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

hard to tell. Perhaps it was because the mothers of the condemned had upset the prim, pristine equilibrium of white Upington’s town center by gathering there, to shed their tears and sing their sad songs. Perhaps it was because, in the one moment of light relief on a day of woe, the black women outside the court had burst into hoots of laughter and ribald applause when a police car slammed accidentally into the side of a passing Toyota. Perhaps it was just that Upington had not yet fully sated its revenge, was still outraged by the intrusion of black unrest into the comfortable certainties of their apartheid lives.
    For whatever reason, at nightfall that Thursday a police riot squad stormed past the slaughterhouse on the edge of town, turned left into Paballelo, and assaulted everyone who came into view. At least twenty people were severely beaten. Some were clubbed unconscious. Some were stamped on. Some were kicked in the abdomen till they bled. Of the twenty who had to be hospitalized, five were thirteen years old, and four fifteen.
    Next day, the final one of the Upington trial, the courtroom was again furnace hot. Yet Justice J. J. Basson, wrapped in his ceremonial red robes, did not break a sweat. He was going to pass death sentences that morning, but it was with an absent voice—like a bureaucrat impatient to head home at the end of a long day—that he invited each of the accused to make a brief address to the court, as the law allowed.
    Justice Bekebeke had been asked by the fourteen to speak on their behalf. He had planned to write something but in the end he could not. He just spoke from the heart.
    “In a country like South Africa,” he began, addressing himself to Basson, “I wonder how justice can really be applied. I certainly haven’t found it. But, my lord, I would like to ask, Let’s forget our racial hatred. Let us see justice for all humanity. We are striving for each and every racial group to live in harmony. But is it possible, in the name of the Lord? Is it possible in such a country? . . . I would like the Lord to give you many years so that one day you can see me, a black man, walking on the streets of a free South Africa. . . . And, my lord, may the Lord bless you, my lord.”
    At those words a small old man standing at the back of the courtroom muttered, “Amen!” He stood erect, propped up with the aid of a wooden ivory-headed cane, impeccably dressed in three-piece suit and tie. He was the father of one of the accused, and—about Mandela’s age—a picture of elderly distinction. But when Judge Basson announced his verdicts, he sat down very slowly and his whole body crumpled, his head in his hands. It was death by hanging for Justice Bekebeke and the thirteen others. Basson made the announcement in a deadpan voice before dismissing the court for the last time. The prisoners went down to the holding cells under the courtroom, where Lubowski joined them. He was devastated. “We were the ones consoling him” recalled Bekebeke.
    The Upington 14, as they soon became known, were bundled into a big yellow police truck and driven off to Pretoria Central, the maximum-security prison more commonly known then in South Africa as Death Row. Brown fingers clung to the vehicle’s metal grille. Led by Bekebeke, the condemned sang “Nkosi Sikelele,” the one gesture of defiance they had left.
    They arrived at Death Row on the following afternoon, a Saturday, and at dawn on Monday a woman prisoner was hanged. More prisoners were killed on a weekly basis during the rest of 1989. Since 1985, South Africa had carried out six hundred legal executions. A prisoner would be given a week’s notice of his death, and then placed in a cell known as “the pot,” two cells away from where Justice Bekebeke had his permanent lodging. Before the morning of an execution he would hear the condemned prisoners crying all night long. He would hear the jailers opening the cell at dawn, he would hear prayers being