Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation by John Carlin
Authors: John Carlin
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Antipodean “white unrest” four years earlier that had so baffled the Pienaar family.
For Pienaar, rugby was just a game, his chief entertainment as a child along with fighting. His life, from a very early age, was violent, but it was never political or criminal in intent, as it was in the ungentle townships; it was violence for violence’s sake. When Pienaar was seven, members of a rival gang hanged him from a tree. Had an adult not passed by he would have died. As it was, the rope left deep welts on his neck. Later, while at university, at around the same time as Bekebeke was killing Sethwala, Pienaar nearly did the same—or feared he had—to a stranger he came across outside a bar on a Johannesburg street late at night. During a drunken brawl he floored the man, who landed with his head on the pavement with a terrible crack. In between those two incidents, he cracked more ribs and broke more teeth, on and off the rugby field, than he could remember.
Viewed from the perspective of Justice Bekebeke’s world, where soccer and dancing were what people did for fun, rugby was a puzzlingly savage sport, one in which players were stretchered off the field like soldiers from battle; in which the inevitably large, inevitably drink-sodden spectators, in their game-ranger Boer uniform of khaki shorts and shirts, heavy socks and boots, chewed with ferocious gusto on their traditional boerewors beef sausages and drank their favorite drink, brandy and Coke. As for the boys, they seemed to take their lead in black South African eyes from their dads. Their lives seemed to consist of one bruising, bloody fight after another, in which children were permanently smashing each other over the head with chairs, when they were not hanging their little friends from trees.
Hanging was very much in the mind of an Afrikaner called J. J. Basson on the morning of May 24, 1989. Basson, the judge who had reached the record-breaking verdict in the Upington case, had been listening for almost six months to arguments from the defense lawyers, chiefly Anton Lubowski, in favor of finding extenuating circumstances that might mitigate the death sentences of Justice Bekebeke and the other twenty-four convicted murderers.
Lubowski was a tall, handsome, thirty-seven-year-old Afrikaner raised in Cape Town whose looks suggested, as his name did, a dashing Polish count. An activist deeply immersed in the political struggle against apartheid, he belonged to that less than 1 percent of the white population who not only saw South Africa the way the rest of the world did, but who acted on that understanding—who took risks, who made the conscious decision to swim against the fierce currents of conventional volk wisdom. He was that rare white person who really knew his country, all of it; who spent time in the black townships, socializing as well as plotting; who made an effort to learn a smattering of a black language.
Lubowski was a character with whom the journalists covering the trial became friendly during those first months of 1989. Justice Bekebeke was only a face then across a crowded courtroom. But years later it was Bekebeke who talked about that time. “Anton was one of us,” he said, with pained solemnity. “He and we were one. We called him ‘Number 26,’ as if he were the twenty-sixth accused. He was so much more than just our lawyer.” Inside the Upington court building there was a special consulting room where lawyers met with their clients. “But he did not want to meet with us there. He wanted to meet with us in our environment, so he came down to our cells to talk to us. He said he was more comfortable there. He was our comrade. We didn’t see his whiteness, that he was an Afrikaner.”
Lubowski would go down to the cells below the court and sing protest songs with them, join them in their dances of defiance. And then he would stand up for them, imposingly tall in his flowing black advocate’s gown in the desert heat of
For Pienaar, rugby was just a game, his chief entertainment as a child along with fighting. His life, from a very early age, was violent, but it was never political or criminal in intent, as it was in the ungentle townships; it was violence for violence’s sake. When Pienaar was seven, members of a rival gang hanged him from a tree. Had an adult not passed by he would have died. As it was, the rope left deep welts on his neck. Later, while at university, at around the same time as Bekebeke was killing Sethwala, Pienaar nearly did the same—or feared he had—to a stranger he came across outside a bar on a Johannesburg street late at night. During a drunken brawl he floored the man, who landed with his head on the pavement with a terrible crack. In between those two incidents, he cracked more ribs and broke more teeth, on and off the rugby field, than he could remember.
Viewed from the perspective of Justice Bekebeke’s world, where soccer and dancing were what people did for fun, rugby was a puzzlingly savage sport, one in which players were stretchered off the field like soldiers from battle; in which the inevitably large, inevitably drink-sodden spectators, in their game-ranger Boer uniform of khaki shorts and shirts, heavy socks and boots, chewed with ferocious gusto on their traditional boerewors beef sausages and drank their favorite drink, brandy and Coke. As for the boys, they seemed to take their lead in black South African eyes from their dads. Their lives seemed to consist of one bruising, bloody fight after another, in which children were permanently smashing each other over the head with chairs, when they were not hanging their little friends from trees.
Hanging was very much in the mind of an Afrikaner called J. J. Basson on the morning of May 24, 1989. Basson, the judge who had reached the record-breaking verdict in the Upington case, had been listening for almost six months to arguments from the defense lawyers, chiefly Anton Lubowski, in favor of finding extenuating circumstances that might mitigate the death sentences of Justice Bekebeke and the other twenty-four convicted murderers.
Lubowski was a tall, handsome, thirty-seven-year-old Afrikaner raised in Cape Town whose looks suggested, as his name did, a dashing Polish count. An activist deeply immersed in the political struggle against apartheid, he belonged to that less than 1 percent of the white population who not only saw South Africa the way the rest of the world did, but who acted on that understanding—who took risks, who made the conscious decision to swim against the fierce currents of conventional volk wisdom. He was that rare white person who really knew his country, all of it; who spent time in the black townships, socializing as well as plotting; who made an effort to learn a smattering of a black language.
Lubowski was a character with whom the journalists covering the trial became friendly during those first months of 1989. Justice Bekebeke was only a face then across a crowded courtroom. But years later it was Bekebeke who talked about that time. “Anton was one of us,” he said, with pained solemnity. “He and we were one. We called him ‘Number 26,’ as if he were the twenty-sixth accused. He was so much more than just our lawyer.” Inside the Upington court building there was a special consulting room where lawyers met with their clients. “But he did not want to meet with us there. He wanted to meet with us in our environment, so he came down to our cells to talk to us. He said he was more comfortable there. He was our comrade. We didn’t see his whiteness, that he was an Afrikaner.”
Lubowski would go down to the cells below the court and sing protest songs with them, join them in their dances of defiance. And then he would stand up for them, imposingly tall in his flowing black advocate’s gown in the desert heat of
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