Read Online Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation by John Carlin - Free Book Online
Authors: John Carlin
Ads: Link
of black South Africans were. He enjoyed the game only when the foreign rivals were good enough to beat the Boers.
Justice became a politically alert adolescent who understood how important rugby was to the Afrikaners; how it was the closest they got, outside church, to a spiritual life. They had their Old Testament Christianity, otherwise known as the Dutch Reformed Church; and they had their secular religion, rugby, which was to Afrikaners as soccer was to Brazilians or American football (rugby’s shoulder-padded first cousin) was to the residents of Green Bay, Wisconsin. And the more right-wing the Afrikaners were, the more fundamentalist their faith in God, the more fanatical their attachment to the game. They feared God, but they loved rugby, especially when played in a Springbok jersey.
Successive South African national teams had built up a reputation during the twentieth century as the most bruisingly physical rugby players in the world. Mostly they were Afrikaners, though occasionally an unusually hefty, or tough, or fast “Englishman” (as the Afrikaners called them, when they were being polite) would sneak into the national side. And mostly, being Afrikaners, they were big-boned men of horny-handed famer stock, who as children learned the game playing barefoot on hard, dry pitches where if you fell, you bled.
As a metaphor for apartheid’s crushing brutality, the Boks worked very well. That was why their distinctive green jersey had become as detestable to blacks as the riot police, the national flag, and the national anthem, “Die Stem” (The Call), whose words praised God and celebrated the white conquest of Africa’s southern tip.
It was on such indignities that Justice dwelled in that fateful month of November 1985. Mandela, unimaginably, was meeting secretly with Kobie Coetsee, but Justice himself was in less mood for compromise than ever before. He seethed with the dark indignation of a man who knew that, because he was born black, he would never be able to exploit his natural gifts to the full. He had always been an unusually bright pupil, way ahead of his peers and of his parents (his mother never learned to read) by the age of fifteen. But the Upington authorities, who ran Paballelo, did not provide schooling for black children beyond that age. They stuck by the spirit and the letter of apartheid’s chief architect, Hendrick Verwoerd, who in 1953, as head of the Department of Native Affairs, came up with a school curriculum designed, as he put it, for “the nature and requirements of black people.” Verwoerd, who would go on to become prime minister, stated that the aim of his Bantu Education Act was to stop blacks from receiving an education that might make them aspire to positions above their station. The deeper purpose was to uphold the apartheid system’s giant, covert job-protection scheme for whites. Justice’s father, determined to do what he could to short-circuit the system, sent him far across the country to the Eastern Cape, to a Methodist school called Healdtown that Mandela himself had attended.
Justice spent the next ten years shuttling back and forth between Upington and the Eastern Cape, six hundred miles across country, in an often frustrating search for an education that would help him achieve his dream of becoming a doctor. He was beginning to get close, passing all the right exams to be admitted eventually to study medicine, when, at the end of 1985, disaster struck. He fell for a girl and made her pregnant. He was twenty-five years old but the Christian educational establishment he now attended found such behavior intolerable. He was expelled, returning home to Paballelo on the first week of November, burning with frustration.
Justice’s return coincided with the township’s first serious episode of what the apartheid authorities called “black unrest.” It was happening all over the country but was a novel phenomenon for a backwater like Paballelo, where until now
Justice became a politically alert adolescent who understood how important rugby was to the Afrikaners; how it was the closest they got, outside church, to a spiritual life. They had their Old Testament Christianity, otherwise known as the Dutch Reformed Church; and they had their secular religion, rugby, which was to Afrikaners as soccer was to Brazilians or American football (rugby’s shoulder-padded first cousin) was to the residents of Green Bay, Wisconsin. And the more right-wing the Afrikaners were, the more fundamentalist their faith in God, the more fanatical their attachment to the game. They feared God, but they loved rugby, especially when played in a Springbok jersey.
Successive South African national teams had built up a reputation during the twentieth century as the most bruisingly physical rugby players in the world. Mostly they were Afrikaners, though occasionally an unusually hefty, or tough, or fast “Englishman” (as the Afrikaners called them, when they were being polite) would sneak into the national side. And mostly, being Afrikaners, they were big-boned men of horny-handed famer stock, who as children learned the game playing barefoot on hard, dry pitches where if you fell, you bled.
As a metaphor for apartheid’s crushing brutality, the Boks worked very well. That was why their distinctive green jersey had become as detestable to blacks as the riot police, the national flag, and the national anthem, “Die Stem” (The Call), whose words praised God and celebrated the white conquest of Africa’s southern tip.
It was on such indignities that Justice dwelled in that fateful month of November 1985. Mandela, unimaginably, was meeting secretly with Kobie Coetsee, but Justice himself was in less mood for compromise than ever before. He seethed with the dark indignation of a man who knew that, because he was born black, he would never be able to exploit his natural gifts to the full. He had always been an unusually bright pupil, way ahead of his peers and of his parents (his mother never learned to read) by the age of fifteen. But the Upington authorities, who ran Paballelo, did not provide schooling for black children beyond that age. They stuck by the spirit and the letter of apartheid’s chief architect, Hendrick Verwoerd, who in 1953, as head of the Department of Native Affairs, came up with a school curriculum designed, as he put it, for “the nature and requirements of black people.” Verwoerd, who would go on to become prime minister, stated that the aim of his Bantu Education Act was to stop blacks from receiving an education that might make them aspire to positions above their station. The deeper purpose was to uphold the apartheid system’s giant, covert job-protection scheme for whites. Justice’s father, determined to do what he could to short-circuit the system, sent him far across the country to the Eastern Cape, to a Methodist school called Healdtown that Mandela himself had attended.
Justice spent the next ten years shuttling back and forth between Upington and the Eastern Cape, six hundred miles across country, in an often frustrating search for an education that would help him achieve his dream of becoming a doctor. He was beginning to get close, passing all the right exams to be admitted eventually to study medicine, when, at the end of 1985, disaster struck. He fell for a girl and made her pregnant. He was twenty-five years old but the Christian educational establishment he now attended found such behavior intolerable. He was expelled, returning home to Paballelo on the first week of November, burning with frustration.
Justice’s return coincided with the township’s first serious episode of what the apartheid authorities called “black unrest.” It was happening all over the country but was a novel phenomenon for a backwater like Paballelo, where until now
Similar Books
