Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation by John Carlin Page A

the courtroom, where the windows stood wide open in the hope of snatching a passing breeze. He would face down Basson, arguing in subdued legal tones or, when all else failed, raging at him. Mandela would have been more ready than Lubowski to forgive Basson, would have been more disposed to see his callousness as the consequence of the world in which he was raised. But Mandela would also have known that Lubowski offered a vision of that better world he wished to create in South Africa, and that it was in large measure thanks to South Africa’s Lubowskis that he could argue convincingly to his black compatriots that because a person was white, it did not mean that he was bad.
    Early in the morning of May 24, the day Basson would give his verdict, Lubowski confessed over breakfast that the best one could seriously hope for was a ray of benevolent paternalism to penetrate Basson’s icy heart. Lubowski harbored most hope for the married couple in their sixties, Evelina de Bruin and her husband, Gideon Madlongolwana. “I don’t think even Basson could be so mad as to hang them,” he said. They had ten children, two still of school age. Evelina was a plump domestic servant who walked with a limp. Gideon had worked loyally for South African Railways for thirty-six years. Neither had a criminal record. They would be okay, Lubowski figured. The accused for whom he held out no hope at all was Justice Bekebeke, who was twenty-eight years old at the time, and the most articulate, and militant, member of the group.
    If he had been singled out and the rest spared there would have been some harsh logic in that. “The real guilty party was me,” Justice said. “Towards the end of that mitigation phase of the trial Anton came down to the cells and told us our chances. My response was to say to the guys that I felt I should come clean for the sake of the group. They hardly let me finish. They all jumped on me. They were enraged. They said, ‘We would rather kill you ourselves than let them kill you.’ They did not want me to own up to this white judge. It was a question of dignity and solidarity and it was immediately clear to me that there was no possibility of further discussion. Anton was present and he said, ‘Okay, guys, I did not hear this. This conversation never took place.’ ”
    As it turned out, Bekebeke’s fellow accused made an immense sacrifice, for Judge Basson surpassed Lubowski’s worst expectations. He ruled that extenuation would apply to only eleven of the accused; that along with Justice Bekebeke, Evelina de Bruin, and Gideon Madlongolwana should be counted among the fourteen in whose behavior he saw no excuse, whose purpose on November 13, 1985, he judged to be murder.
    Cries of pain, amazement, and anger filled the courtroom as the accused and their relatives clutched their faces in despair and disbelief, for this was not what their lawyers had told them to expect. Evelina de Bruin leaned against her husband and wept. Basson, impassive, postponed final sentence until the following day. But the emotions he had unleashed in the courtroom spilled onto the streets. Forty or fifty women, youths, and old men gathered, watched by an equal number of heavily armed policemen. They wept, then burst into song, protest songs of the type heard throughout South Africa at funerals, demonstrations, or political trials.
    One teenage boy broke from the crowd and exploded into a Toyi Toyi, a war dance symbolic of angry resistance to apartheid. Hissing, “Zaaa!! Za-Zaaa! Zaaa! Za-Zaaa! Zaaa! Za-Zaaa!” and stamping so hard that his knees jerked up to his chin, he spun around and around as if in a trance, arms flailing, fists so clenched they turned white. But he was not carrying a spear and the policemen had guns and dogs baring their fangs, and a video camera pointed right at him.
    The women looked at him and shook their heads. They trembled for him. They were right to. That night the police went berserk. Quite why, it was