18.02.2010

Who will build the nation?

Alan Fox reviews Clint Eastwood's 'Invictus' (on general release)

This film has, understandably, had very mixed reviews. On the one hand, it plays on the viewer’s emotions by appealing to a liberal anti-racism and the simplistic notion of equality for all; on the other hand, it deals with a key moment in Nelson Mandela’s attempt to draw a definitive line against the apartheid era and establish a stable, united, bourgeois South Africa.

That moment was, of course, the 1995 rugby World Cup held in the country just a year after the first free elections, when Mandela was elected president and the African National Congress swept to power. Mandela (convincingly and sometimes movingly portrayed by US actor Morgan Freeman) viewed this significant sporting occasion as an opportunity to take a major step along the path towards the construction of a South African nation.

Mandela’s ambitious plan was to transform the overwhelmingly white South African team - fanatically supported by a sports-mad, privileged minority, but rejected by the black masses as a symbol of the former regime - into an object of association and self-identity for all South Africans.

The lone black team member, Chester Williams, is promoted as a national icon - his giant image painted on the underside of South African Airways jets alongside the slogan, “Go, Chester!” But, more importantly, Mandela cultivates a close relationship with Springbok captain François Pienaar (equally competently played by another Hollywood star, Matt Damon) in order to persuade him of the central political role that the South African rugby campaign must embrace.

Mandela inspires Pienaar by giving him a copy of the WE Henley poem, ‘Invictus’, with which he constantly comforted himself during his long years on Robben Island:

… Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll.
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

Pienaar himself has told of the impact that first meeting with Mandela had on him - he had never met a man quite like him before - and he willingly accepted the role the president had called upon him to play. After the semi-final, Pienaar takes the whole rugby squad to Robben Island to view Mandela’s tiny cell. In the run-up to the tournament he had persuaded the players to begin coaching kids in the townships - amidst much media publicity, obviously. An even harder task, however, was winning the team to learn the Xhosa words of the new national anthem - a “terrorist song”, as some of them complain.

In fact it was a memorable moment when the entire team belted out the words of Nkosi sikelel’ iAfrika before the World Cup final - the entire team, that is, except Pienaar himself, who later confessed he was too overcome to join in. Strangely the film plays this down, preferring to concentrate on an equally decisive moment - that of the president in his Springbok rugby shirt being introduced to the teams, to the chants of the overwhelmingly white spectators: “Nelson, Nelson, Nelson”.

Earlier Mandela had faced down the ANC executive after its unanimous vote to instruct all sports associations to drop the springbok emblem - the symbol of the oppressor - in favour of the protea. The film depicts the episode when ‘Madiba’, hearing of the vote, orders his chauffeur to drive him to the executive meeting, where he succeeds in narrowly reversing the decision.

One might ask, what does it matter if a gazelle is replaced by a wild flower as a national emblem? But symbols are politically important, and this was a passionate matter for liberation veterans. Yet Mandela persuaded them of the necessity of making concessions to the former ruling minority - “they cherish the springbok”, just as they cherished Die stem, the old national anthem, which was retained, on Mandela’s insistence, alongside Nkosi sikelel’ iAfrika.

But this was typical of a man adept at making the most remarkable of compromises in his single-minded pursuit of the ‘new South Africa’. Perhaps the most notable is his ceding of KwaZulu-Natal to the Zulu-tribalist Inkatha Freedom Party in the 1994 election, despite all the evidence that the ANC would have won there too, but for the massive disruption to polling caused by Inkatha violence. In every subsequent election the ANC has captured the province. But Mandela was focussing on the bigger picture and was prepared to pacify Inkatha in order, eventually, to marginalise it.

The strength of Invictus lies in capturing the huge importance of the following year’s sporting event for the shaping of South African politics, but its weaknesses are also notable. Firstly, it cannot make up its mind whether or not it is primarily a sports movie. The last 20 minutes or so (at least it seemed that long) is devoted to the restaging of the final against New Zealand - and with limited success, it has to be said (that Kiwi kicker is so embarrassingly bereft of skill, he surely would not make a Sunday afternoon team in the local park).

Secondly, the film tries to make out that Mandela’s triumph lay not in the fact that he had succeeded in initiating a lengthy process of nation-building, but in the implication that South Africa’s social antagonisms had been undercut virtually overnight. Thus the well-off customers of city centre pubs, like the working class drinkers in township bars, are glued to their televisions as the dramatic finale is played out, and both pour onto the streets to celebrate South Africa’s victory as one. Pienaar’s maid is embraced by his mother and (ex-)racist father, as the winning goal is kicked. The white policemen stop threatening to beat the street boy scavenging for tin cans and instead raise him onto their shoulders, as they listen to the culmination of the match on the radio. As the credits roll, township lads are seen playing rugby in their new kits on immaculate, green turf.

But, of course, middle class and township blacks still drink in their very different bars, Pienaar’s maid is still a servant, the street boy is still homeless and the black lads still play soccer on mud pitches with sticks for goalposts.

Nevertheless, the film is useful in reminding us of Mandela’s success in exploiting the rugby World Cup, aided by a good slice of luck - the unfancied South African team did him a huge favour by actually winning the tournament - in order to further his political project. It was indeed a turning point.

Despite Mandela’s aim of constructing a stable South Africa built on class peace and fit for capitalist accumulation, the construction of a South African nation is in fact objectively progressive. A common, national, culture that cuts across ethnicity, tribe and ‘race’ facilitates the creation of a class for itself, forged by the coming together of working class Zulu and Xhosa, ‘coloureds’ and Indians, and, yes, white workers too. This is a process that needs to proceed in tandem with a burgeoning internationalism. South African workers cannot achieve social liberation in isolation from, in particular, their brothers and sisters across the continent.

Apartheid did its damnedest to prevent any such development, aiming to permanently cement the separation of South Africa’s peoples, with their multitude of languages. The constitution names 11 official tongues, spoken as a first choice by 99.5% of the population, but just three of them - Zulu, Xhosa and Afrikaans - are used at home by more than 10%. English is only the sixth most common first language, but is increasingly promoted by the media and the state as the lingua franca, despite not having any such official status in the constitution.

The promotion of English is in accord with the wishes of most South Africans, who see it as an essential tool of advancement for their children to acquire. But this, along with the whole nation-building process, is severely hampered by the divisions inherited from apartheid. Former white schools, now attended too by the children of middle class blacks, achieve overwhelming success rates at matriculation, while in black schools (here the word ‘former’ does not apply) a huge majority fail.

This is a question of class, not ethnicity - but it results in a dismal level of education for the majority, not least in their inability to speak and write English to a standard necessary even for a skilled worker.

But none of this need be decisive in holding back class action for socialism. Unlike the influential South African Communist Party, which contends that a lengthy period of class collaboration (under the rubric of the ‘national democratic revolution’) is necessary to overcome the country’s huge “racialised inequality”, genuine communists do not propose holding back the class struggle for emancipation. Such a delay will end up being an indefinite one.

It goes without saying that none of this is even hinted at by the film. However, for all that, Invictus succeeded, for this reviewer at least, in highlighting the question of nation. But it is the working class that must win hegemony over the struggle to forge a South African nation as an essential part of the fight for proletarian emancipation.