John Carlin - Playing the Enemy

ATLANTIC BOOKS

LONDON

The first person to whom I proposed doing this book was Nelson Mandela. We met in the living room of his home in Johannesburg in August 2001, two years after he'd retired from the South African presidency. After some sunny banter, at which he excels, and some shared reminiscences about the edgy years of political transition in South Africa, on which I had reported for a British newspaper, I made my pitch.

Starting off by laying out the broad themes, I put it to him that all societies everywhere aspire, whether they know it or not, to Utopias of some sort. Politicians trade on people's hopes that heaven on earth is attainable. Since it is not, the lives of nations, like the lives of individuals, are a perpetual struggle in pursuit of dreams. In Mandela's case, the dream that had sustained him during his twenty-seven years in prison was one he shared with Martin Luther King Jr.: that one day people in his country would be judged not by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character.

As I spoke, Mandela sat inscrutable as a sphinx, as he always does when the conversation turns serious and he is the listener. You're not sure, as you blather on, whether he's paying attention or lost in his own thoughts. But when I quoted King, he nodded with a sharp, lips-pursed, downward jolt of the chin.

Encouraged, I said that the book I meant to write concerned South Africa's peaceful transfer of power from white rule to majority rule, from apartheid to democracy; that the book's span would be ten years, starting with the first political contact he had with the government in 1985 (I got a hint of a nod at that too), while he was still in prison. As for the theme, it was one that would be relevant everywhere conflicts arise from the incomprehension and distrust that goes hand in hand with the species' congenital tribalism. I meant "tribalism" in the widest sense of the word, as applied to race, religion, nationalism, or politics. George Orwell defined it as that "habit of assuming that human beings can be classified like insects and that whole blocks of millions or tens of millions of people can be confidently labelled good' or bad'." Nowhere since the fall of Nazism had this dehumanizing habit been institutionalized more thoroughly than in South Africa. Mandela himself had described apartheid as a "moral genocide" not death camps, but the insidious extermination of a people's self-respect.

For that reason, apartheid was the only political system in the world that at the height of the Cold War many countries the United States, the Soviet Union, Albania, China, France, North Korea, Spain, Cuba agreed was, by the United Nations definition, "a crime against humanity". Yet from this epic injustice an epic reconciliation arose.

I pointed out to Mandela that in my journalism work I had met many people striving to make peace in the Middle East, in Latin America, in Africa, in Asia: for these people South Africa was an ideal to which they all aspired. In the "conflict resolution" industry, burgeoning since the end of the Cold War, when local conflicts started erupting all over the globe, the handbook for how to achieve peace by political means was South Africa's "negotiated revolution", as someone once called it. No country had ever shepherded itself from tyranny to democracy more ably, and humanely. Much had been written, I acknowledged, about the nuts and bolts of "the South African miracle". But what was missing, to my mind, was a book about the human factor, about the miraculousness of the miracle. I envisioned an unapologetically positive story that displayed the human animal at its best; a book with a flesh-and-blood hero at its centre; a book about a country whose black majority should have been bellowing for revenge but instead, following Mandela's example, gave the world a lesson in enlightened forgiveness. My book would include an ample cast of characters, black and white, whose stories would convey the living face of South Africa's great ceremony of redemption. But also, at a time in history when you looked around the world's leaders and most of those you saw were moral midgets (the sphinx did not flinch at this), my book would be about him. It wouldn't be a biography, but a story that shone a light on his political genius, on the talent he deployed in winning people to his cause through an appeal to their finer qualities; in drawing out, in Abraham Lincoln's phrase, the better angels of their nature.

I said I meant to frame the book around the drama of a particular sporting event. Sport was a powerful mobilizer of mass emotions and shaper of political perceptions. (Another nod, short and sharp.) I gave as examples the Berlin Olympics of 1936, which Hitler used to promote the idea of Aryan superiority, though the black American athlete Jesse Owens upset those plans badly by winning four gold medals; Jackie Robinson, the first black man to play major league baseball, helping set in motion the necessary change of consciousness that would lead to big social changes in America.

I then reminded Mandela of a phrase he had used a year or two earlier when handing over a lifetime achievement award to the Brazilian soccer star Pel. He had said, and I read from some notes I had brought, "Sport has the power to change the world. It has the power to inspire, the power to unite people that little else has. It is more powerful than governments in breaking down racial barriers."

Finally coming to the point, I told Mandela what the narrative heart of my book would be, why it was that I would need his support. I told him that there had been one sporting occasion that outdid all the ones I had just mentioned, one where all the themes I had been touching on during this conversation had converged; one that had evoked magically the "symphony of brotherhood" of Martin Luther King's dreams; one event where all Mandela had striven and suffered for during his life converged. I was referring to the final of the