin. Most of Mandela's politicking with the brokers of white power had taken place behind closed doors. He had worked his charm on the key leaders of the Afrikaner regime, but much of the white South African public still viewed him from a sceptical distance. On the eve of the rugby final, the ANC had won its political battle, but had yet to win society over to its narrative.

The match did not come about by accident. Given rugby's centrality to Afrikaner identity, no sanction had irked whites as much as their exclusion from international athletic competition. Mandela had worked hard to persuade his ANC comrades to lift the sport boycott - he wanted to build momentum for the transition by demonstrating to white South Africans that the new, democratic society held dividends for them too.

At Ellis Park, Mandela publicly consecrated the new and inclusive South African nationhood that he had spent his life fighting for. The moss-green, gold-trimmed Springbok jersey had an iconic power that cannot be overstated. Springbok rugby teams were to the old apartheid order what the boxer Max Schmelling was to Hitler - champions whose sporting triumphs affirmed the superiority of their social order. To black South Africans, the Springbok jersey was a symbol of the self-glorifying swagger of their tormentors.

Donning the Springbok jersey was a shrewd and eloquent gesture that spoke to all South Africans. To the white minority, it was an affirmation of their history and culture, and of their place of honour in the new South Africa. To the black majority, it was a demonstration that the old regime and its symbols had lost their power to oppress and wound. It sent a message that with political power came the obligation to embrace those who had relinquished it, and released a pent-up dam of emotion; tens of thousands of Afrikaners in the stadium and millions of South Africans watching on TV let loose a chorus of full-throated affirmation, a public confirmation of the accord forged among political leaders.

Today, South Africans still have plenty to grumble about - the majority of black people remain mired in grinding poverty; violent crime has reached epidemic proportions; racial divides, though no longer legislated, are nonetheless sharp; and the government has been slow to respond to the challenge of saving the lives of more than four million people infected with HIV. But at least they confront these challenges as a nation whose citizens have some sense of shared past and destiny.

The 1995 rugby World Cup, which South Africa won, was the triumphant conclusion of Mandela's hegemonic project of taking political power by successfully establishing his movement's agenda as the national consensus. By convincing white South Africans that they had no reason to fear majority rule, he allowed them to put down their guns and watch rugby. At the end of the game, Mandela walked out on to the field to salute his victorious Boks. One of Carlin's interviewees describes sitting in the stands next to a white South African with tears streaming down his face as he screamed in Afrikaans, "That's my president! That's my president!"

Carlin narrates the moment, captured in close-up on television for an enraptured nation: "As [Springbok captain Francois Pienaar] held the cup, Mandela put on his left hand on his right shoulder and fixed him with a fond gaze, shook his right hand and said, 'Francois, thank you very much for what you have done for our country.' Pienaar, meeting Mandela's eyes, replied, 'No, Mr President. Thank you for what you have done for our country.' "
Tony Karon is a New York-based writer and analyst who blogs at Rootless Cosmopolitan.