On the day that Nelson Mandela was released from prison 18 years ago, Morné
du Plessis wondered whether to go to the Grand Parade, the great open square
in Cape Town where the freed man was due to speak to a huge crowd. He
decided eventually that yes, he would.
Du Plessis was quite possibly the tallest of the tens of thousands of people
gathered at the Parade. He was certainly the most famous white person there:
a former captain of the Springboks, the national rugby team, and now their
manager.
He was an Afrikaner national hero during the 10 years he played for his
country and, as such, the most visible expression of the racial oppression
that the green Springbok jersey symbolised for black South Africans. Unlike
some of his teammates, he was not blind to this. But he had kept his views
to himself.
It was thus only partly surprising that a black man, apparently drunk, came up
to him that afternoon at the Parade and told him in abusive language to go
away, that this was a ceremony at which he did not belong. “But it wasn’t
the guy’s threatening behaviour that stayed with me,” du Plessis recalled.
“It was the fact that immediately another black man admonished him. Then
others joined in, angry that he should have treated me that way, and
escorted the man away.”
They were poor people who spoke in Xhosa, Mandela’s language, but du Plessis
understood that they had the political sophistication to see that the more
whites who could be persuaded to join the celebrations, the better for
everybody.
Du Plessis went to the Parade because he hoped Mandela’s release would heal a
country that he had long known to be sick and which in 1990 contained all
the conditions for civil war.
His hopes would be fulfilled – and du Plessis would find he had a part in
Mandela’s plan to use rugby as the healing balm reconciling blacks and
whites under the slogan “One Team, One Country”.
Mandela’s masterstroke was to bring the Rugby World Cup to South Africa,
thrilling Afrikaners who had been starved of top-level rugby because of the
international boycott of the Springboks in the 1980s.
Du Plessis’s act of genius was to persuade the Boks to learn a black
resistance anthem that to many white South Africans was a menacing
expression of the vast black sea that might rise and engulf them.
Afrikaner crowds at Springbok matches had always bellowed out Die Stem, (The
Call), the lugubrious official national anthem, which celebrates the
triumphs of the Boers as they marched northward in the mid-19th century
Great Trek, eating up black-owned land along the way.
Nkosi Sikelele iAfrika (God Bless Africa) was the blacks’ response, the richly
soulful expression of a long-suffering people yearning to be free. It often
triggered the police into violent action when it was sung defiantly in the
apartheid years.
Both songs were potentially political dynamite in the divided country.
Mandela overruled the executive of his African National Congress (ANC) when it
wanted to replace Die Stem with Nkosi Sikelele as the national anthem at a
time when political tensions were high and there were fears of a white
extremist coup.
He told them: “This song that you treat so easily holds the emotions of many
people who you don’t represent yet. With the stroke of a pen, you would take
a decision to destroy the very – the only – basis that we are building upon:
reconciliation.”
The two songs became joint anthems; but at Mandela’s presidential inauguration
in 1994, few white voices sang Nkosi Sikelele. Du Plessis decided that his
men could do better.
He and Mandela shared the same mission impossible: persuading black South
Africans to perform a historical about-face and support the Boks. Mandela
was doing his bit within the ANC, sending word out to his people that now
“they” were “us”. Du Plessis knew that things could go terribly wrong if
before the start of each World Cup game black people were to see the
Springboks singing Die Stem with gusto but making no effort to sing Nkosi
Sikelele.
Du Plessis had not talked politics with any of the players but he had no
reason to believe they were anything but run-of-the-mill voters for the old
National party, which had imposed apartheid for nearly half a century, with
the ignorance and prejudice that entailed.
“We had some real through-and-through Afrikaners there and this [Nkosi
Sikelele] was in Xhosa and it was the language of what, for many white South
Africans, if not most, had been the enemy. It was quite a thing to ask these
guys to sing a song that carried that kind of associations,” he recalled.
Quite a thing, too, to teach them to pronounce the Xhosa words. Only two
players in the team spoke the language. Mark Andrews, 6ft 7in and 17 stone,
had been raised in the rural Eastern Cape, Xhosa country, and he had been
exposed to Mandela’s language from birth. Hennie Le Roux, smaller and faster
and also from that part of the world, spoke some Xhosa too. As for the other
24 players in the squad, not a clue.
Fortunately du Plessis had a friend who could help, a neighbour in Cape Town
called Anne Munnik. She was a trim, attractive, bubbly English-speaking
white woman in her thirties who earned her living teaching Xhosa. She was
staggered when du Plessis suggested she teach the Boks how to sing Nkosi
Sikelele. How would they respond?
Munnik thought about some of their classically guttural Afrikaans names –
Kobus Wiese, Balie Swart, Os du Randt, Ruben Kruger, Hannes Strydom, Joost
van der Westhuizen – and she feared that politically they had to have more
in common with the far right than with the ANC, with Die Stem than with
Nkosi Sikelele. With some misgivings, she agreed to teach them.
An evening was fixed in the third week of May 1995 at the hotel in Cape Town
where the team were staying in preparation for the opening game of the World
Cup against world champions Australia, just days away. Du Plessis, towering
over the choirmistress, introduced her as an old friend. The players reacted
like teenagers. Nudges, winks, knowing nods.
“When Morné said he had been out to my farm a number of times, that was it,”
Munnik recalled. “It was ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’ and giggles and laughter and
innuendos and teasing generally.”
She was keen on rugby but nothing that she had seen on TV had prepared her for
the size of these men in the flesh. Wiese and Strydom were both 6ft 6in and
nearly 18 stone; Swart was 3in shorter but as wide as a barn door.
Munnik handed out song sheets and made them go over the words, repeating the
difficult ones, having a crack at the Xhosa clicking sounds, almost
impossible for people who had not learnt them from birth.
“Then when the time came to sing,” she said, still surprised, years later,
“they did so with great feeling.”
Wiese, Swart and Strydom were naturals. Wiese (pronounced “Veessuh”) was a man
whose sharpness of mind belied his bulk, but whom no one had ever accused of
being a progressive thinker. Mandela’s release, by his own admission, had
left him cold.
He was amazed at how quickly the music of Nkosi Sikelele, the first time he
had ever sung it, swept away all political scruples.
“I’d heard the song before, of course,” he said. “I’d seen those television
images of huge masses of black people marching and singing and dancing
through the streets with sticks and burning tyres; throwing stones and
burning down houses. And you always had Nkosi Sikelele iAfrika playing over
the images. For me, and for just about everyone I knew, that song was
synonymous with ‘swart gevaar’ – the black danger.
“But, you know, I love singing. Always have. And suddenly I found, to my
astonishment, that I was caught up in it; that this song was so lovely.”
François Pienaar, the captain, who had met Mandela and had been entranced,
joined in gamely. But he struggled badly with the pronunciation of the
words, and the song registered in his mind far less – “Few of us even knew
the tune, to be honest” – than it had on the politically unen-lightened
Wiese.
But he was also thinking, as he did always with relentless detail, what the
team did off the field might improve their performance on it. And as he
heard himself and his teammates singing, his rugby brain clicked into
action. He understood that victory in a top-class rugby game was 50%
psychology, and saw a sporting value in the song, beyond the politics.
“I made up my mind right there and then that this was an unexpected plus that
Morné had given us; that it could give us something special going into a
game, if we respected it and felt the energy of it,” Pienaar said, before
adding, with a smile and a shake of the head, “but . . . it’s amazing to
think about. The Afrikaans boys singing that anthem!”
James Small, who modelled clothes when he was not playing rugby, was the bad
boy among the squad. He had been banned from the previous year’s tour to
Britain after a barroom brawl. But, Munnik noticed, no one sang the song
with more feeling than he did. “He was close to tears the whole time,” she
said.
The ordinary South African rugby fan, aware of his off-field shenanigans,
would have struggled to believe it, but his teammates did not. Everybody who
knew him had the sense that he lived perilously close to the edge, that had
it not been for the partial escape valve rugby provided for his overwrought
emotions, he had an uncontrolled, violent personality that could have landed
him behind bars.
He was the first to say so. “I’m so fortunate,” he said. “I was a hard guy, I
could have ended up in prison. I’d go to those rough Johannesburg clubs late
at night. I could easily have taken a bullet.”
There was another reason why he got so emotional when he started singing the
old black anthem. He had felt what it meant to be marginalised. Apartheid
existed within rugby too, among whites.
“I know what it’s like to be on the receiving end too,” he said. “I was an
Englishman playing a Dutchman’s game. When I began in the game at provincial
level I got f***** around badly by the Afrikaner players. I was made not
welcome both by my own team and by the rival. Players in my own team tried
to get their Afrikaner mates ahead of me in the team selection.
“They ostracised me, and I was badly beaten too. At my Springbok initiation,
they f***** me up so badly my dad wanted to report them to the police. The
point was that, for them, it was an Afrikaners’ game and there was no room
for an Englishman. The Englishman was an interloper.
“But I used all that to spur me, and I got my way in the end. I became a
Springbok. Yet the whole experience taught me an appreciation for the
outsider, a sympathy for those in my country who did not have the
opportunities that I’d been so lucky to have.”
This was not how he had felt a year earlier. “As we approached the 1994
elections, I was swept along by the fear so many white people had that it
was going to be chaos and violence and vengeance. That was why I bought a
gun for the first time in my life. I was afraid. And yet, a year later, this
. . . Singing Nkosi Sikelele!
“But it wouldn’t have happened without Morné. He was the one who impressed on
us that we needed to represent South Africa as a collective, that we had to
have a true understanding of being a South African in a South Africa that
was just one year old. It was through him that I understood that learning
Nkosi Sikelele was a part of that.”
Hennie Le Roux, one of the more serious-minded Springboks, applied himself
earnestly to Munnik’s lessons. He was no more political than anyone else on
the team but for him the national imperative to learn Nkosi Sikelele was now
clear.
He had seen it, as other Springboks had, on arrival at their Cape Town hotel a
few days earlier when the mostly black staff came out to greet them in the
lobby. “They were singing songs and dancing and carrying on, just so happy
to see us, so welcoming.
“It was something we had never seen in our careers, black people right there
in front of us, welcoming us with as much excitement as we got from the
wildest white rugby crowds. It was a big moment for all of us.”
Small put it more bluntly. “We looked at each other and thought, ‘F***,
there’s something going on here!’ ” For Le Roux it was the moment he
understood he had to give something back. “If they were so willing to stand
with us the least we could do was make an effort to learn their song.
Remembering those scenes at our arrival when we were there learning the song
made it all so much more moving for me.”
Munnik was about to wrap up the lesson when the huge Wiese, Strydom and Swart
made a request: could they sing the song one more time, just the three of
them?
“I said, ‘Of course!’ And then they began, like three giant choirboys, softly
at first, rising, rising to the high notes. They sang it so, so beautifully!
The other players just stood there with their mouths open. No laughing, no
jokes. They just stood and stared.”
For the big men, singing this song had the power of an epiphany. “That was my
innocent ignorance shattered!” Wiese exclaimed. “When I learnt the words of
that song, doors opened for me. Ever since then, when I hear a whole group
of black people sing Nkosi Sikelele, it’s, like, stunning, man. It’s so
beautiful.”
The team sang Nkosi Sikelele at the opening game against Australia and at
every match as they progressed towards the final. But when it came to the
final against New Zealand, Pienaar was suddenly struck dumb. “I couldn’t
sing the anthem,” he admitted. “I dared not.”
He had been desperate to rise to the occasion, to set an example, not to let
Mandela down. He had rehearsed the scene over and over in his mind. But when
the time came, when the two teams lined up on the side of the pitch before
the game and the band struck up the first strains of Nkosi Sikelele, he
couldn’t open his mouth.
“Because I knew that if I did, I’d fall apart. I’d just crumble, right there.
I was so emotional,” the Springbok captain said, “that I wanted to cry. Sean
Fitzpatrick [the All Black captain] told me later that he looked over and
saw a tear roll down my cheek. But that was nothing compared with what I was
feeling inside.
“It was such a proud moment in my life and I stood there and the whole stadium
was reverberating. And it was just too much. I tried to find my fiancée, to
focus on her, but I couldn’t find her. So I just bit my lip. I bit it so
hard I felt the blood rolling down my throat.”
No matter: South Africa, of course, won the match.
© John Carlin 2008
Extracted from Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game that Made a
Nation by John Carlin, to be published by Grove Atlantic on September 1 at
£18.99. Copies can be ordered for £17.09, including postage, from The Sunday
Times BooksFirst on 0870 165 8585
The rival anthems
Nkosi Sikelele iAfrika
God Bless Africa
May her glory rise high
Hear our pleas
God bless us
Us your children
Come Spirit
Come Holy Spirit
God we ask you to protect our nation
Intervene and end all conflicts
Protect us Protect our nation Let it be so
For ever and ever
Protect us
Protect our nation
Let it be so
For ever and ever
Translated from Xhosa
Die Stem
From the depths of our sea,
Over our eternal mountain ranges
Where the cliffs give answer
Through our far-deserted plains
With the groan of ox-wagon
Rises the voice of our beloved,
Of our country South Africa
We will answer to your calling,
We will sacrifice what you ask
We will live, we will die
We for Thee, South Africa
First verse, translated from Afrikaans
