FOR NELSON MANDELA, SOUTH Africa's first free election in April 1994 was an incomplete triumph. Black votes had brought power, but whites still had enough money and weapons to endanger the fledgling country if they felt alienated from it. As John Ca
rlin explains in this wonderful book, he had one tactic to win them round: rugby.
That South Africa's first patch of common ground might be a rugby field seemed preposterous. Rugby was the secular religion of the Afrikaners, a sport that most blacks considered "the brutish, alien pastime of a brutish, alien people". Now, in an attempt to reassure the defeated minority that they had a rightful place in the new order, Mandela agreed to host the 1995 Rugby World Cup, and set out to transform black South Africans into Springbok fans by lending his personal charisma to the loathed sport.
A caveat is required: the premise that a single rugby game, even a championship game, could heal three centuries of racial division, dispelling accumulated terrors and hatreds, is romantic overstatement. South Africa is still a generation or two from racial reconciliation. But Carlin summons many witnesses, from ardent liberation firebrands to white racist bitter-enders, who testify that the 1995 championship match was a formative moment in the young country's move away from the threat of civil war.
Playing the Enemy begins on the morning of the fateful game, in which the South Africans were underdogs against the All Blacks. Carlin introduces an assortment of characters, some familiar, some obscure, victims and villains of apartheid, all of whom would feel themselves and their country transformed by the day's end. We meet François Pienaar, the Springboks' captain, a 6ft 4in model of Afrikaner manhood who "carried his 240 pounds of muscle with the statuesque ease of Michelangelo's David", and Linga Moonsamy, a former anti-apartheid guerrilla who would be Mandela's main bodyguard that day. We meet Niel Barnard, the former head of the apartheid-era intelligence service, and Justice Bekebeke, who had spent much of his young life on death row for killing a policeman. We meet Desmond Tutu, stranded in San Francisco and looking for a bar that might broadcast the game, and Constand Viljoen, the retired head of the South African Defence Force who became the leader of a white separatist resistance front.
After that overture, the book steps back to its real beginning, in 1985, the year Nelson Mandela – then 21 years into a life sentence for conspiring to overthrow the regime – made his first overture to the white government. It was also the year activists scuttled a planned All Black tour of South Africa – which, along with riots in black townships and a rising chorus of international opprobrium, helped convince realists in the white government that they needed Mandela as much as he needed them.
There are many moving scenes, like the one in which the Springboks set out to learn how to sing the South African national anthem Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika. Or when, on the morning of the climactic match, the rugby captain leads his men from their hotel for a warm-up jog, and four black children selling newspapers recognise them and call out to them by name – adoring fans from the other side of history.
This is, of course, Mandela's book. Carlin portrays him as the master politician, a man who manipulated allies and adversaries alike with the charming calculation of a benign Machiavelli. It is a close call which was the bigger challenge: standing up to the more vengeful impulses of his own movement or winning over the fearful white minority. But he essentially restrained his side by de-fanging the other side. Having read their history and studied their sport, he astonished the Afrikaners by addressing them in their language (learned in prison), but mostly by not hating them. "You don't address their brains," he advised comrades, speaking of the Afrikaners. "You address their hearts."
Mandela was, Carlin demonstrates, "a canny strategist, a talented manipulator of mass sentiment". If Playing the Enemy were not so well written, it would deserve a place among the management tomes that dominate business bestseller lists – a guide to leadership that plays to people's better angels.
Carlin has already sold film rights to Morgan Freeman, who seems born to play Nelson Mandela. Matt Damon is signed up to play the Springbok captain, and Clint Eastwood (a rugby fan) is directing. In those hands, there's a chance the movie will do justice to the story.
The full article contains 774 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
