Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation Read Online Free PDF Page A

because he was stronger than his foes, but because he was cleverer and more beguiling. He had forged these qualities following his arrest and imprisonment in 1962, when he came to realize that the route of brute force he had attempted, as the founding commander of the ANC’s military wing, could not work. In jail he judged that the way to kill apartheid was to persuade white people to kill it themselves, to join his team, submit to his leadership.
    It was in jail too that he seized his first great chance to put the strategy into action. The adversary on that occasion was a man called Kobie Coetsee, whose state of mind on this morning of the rugby game was one of nerve-shredding excitement, like everybody else’s; whose clarity of purpose was clouded only by the question whether he should watch the game at his home, just outside Cape Town, or soak in the atmosphere at a neighborhood bar. Coetsee and Mandela were on the same side today to a degree that would have been unthinkable when they had first met a decade ago. Back then, they had every reason to feel hostile toward each other. Mandela was South Africa’s most celebrated political prisoner; Coetsee was South Africa’s minister of justice and of prisons. The task Mandela had set himself back then, twenty-three years into his life sentence, was to win over Coetsee, the man who held the keys to his cell.

CHAPTER II
    THE MINISTER OF JUSTICE
    November 1985
     
    Nineteen eighty-five was a hopeful year for the world but not for South Africa. Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the Soviet Union, Ronald Reagan was sworn in as president for a second term, and the two Cold War leaders held their first meeting, offering the strongest signal in forty years that the superpowers might prevail upon each other to shelve their stratagems for mutually assured destruction. South Africa was rushing in the opposite direction. Tensions between anti-apartheid militants and the police exploded into the most violent escalation of racial hostilities since Queen Victoria’s redcoats and King Cetshwayo’s battalions inflicted savage slaughter on each other in the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879. The exiled ANC leadership stirred their supporters inside South Africa to rise up against the government, but they pursued their offensive against the government across other fronts too. Through the powerful domestic trade unions, through international economic sanctions, through diplomatic isolation. And through rugby. For twenty years, the ANC had been waging a campaign to deprive white male South Africans, and especially the Afrikaners, of international rugby, their lives’ great passion. Nineteen eighty-five was the year they secured their greatest triumphs, successfully thwarting a planned Springbok tour of New Zealand. That hurt. The fresh memory of that defeat injected an added vitality into the hammy forearms of the Afrikaner riot police as they thumped their truncheons down on the heads of their black victims.
    The only prospect in sight that year, it seemed, was civil war. A national opinion poll conducted in mid-August found that 70 percent of the black population and 30 percent of the white believed that was the direction the country was heading in. But were it to come to that, the winner would not be Mandela’s ANC; it would be their chief adversary, President P. W. Botha, better known in South Africa as “P.W.” or, by the friends and foes who feared him, “die groot krokodil,” the big crocodile. Botha, who ruled South Africa between 1978 and 1989, announced a state of emergency in the middle of 1985 and ordered 35,000 troops of the South African Defence Force, better known as the SADF, into the black townships, the first time the military had been called in to help the police quell what the government believed to be an increasingly orchestrated rebellion. Their suspicions were confirmed when the ANC’s exiled leadership responded to Botha’s move by calling for a “People’s War” to