Within days of his inauguration as president in 1994 Nelson Mandela sent for
François Pienaar, the Springboks’ captain. He had a special role in mind for
him in his political plans.
If the apartheid ideologues had had the same inclination for putting art to
political use as their Soviet counterparts, they would have chosen Pienaar
to depict the model specimen of Afrikaner manhood. Six foot four, he carried
his 17 stone of muscle with the statuesque ease of Michelangelo’s David.
“You looked at him,” Mandela said, “you considered where he came from and
what you saw was a typical Afrikaner.”
Pienaar grew up in Vereeniging, an industrial town south of Johannesburg.
Vereeniging weighed heavily on the minds of the residents of the nearby
black township of Sharpeville. It was the place from which death had been
famously visited on them. Sharpeville had endured the single worst atrocity
of the apartheid era: in 1960 police opened fire on unarmed, fleeing black
demonstrators, killing 69.
There was probably more hatred concentrated toward whites in Vereeniging than
anywhere else in South Africa. Yet Pienaar had little notion that the blacks
viewed him as a mortal enemy and no sense of Sharpeville’s existence, let
alone its history. Black people drifted around the fuzzier edges of his
consciousness: “We were a typical, not very politically aware working-class
Afrikaner family who never spoke about politics and believed 100% in the
propaganda of the day.”
Yet if there was one thing Mandela had learnt in his dealings with the
Afrikaners it was to see past appearances. “He did not seem to me at all to
be the typical product of an apartheid society,” Mandela said. “I found him
quite a charming fellow and I sensed that he was progressive. And, you know,
he was an educated chap. He had a BA in law. It was a pleasure to sit down
with him.”
Pleasure was the last thing on Pienaar’s mind as he stood on the stone steps
of the giant Union Buildings on June 17, 1994, preparing to go inside for
their first meeting.
He was taken to a small waiting room, bare save for a table and some leather
chairs, into which stepped Mandela’s personal assistant, a tall, imposing
black lady called Mary Mxadana who asked him to take a seat and wait a
moment. “I was incredibly tense as the moment arrived when I would meet
him,” he recalled. “I was really in awe of him. I kept thinking: what do I
say, what do I ask him?”
Mxadana reappeared and bade him follow her. She stepped out of the waiting
room into the corridor, stopped at a tall, dark brown door, knocked sharply
and, in one move, stepped in. She held open the door for Pienaar, whose
stage fright only worsened at the sight of the vast room before him,
oceanically empty, as at first it seemed, until he crossed the threshold and
spotted to his right a tall grey-haired man jumping out of his chair.
Mandela was 75 but he headed towards Pienaar with the alacrity of a rugby
opponent charging in for a tackle – except that he stood erect, had a big
smile on his face and his hand outstretched. “Ah, François, how very good of
you to come!”
Mandela, smiling all the time, clearly happy to have this big young Boer in
his new office, gestured to him to sit down on a sofa as he congratulated
him on a Springbok victory over England in a game in Cape Town six days
earlier.
There was a knock at the door and a woman came in carrying a tray of coffee
and tea. She was white, middle-aged and wearing a floral dress with shoulder
pads. Mandela saw her appear at the door at the other end of the room – a
distance six times greater than the length of the cell that had been his
home for 18 years – and immediately stood up, remaining standing as she
placed the tray on a low table before the two men. “Ah, thank you very much.
Thank you very much,” smiled Mandela, still standing. “And, ah, this is
François Pienaar . . . Lenoy Coetzee.” Pienaar shook hands with her and
before she turned to go, Mandela thanked her again and did not sit down
until she had exited the room.
Pienaar looked around the large wood-panelled office, vaguely registering a
blend of decor that was old South African and new: ox-wagon watercolours
side by side with shields of leather hide and wooden African sculptures.
Mandela broke in: “Do you take milk, François?”
In less than five minutes, Pienaar’s mood had been transformed. “It’s more
than just being comfortable in his presence,” Pienaar recalled. “You have a
feeling when you are with him that you are safe.” So safe that Pienaar had
the audacity half-jokingly to ask him whether he would accompany the
Springboks on a tour to New Zealand.
“Nothing would please me more, François,” he smiled. “But most unfortunately I
have these people here in this building who drive me very hard and I know
they will give me orders to remain here and work!”
To Pienaar’s relief, Mandela simply took charge from there, launching into a
sequence of reminiscences that made Pienaar feel like a little boy sitting
at the feet of a wise old man.
Pienaar would not have guessed it at the time, but winning him over – and,
through him, enlisting the rest of the Springbok team – was an important
objective for Mandela. He never made his purpose overt in that first meeting
but he did edge closer to the main theme when he switched the conversation
to his memories of the Barcelona Olympic Games, which he had attended in
1992 and recalled with great enthusiasm.
“He talked about the power that sport had to move people and how he had seen
this not long after his release in the Barcelona Olympics, which he
especially remembered for one particular moment when he said he stood up and
he felt the whole stadium reverberating,” said Pienaar, in whose mind
Mandela was seeking to plant the first seeds of a political idea.
Pienaar did not register it as such, but in Mandela’s version of the
encounter, the subtext was crystal clear.
“François Pienaar was the captain of rugby and if I wanted to use rugby, I had
to work with him,” Mandela said. “I concentrated in our meeting on
complimenting him for the role which he was playing and which he could play.
And I briefed him on what I was doing about sports and why I was doing so.
And I found him a highly intelligent person.”
Pienaar had become the latest Afrikaner to be “enveloped”, as he himself put
it, in Mandela’s aura; but he did not become an overnight evangeliser. He
was a straightforward rugby man, for whom big words like “nation-building”
carried little meaning. The message he took away from that meeting was a
straightforward one: get out there and win, wear that shirt with pride,
certain of my support. Mandela bade Pienaar goodbye as if they were already
the best of friends.
