During the the climactic last few years of the African National Congress's
struggle for power in South Africa, some journalists simply attached
themselves to the ANC and reported the story with their men as heroes and
everyone else (FW de Klerk, the Inkatha party, liberals) as the baddies or
irrelevant. This had the advantage of giving great access to the ANC side
and, in one case, led it to nominate one such journalist, Alistair Sparks,
on its election list. John Carlin was among these “movement journalists”,
but he left South Africa shortly after the ANC's accession to power in 1994
- which spared him the agonising reappraisal in store for those who stayed
on; yesteryear's heroes transmuted so quickly into something a great deal
less attractive that some people wondered whether they hadn't been
misdescribed in the first place.
Carlin has now written a book ostensibly about the 1995 rugby World Cup final
in which Nelson Mandela famously sported a No6 Springbok shirt (aping that
worn by the Springbok captain, Francois Pienaar) as he cheered the team on
to victory on their home turf against the mighty All Blacks, who had
trampled all opposition until then. It was a famous victory, not just
because the Springboks beat the stronger team but because of the way,
following the president's example, black South Africans embraced their own
team for the first time (under apartheid it had been normal for them to
support all-comers against the Boks). Conversely, Pienaar and his men were
hugely inspired by Mandela and, following their example, white Afrikaners,
delirious with victory, embraced Mandela as their president. Even today, the
occasion is remembered as a great assertion of the notion of the new South
Africa as one nation. We are told that the film rights have already been
sold for this ultimate feel-good story, with Morgan Freeman playing Mandela.
But of course you can't really write a decent book about one game of rugby, so
there are many flashbacks to Mandela's life - especially his jail years -
with thumbnail sketches of all sorts of characters, many of dubious
relevance. The result is a thin, disjointed book. But its greatest weakness
is that it has been written in a time warp. All the judgments and
perceptions are frozen in 1995. Thus we hear early on about “the
miraculousness of [South Africa's] miracle”, that Mandela is
a “political genius”, and how at least he realised his dream that “people in
South Africa would be judged not by the colour of their skin but by the
content of their character”. There was a lot of this hyperbole about in the
mid-1990s, but little is left today now that South African society has been
comprehensively re-racialised under ANC rule; even old-struggle heroes such
as Allan Boesak complain bitterly that racial identity is just as important
for access to jobs and opportunities as it was under apartheid. For the same
reason, nobody now refers to what has happened as a “miracle”, let alone
believes this unhappy state of affairs is the result of anyone's “political
genius”.
This afflicts the entire book. Thus, for example, we are introduced to the Rev
Arnold Stofile as a hero of the anti-apartheid sports boycott. But it is
years since Stofile abandoned “Arnold” for his African name, Makhenkesi, and
rugby fans are more conscious today of how Stofile, as sports minister,
helped his brother Mike into the No2 spot in South African rugby, where he
played the race card on every conceivable occasion even against Coloured
South Africans. A report has recently appeared in which the two Stofiles are
named as responsible for colossal peculation in the eastern Cape when
Makhenkesi was the provincial premier. A book that depicts Stofile in a
heroic light seems almost funny today.
Carlin rightly identifies James Small, the Springbok winger who had to mark
the fearsome Jonah Lomu in the final, as a key character, but he misses the
fact that Small came from probably the toughest, poor white community in the
country, which doubtless contributed to his almost suicidal bravery that
day. Small was a player of genius, a barroom brawler and a troubled soul, as
his subsequent nervous breakdown and marital troubles revealed, but these
complexities are missing from Carlin's account. Similarly, Carlin mentions
that the other Springbok wing, Chester Williams, a Coloured player, later
wrote an autobiography in which he made racial accusations against some of
his team-mates, accusations that they successfully rebutted. But Carlin
fails to understand that by then the racial atmosphere had been so poisoned
(the Springboks even being threatened by the ANC with the loss of their
passports if they didn't select the “right” racial mix), that Williams, then
campaigning to become Springbok coach, felt that his only hope was to play
the race card, no matter how unfairly.
So this is history rewritten as Hollywood feel-good pabulum. It would have
been more honest to admit that Mandela's fine gesture of 1995 stands out as
a brave stroke against the tide, and that its positive impact was tragically
wasted. Its importance today is that it showed South Africans what might
have been and even, just conceivably, what might one day be possible again.
Perhaps all such historical gestures carry their own pathos and
contradictions. Just as Clint Eastwood's two Iwo Jima films were so powerful
precisely because they eschewed the obvious heroics to explore the
contradictory truth and pathos behind the famous flag-raising during the
battle of Iwo Jima in 1945, so an honest book or film about Mandela's noble
gesture would show the contradictory truth - and the tremendous pathos -
that the images of his action carry today. But that would be a different
book entirely.
Playing the Enemy by John Carlin
Atlantic £18.99 pp276
