Playing the Enemy

"John Carlin’s book focuses on this extraordinary sporting event, the Rugby World Cup final in 1995. Rugby was, in South Africa, a game primarily for whites. Some black South Africans played, but it was very much a game dominated by the Afrikaners. I think it’s fair to say that for many Afrikaners the belligerence of rugby matches and the physicality of it was what gave them a sense of themselves: a pugnacious race who pulled off any attempts to undermine them and so on. So it was an unlikely game for Mandela to use as a way of binding the nation together, but he did. He recognized that it meant a lot to Afrikaners and so he embraced it wholeheartedly, not just in a slapdash political way – you know, just turning up for a photograph. He made it perfectly clear that he knew a lot about the game, he turned up at the opening match, he gave a ringing endorsement of the Springboks, the all-white national team – I think there was one player of mixed race, who played some of the games, but not all – basically it was a white team supported by the whites and Mandela endorsed it right at the outset of the tournament and the message went through all South Africa. It’s a tribute too to large numbers of black South Africans who were a little bit skeptical about this whole rugby thing, I mean, why in hell should they back this game of the white man? But they followed Mandela’s lead. I remember listening to this amazing radio broadcast; there was a young black woman on the phone who was saying she’d never been remotely interested in the game and then she turned on the television one day and had a look at the big white men running around, throwing this ball, and she suddenly thought, ‘Yes! This is my nation too.’ And that’s what Mandela pulled off. As with Patti’s book, John’s is a moment in time that is easy to forget now, because race relations remain pretty awkward in South Africa. But they were more awkward than they are now and that rugby tournament, and in particular the final when Mandela turned up wearing the Springbok jersey and embraced the Springbok captain, the imagery of that final did a huge amount to reassure white Africans that South Africa remained their home. It was a very, very important moment."