Playing the Enemy
As I made my way through John Carlin’s Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation, I kept thinking back to the Clint Eastwood-directed, Morgan Freeman- and Matt-Damon starring movie Invictus, which is based on this book. The film was entertaining and thoughtful, although it seemed to be a bit more upbeat than I expected, considering that it follows Nelson Mandela from the beginning of his presidency, a time still very fraught with racial tensions in South Africa. Invictus focuses on Mandela and his involvement with the Springboks (the South African rugby team), whom he encouraged his countrymen to support (the Springboks were mostly supported by the Afrikaners, and for many non-whites symbolised white supremacy). The movie mostly suggests these tensions, and makes use of Mandela’s white and black bodyguards to illustrate some of these tensions (not all that effectively).
Reading Playing the Enemy became a game of ‘spot the difference’ for me. For instance, Invictus left the impression on me that prior to winning the 1995 Rugby World Cup, the Springboks were quite a hopeless team (apparently not all that true). They had, for instance, beaten the All Blacks before, as well as Argentina, another strong team, if I remember correctly from the book. Perhaps the biggest tragedy of Invictus was the lack of excitement in their rugby footage! The husband and I were commenting that even an episode of Friday Night Lights has more exciting sports footage than Invictus! And also, the role of team captain Francois Pienaar is played up. The movie portrays it as his idea to have the team learn the new anthem (it was the team manager’s idea). And the team did not react as negatively as the movie suggests, and many of the team members embraced it wholeheartedly, such as James Small, an Englishman who had felt ostracized by his teammates.
More importantly, Playing the Enemy also made me realize just how much was glossed over, or perhaps not even mentioned at all. The violence, the protests, the false arrests, the assassinations, especially of Afrikaners such as the defense attorney working to free the Upington 14 who were accused of killing a black policeman who had fired into a crowd. There wasn’t enough of a sense of this tension, of the background that shocked the world.
But enough about the movie. Movies tend to pale when compared to the book, don’t they? Playing the Enemy is yet another well-written non-fiction book, from which the movie pulled information from just the last few chapters. It sustains one’s interest in a subject that could easily have been bogged down by too much information. (Here I should admit that I am somewhat interested in rugby. Thanks to its colonial past, Singapore does actually have a national rugby team, and so do many of the schools and I have actually seen watched a little rugby – at the Singapore Sevens, although I never thought that I’d ever read a book on rugby.) There are ample interviews with relevant people, which was aided by Carlin’s journalism background (he was The Independent’s South African bureau chief in the late 1990s). The information is well laid out and interspersed with interesting anecdotes and quotes, and he provides plenty of background for ignoramuses like me, who need to a refresher on South Africa’s apartheid history. Unlike the movie, the book wasn’t all about the game. The Rugby World Cup final was the culmination of all this planning, strategic or accidental, so like the firework spectacular at a new year celebration, it gave the world a big bang to wow over. Carlin does a wonderful job capturing the issues, the hostility, introducing a host of other characters but at the same time keeping Mandela very firmly as the main personality, the driving force of these events, both captivating and enigmatic. This is Mandela’s story, this is South Africa’s story, as it very rightly is.
Highly recommended!
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