SOUTH AFRICA
NOT JUST SPORTS

The Astuteness
of Forgiveness
With the Soccer World Cup, South Africa is once again in the spotlight. The legacy of Mandela, racism on the return, black diamonds, corruption, and AIDS are among its unfinished business. To face and overcome the challenges of the future, this country will need to start from one point...

by Saverio Rando

Nelson Mandela will be 92 on July 18th, a week after the final game of the World Cup. His days are marked by lapses of memory and small treats (honey in his coffee). The old captain is disappearing and today’s South Africa needs to remember the formula of his tranquil power. If Barack Obama wrote The Audacity of Hope, Nelson Mandela should write The Astuteness of Forgiveness. Bill Clinton once asked him how much anger he held in his body for those 27 years lost in prison. “Up to the night before my release, I was furious. Then I decided to block the emotions. If I were left with bitterness in my heart, they would have continued to keep my mind behind bars.” His enemies, the zealous bureaucrats of the old system called apartheid, were the ones with whom the former-prisoner–become-President was able to play the game of the new South Africa and avoid civil war. How? Through a certain idea of forgiveness, the opposite of revenge: tactical astuteness, rather than moral imperative.
Perhaps Mandela’s response to Clinton was phrased a bit for dramatic effect. It is more plausible that his decision to “forgive” his jailors did not evolve in one night, but solidified through years of reflection and study of the adversary. The original title of the book by John Carlin–on which Clint Eastwood based his recent film Invictus–is Play the Enemy.  Love is too big a word for Mandela, who has always said he doesn’t want to be depicted as a saint. Rather, one should say that Mandela forced his adversary to play with him. He “engaged” him as you engage in a rugby scrum. More than embracing him, he tackled him. He seduced his foe, speaking his own language, sharing his passions, as when, still in prison, he memorized the names and stories of the white players of the national team because he had to deal with the chief of police, who was a rugby fanatic.
His memoirs contain this sentence: “Sit down and deny your enemy the opportunity to use violence–this is the best of strategies.” Make him lower his guard. Mandela’s favorite sport is boxing. As a boy, he boxed, and in his long autumn of life, he follows it on TV, fragile-kneed and foggy-minded. When they released him in 1990, the “whites” feared him and his possible revenge, feared that his liberation would have an effect similar to that of Khomeini’s release in Iran (and, in fact, the secret service code name for him was “The Ayatollah”). Mandela was able to disperse the fear of the whites by convincing them to play, in the interests of the oppressed blacks. Here, in this “astuteness of forgiveness,” is the secret of one of the most extraordinary figures of contemporary history; here is the reason today’s impatient and forgetful South Africa needs to remember the logical, rather than magical, formula, of its own very young identity.

A ticket to heaven. One of the many amusing scenes of the repertoire of the pair of retired Nobel Prize winners, Mandela and Tutu, happened on the stage of an event, maybe before a speech, when, in front of an adoring public, the Archbishop welcomed his friend with a deep bow, while the statesman in colored shirt shied away, saying, “I’m a sinner.” The former straightened up and said, “Son, I will absolve you,” and the other smiled, “If you open the road for me, I too will knock on the door of heaven.”
It has been a while since the prize-winning pair of great South African icons appeared on the public scene. They were still together a few years ago, on the night FIFA chose South Africa for the 2010 World Cup (a euphoric Tutu promised the FIFA delegates an “open” ticket to heaven). But now that the World Cup has started, the great arbiters of the peaceful transition remain behind the scenes. The substitutes today occupying the stage and drawing attention are Jacob Zuma, the President of the Republic (with his many wives and shadows of corruption), and Julius Malema, the President of the African National Congress (ANC) Youth (with his shots against whites). The ANC, the party of anti-apartheid struggle, after 16 years of uninterrupted leadership, has become the feeding trough of power that everyone tries to approach. Mandela used to say that the first thing he would look for in heaven would be the local headquarters of the ANC. Who knows if he would say the same thing today? Tutu might not forgive him. Of the two Nobel companions, the one who is still out and about and thundering (above all, abroad) is the joyful emeritus Archbishop of Capetown, Nobel Prize for Peace recipient in 1984, who at the age of 78 still incarnates the critical conscience of this extraordinary country of 50 million that he himself, after the fall of apartheid in 1994, baptized the “Rainbow Nation.” Remember? It was one of the key events of the twentieth century and perhaps it is not strange that it seems like ancient history, even when only 16 years have passed. It seems ancient because on that day in April a third of the current South African population wasn’t even born yet. In front of the voting stations of the first democratic elections, the barrier between whites and blacks fell. A year later, the epic of the Rainbow Nation was triumphantly presented in the stadium-theaters of the Rugby World Cup hosted and won by South Africa. A little big miracle: a people divided for decades (centuries) on the basis of skin color was reunited–and welcomed back into the world–through the construction and celebration of the victory of the Springboks in a traditionally white sport, the oval ball an implacable symbol of racial segregation and international boycott.
Today, this extraordinary epic is a bit faded. To revive its colors, at least on the big screen, Clint Eastwood was needed, with his film Invictus, starring Morgan Freeman in the role of Mandela and Matt Damon in the shoes of national team captain François Pienaar. This Hollywood film resonates more abroad than at home, and in South Africa more in the white community than in the black one. Tourism Minister Marthinus Van Schalkwyk recounts going to see it with his son, who was only a year old in 1995. “He was profoundly struck. He said to me, ‘Papa, did it really happen that way?’” Former captain Pienaar says he’s heard friends admit after seeing the film that they hadn’t done enough in that period of change and fear. On the other end of the rainbow, in the former black townships of Soweto or Guguletu, in the countryside of Limpopo or the shantytowns of Durban, the impression is that the epic represented by Invictus says little or nothing about today’s South Africans (80% black). AIDS has wiped out entire generations (the average age does not exceed 50). A black middle class, the so-called black diamonds, has grown up thanks to programs of positive discrimination–BEE, Black Economic Empowerment–and quotas reserved for blacks in companies. But unemployment remains at 40%, the crime rate is high (90% of homicides go unpunished), and houses in Johannesburg seem like fortresses of barbed wire while many homes in the ghettos still lack electricity. South Africa is becoming a normal African nation (even though it constitutes the engine of the economy of the entire continent, with about 30% of the GDP), with a normal (therefore corrupt) governing and administrative class. Every revolutionary spree, even in the rare peaceful South African version, has its aftermath of delusion, scars, and side effects. If you travel from Cape Town to Johannesburg on the eve of the World Cup, you realize that the epic of 1994–1995, elections plus rugby World Cup, is past history. But what does “past” mean–metabolized or forgotten? Has the fable of the Rainbow Nation become everyday news or has it melted into rhetoric? A bit of both. A few days ago, in London, Desmond Tutu said that fortunately Nelson Mandela can no longer understand what’s happening around him. He would be disappointed, upset. Those close to the great old man say that up to a short time ago, he read the newspapers with a strange grimace of suffering on his face. Certainly, the new governing class has never ceased to honor him, now that it can afford not to listen to him. Mandela is mute, but he should cry out his life.

With open eyes. One of the most important departments of the Foundation that bears his name in Johannesburg concerns “memory.” Here, thousands of pages, from prison diaries to notes and letters, are waiting to be distilled into one great volume. And what if it were entitled, The Astuteness of Forgiveness? The treasures of the Mandela archive hold no surprises capable of changing perspective and judgments on recent history, but word after word, they constitute an extraordinary practical manual for a society (only one?) that suspects it is advancing too slowly, or retrogressing. “Reconstruction and reconciliation hold hands every day,” Mandela would repeat today to young Julius Malema, who blows on the fire of racial division singing the old battle song, “Kill the Boers.” But there is no reconciliation without truth: at the end of the 1990s it was Desmond Tutu himself who guided the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that sifted through political crimes committed during apartheid, granting forgiveness to those responsible if they admitted their guilt. But even if it has “forgiven” the crimes of the segregationist past, the new South Africa of President Zuma and the black diamonds should not for this reason feel authorized to close their eyes on their own corruption and present injustices. Only the FIFA delegates have an open ticket to paradise. And maybe not even them.