When Mandela understood the unifying nature of sport

We may not realise it today, having taken for granted the many cricketing exchanges between South Africa and India since 1991, but for many of us who would see things mainly through the prism of sport during the 1980s, South Africa remained the place the world of sport had boycotted. Simply put, they were the people you did not play ball with.
Nelson Mandela, and the idea of sport, suddenly came into focus when Ruud Gullit dedicated his 1987 European Footballer of the Year Award to the jailed leader.Mandela? And Gullit? Here was a relatively-unknown, strangely-coiffured upstart of a footballer and he was gifting away his award to someone who couldn't be there to acknowledge it. This was one of the few acts which helped thrust Mandela - forgotten for most of the 1970s - back into the world's consciousness.
After his release in February 1990, sportsmen regularly made a pilgrimage to him whenever they found themselves in South Africa - making him more popular than the Pope at Vatican - but Nelson Mandela and sport go back a long way.
When he first arrived as Prisoner No. 46664 in the Section B Isolation Cell at Robben Island where he spent 18 years of his 27 imprisoned years, Mandela wasn't too keen a football fan. A boxer by training, football nevertheless intrigued him. And Mandela quickly learnt to recognise the unifying power of sport as he witnessed - by word of mouth - the setting up of the Makana Football Association, a football league comprising teams from the prisoners at Robben. The organised set-up in itself was a victory of structured protest against the regime.
After South Africa narrowly lost hosting the 2006 World Cup to Germany, it was perhaps this Robben Island experience that made Mandela go to Zurich in May 2004 during the bid for the 2010 World Cup and sway everybody with his powerful, smiling charisma and help get football's great big extravaganza to his country.
In More Than Just A Game: Football V Apartheid, Chuck Korr and Marvin Close tell us how black prisoners surprised the authorities by demanding that rugby facilities be made available to them too. They already had been allowed their football, the black man's sport; now they wanted the sport of the oppressors too.
It was perhaps after seeing these two symbolically diverse sports being embraced by prisoners that Mandela understood the unifying nature of sport. He borrowed from it to deliver his masterstroke political act with the Springbok Rugby team - which was an overpowering and much-hated symbol of all things Afrikaan white. It was this gesture that eventually led to the 1995 World Cup win, and helped unify a fractured nation.
In the opening scene of Invictus, the Clint Eastwood-directed film starring Morgan Freeman and Matt Damon, when President Mandela's motorcade drives through a Pretoria street, there's a bunch of white youth playing rugby on lush green fields and on the other dusty side, a bunch of black kids playing football. A year into Mandela's presidency, that scene mirrored a South Africa where assimilation was a still a mirage and radicals within the African National Congress (ANC) party wanted the Springboks and all that it stood for to be dismantled. While many in the ANC believed that Mandela, as President, would immediately have their wish delivered, he instead delivered a coup.
"Mandela had the greatness to rise above (all) that. That's what he managed to do with the rugby," says journalist and writer John Carlin, "Rugby was a symptom of division and racial hatred and he transformed it into an instrument of unity and reconciliation."
Carlin, who wrote Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game that Made a Nation, on which Invictus is based, spoke to TOI during the 2010 World Cup. The basis of Mandela's move, he pointed out, was cold political logic rather than a desire to play Christ: "There is a tendency to view Mandela as a spiritual figure of generosity, and I am not saying he is not that, but he is I think first and foremost a shrewd political pragmatist.
"He is aware of what is possible and what isn't in politics. And his decision on the Springbok was not a decision of 'Oh let's be sweet and loving to the white people'. The point was, if we ban this symbol, it's going to make it more difficult for us to create a stable democracy."
Mandela found an able ally in Francois Pienaar, the Springbok captain, who apart from preparing his squad for the 1995 World Cup at home, was entrusted with the more onerous task of playing ambassador and facilitator with his predominantly-white squad. It helped win over the whites as well. "That was Mandela's political genius. He won and conquered people over," says Carlin.
"He was already thinking way ahead of anybody else. So he suggested that they have both anthems, which is amazing as 16 years later they still have both anthems. And now the white people and black people feel both of the anthems to be their own," says Carlin.
Finally, in dream-like fashion, when South Africa won a bruising final, Mandela appeared on the winner's podium wearing a Springbok jersey. In one swift action, he had won over a society that for centuries had been split right down the middle. And, he took the help of sport and large-hearted sportsmen to carry out this unique unification that not many believed was possible. Smiling as always, he proved them wrong.