Journalist Alexandra Zavis covered the 1995 Rugby World Cup, as part of her wider reporting on South Africa’s transition to democracy. She remembers “the moment” in the final match that John Carlin’s book and Clint Eastwood’s film capture so powerfully – and she also provides 15 years’ worth of post-match analysis:
But with that one gesture, Mandela reassured the sport’s largely white fans, many of whom had thought of him as a terrorist, that they too had a place in the new South Africa. A chant rose from the stands, difficult to make out at first, then filling the stadium: “Nelson. Nelson. Nelson.”
Of all the improbable images I carry in my head from covering those first heady days of South Africa’s new democracy for the Associated Press, this one stands out. The film “Invictus,” directed by Clint Eastwood and based on a book by journalist John Carlin called “Playing the Enemy,” captures this extraordinary moment when history really was made on a sports field.
Meanwhile, The New Yorker magazine has called Invictus “the best sports movie of the year”, and offers two readings of the film that mix the past with the present.
The first takes a closer look at New Zealand’s haka…
One of the many great moments in Clint Eastwood’s “Invictus”—and, for someone not versed in the ways of rugby, one of the more unexpected—comes in the final of the 1995 World Cup, when the South African Springboks and New Zealand All Blacks have lined up in the field and the New Zealanders start stomping and chanting in unison, turning the South African players even paler than they (or all but one of them) already are. This is the Haka, a Maori war dance now used to intimidate New Zealand’s sporting opponents.
…while the second wonders aloud whether the Obama administration can take any lessons from the film about truth and reconciliation:
Mandela announced his proposal for the T.R.C. four days after the Springboks won the world cup. Given what a pivotal moment the victory was, those events can’t be entirely unrelated—had the Afrikaner sports fans we see, in the movie, painting their chests green and gold even sobered up four days later? Some glimpse of the discussion that preceded the T.R.C. might have made a good film even better. But then there are a couple of specters in the film, and there is a tension between them. One is the reality of apartheid—the pass laws, the brutality, the lack of even a pretense of rights. That one is, arguably, incompletely evoked; an American moviegoer who knew nothing might assume that apartheid-era South Africa was sort of like, say, Mississippi in the sixties (which would be bad enough), with a bit more poverty and stranger accents. And then there’s the specter of Zimbabwe, where Robert Mugabe became the sort of dictator Mandela might have become if he weren’t better than that—better than most of us.
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