PLAYING THE ENEMY

Nelson Mandela and the game that made a nation.

 The heart-lifting spectacle of South Africa’s first free election in April 1994 was, for Nelson Mandela and his followers, a triumph unimaginably sweet, but perilously incomplete. Mandela was keenly aware that his party’s victory, secured by a landslide of black votes, lacked the endorsement of alienated whites, and that whites retained sufficient wealth and weaponry to endanger his new democracy if they felt threatened. As John Carlin puts it in “Playing the Enemy,” paraphrasing Garibaldi on the birth of Italy, the election had created a new South Africa; now Mandela’s task was to create South Africans. This wonderful book describes Mandela’s methodical, improbable and brilliant campaign to reconcile resentful blacks and fearful whites around a sporting event, a game of rugby.

That South Africa’s first patch of common ground might be a rugby field was preposterous on the face of it. Rugby was the secular religion of the Afrikaners, the white tribe that invented and enforced apartheid. It was a sport that most blacks considered — if they considered it at all — “the brutish, alien pastime of a brutish, alien people.”