How one great man in a rugby jersey saved a nation from civil war

Published on Thursday 10 December 2009 22:09

GO AHEAD, make my day, Nelson Mandela told Clint Eastwood. And Eastwood, the actor turned Oscar-winning director famed for his roles in such films as Dirty Harry and The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, accepted the challenge.

On 24 June, 1995, Mandela, wearing a copy of the South African No6 Springbok jersey of skipper Franois Pienaar, lifted the Rugby World Cup in front of 62,000 spectators at Ellis Park stadium in Johannesburg. Pienaar, the offspring of a hardline white Afrikaner family in the coal-mining and steelmaking white community of Witbank, held aloft the cup with Mandela, creating an iconic image of a rainbow nation dumping racial divisions into history's dustbin.

Mandela and Pienaar became and remain close friends, and this week Eastwood's ultimate feelgood movie, Invictus (Latin for "unconquerable"), about the two men's attempt to unite a nation deeply divided – culturally, racially and economically – went on general release in North America to critical acclaim, and it will soon be screened in Britain.

Directed by 79-year-old Eastwood, the film's premise would be completely implausible if it were not true. Invictus is based on a book, Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game that Made a Nation, by John Carlin, depicting the real-life events leading to the then President Mandela wearing the green and yellow Springbok jersey.

Carlin, recognising the full significance of Mandela's gesture and of the willingness of Pienaar's all-white team (with the exception of mixed-race winger Chester Williams) to come on board, set out to record the history of the "rugby revolution" in detail.

"My book covers a timespan between 1985 and 1995 – essentially about Mandela's political genius in getting white South Africa completely into the great project (of a post-apartheid, all-race democracy], and getting black South Africans to support the Springboks," Carlin said. "The country was in an extremely volatile condition in Mandela's first year of presidency]. There were a lot of threats of terrorism. The country could have gone either way."

The film centres on Mandela (Morgan Freeman) and his desire to achieve reconciliation between peoples who came to the brink of civil war before the transformation from apartheid to democracy in 1994. Eastwood got to the nub of Mandela's humanity this week: "There are just no people like this on the planet. He could have come out of jail and started a civil war. Instead, he saw that rugby could unite whites and blacks. It was a stroke of genius."

Precisely. The fact is that Mandela, on release in 1990 after 27 years of imprisonment by the apartheid government, could have set the country ablaze with just one sentence. If he had said, "Kill all the whites", it would have happened. Instead, unlike Robert Mugabe, the head of state consumed by bitterness just to the north in Zimbabwe, he urged reconciliation and forgiveness and steered his country away from a potential Armageddon.

The curmudgeonly John Pilger, unschooled in the complexities of post-apartheid South Africa, has sourly dismissed the Carlin-Eastwood Mandela tale as "another hagiography brimming with clichs and stereotypes".

Pilger, however, may have stumbled on a real truth when he suggested all is not well with the rainbow nation now that Mandela – nearly 92 and visibly ailing – has been succeeded by a head of state, Jacob Zuma, who should have been prosecuted for corruption and narrowly avoided a conviction for rape of an HIV-positive woman.

And some of the lustre derived by South Africa from Invictus will be rubbed off by a truly hagiographic movie based on a truly hagiographic book – Winnie Mandela: A Life, by Anne Marie du Preez – about Mandela's ex-wife, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, that begins production next year.

Oscar winner Jennifer Hudson will play the title role in the movie Winnie. Hudson could be making a bad career move. Winnie will not, for example, depict – if the film script follows the book – the so-called Mother of the Nation beating up 14-year-old Stompie Moeketsi and then stabbing him to death before engineering the murder of her doctor, who threatened to expose her –

facts revealed at South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

So, while Invictus tells the true story about a truly great man, Winnie will bring shame on South Africa by veiling the truth about an evil woman.

&#149 Fred Bridgland is the author of an unauthorised biography of Winnie Madikizela-Mandela and her murderous Mandela United Football Club. He is working on a new book about Madikizela-Mandela.