Madiba: the man who made friends of his enemies

Posted on | January 24, 2010 | 3 Comments

While spending time in his country last week, my South African colleague, Tim Ellis, recommended that I read Invictus: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation. Originally published as ‘Playing the Enemy’, it has been re-released to coincide with the imminent arrival of film of the book. I bought the book in Cape Town Airport, had read half of it by the time I landed in Johannesburg, and read the rest within the first couple of hours of the flight north to Amsterdam. It is an amazing book!

Don’t let the film tie-in aspect put you off: this is a quite superb book that lays out the incredible and precarious process by which Nelson Mandela was able to create a single nation called South Africa. A central element in the success of that miraculous achievement was the South African success in the Rugby World Cup in 1995. Anyone who doubts the centrality of this great sporting event in the foundation of the Rainbow Nation, and of Nelson Mandela’s brilliance in using it to win the hearts and support of the Afrikaaners for the new nation, needs to read John Carlin’s book.

Carlin, who served as the Independent’s chief journalist in South Africa for many years, and who became a good friend of Mandela, has based this book on a large number of interviews he held with many of the key players in the process by which Apartheid was finally ended: those in the ANC, in the governments of Botha and DeKlerk, in the right-wing groups who came so close to instigating full-out civil war, and so many others. From all of these people, the one thing that emerges from every single account is the humanity, warmth, humility, good humour and patience of Mandela in his quest, not only to free the black people of South Africa from the crude iniquities of Apartheid, but also to free those who, whether by omission or commission, did so much to maintain the horrible system from their own fears, suspicions and misgivings about the consequences for them of black majority rule in the country.

At any stage in the process, Mandela could have chosen the path of revenge. Instead, one by one, he met and beguiled each of the central apologists for minority rule with his warmth and humanity, and persuaded each of them of his genuine intention to pull all the disparate fragments of their badly-splintered country into a more or less united nation. He succeeded, of course, and the part played in this extended drama by Mandela’s embrace of rugby, the Afrikaaners’ ‘other religion’, is rendered here by Carlin as a wonderful, suspenseful, fraught narrative. Mandela’s relationship with the big South African rugby captain, Francois Pienaar, is particularly heartwarming, and you can hear Pienaar’s evident love and admiration for Madiba in the video above.

Don’t wait for the film – read the book!

Technorati Tags: invictus, mandela, apartheid, rugby

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