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Captaincy: In the public field, and unreported

Thursday, December 10, 2009

TODAY IN OSLO, NORWAY at 7.00 am (American Media Time) Barack Obama receives his much-queried Nobel award. It's worth noting what rare company he joins. In close on a hundred years of the Nobel Peace Prizes, there have been only seven laureates of African descent.

Fairly or not, that's counting African-Americans Martin Luther King Jr in 1964 and United Nations Undersecretary-General and Mid-East mediator Ralph Bunche in 1950, but excluding the last white South African president F W de Klerk, who while born in Johannesburg traces his ancestry from Holland and France.

 

Of these seven honorees none stands quite so gigantically as Nelson Mandela. A realist and a sharp analyst as well as a humble man, he knows how much his achievements surpass even those of his own one-time leader and hero, Chief Albert Luthuli, who won the award in 1960.

 

Tomorrow, another form of exalted recognition - this time a Hollywood contribution to the Mandela legend - opens in theaters nationwide. Invictus depicts one of those episodes in Mandela's life, from early in his presidency, that's been taken as emblematic of his capacity for melding unity out of disparity and even conflict.

 

Director Clint Eastwood, working once again with the actor Morgan Freeman - who's regarded by many (Mandela and Freeman themselves included) as destined to play Mandela, has retraced the story of how the South African national rugby team - traditionally and at the time well-nigh irredeemably a white institution - was enlisted by the new black president for an unlikely 1995 exercise in unifying the racially divided country.

 

They’ve worked to a script by South African screenwriter Anthony Peckham, based on a book by my former colleague, British journalist John Carlin. Allowing for some - okay, a lot - of dramatic and hagiographic license, the film presents a broadly convincing account of one remarkable step forward in Mandela’s nation-building efforts – though how substantial it has proved to be over time in the real South Africa is still not settled.

 

Most of all Invictus is a showcase for a brilliant and often cunningly poignant portrayal by Morgan of the multifaceted - sometimes downright contradictory - dimensions of Mandela the politician and the man. In this, the movie manages to justify its oddball title.

  

 

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INVICTUS – “UNBEATEN” in Latin - is of course an otherwise forgettable poem on self-reliance by the minor Victorian literary figure William Ernest Henley, which concludes with the line “I am the captain of my soul”, and which by now at least, thanks to the movie, is known to be a favorite of Mandela’s (- oh, and I can't help pointing out, of Obama’s defeated opponent John McCain too … and of executed Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh).
 
But quite how deeply it figured in Mandela’s lifetime struggle may not be generally appreciated. When first consigned to his eventual 27 years in prison – most of them spent on the notorious Robben Island, South Africa’s Alcatraz - Mandela (seen above left, in the prison-yard in 1966) encountered a vicious regime of oppression from the guards. It fell to him, pre-eminent among a small group of leading political prisoners, to uphold the dignity (and often the physical safety) of the inmate population. The poem sustained him then, and from then on.
 
I’ve had tremendous help this week in reconstructing some of those early horrific days from Eddie Daniels, now 81 (above right today; and center with Mandela in an undated photo from the 1990s) who was a fellow prisoner, though not a member of Mandela’s African National Congress.
 
In the isolation block where the allegedly dangerous opponents of apartheid were housed, Daniels was something of an outsider, but Mandela’s first greeting to him was “Call me Nelson” – the first kind words he had heard behind bars. (A noteworthy point about the future president and Nobel laureate: Daniels was once taken so ill he couldn’t get up from his thin mattress on the floor, but was surprised to find that Mandela managed to sidle into his cell and emptied his chamber-pot for him. For his part, Mandela has recalled that Daniels became “one of my greatest friends in prison".)
 
During their snatched talks, Mandela taught Daniels the words of Henley’s poem. Remaining “captain of my soul” meant for the ANC leader practicing enormous restraint in the face of severe provocations from the guards.
 
Daniels is convinced that Mandela’s authoritative presence protected him and others from some vicious assaults. He and the rest recall especially a freezing day in May 1971 when a group of drunken guards burst into the cells, forced the inmates to strip naked, and stand with their arms up for half an hour while a search was conducted. ANC veteran Govan Mbeki (father of the future successor to Mandela as president, Thabo Mbeki) collapsed and had to be hospitalized … Mandela’s friend for fifty years, Ahmed Kathrada has called it “the worst day in my memory” … the Namibian freedom-fighter Toivo ja Toivo tried to resist, and was fiercely beaten - and then made to clean up his blood-spattered cell.
 
But Mandela remained calm … and led a formal delegation of protest to the tyrannical commanding officer, Colonel Piet Badenhorst. He also smuggled out to the political world detailed accounts of the prisoner abuse. Three months later Badenhorst and the most brutal of his warders were transferred.
 
 
THE FIRM RESOLVE demonstrated in Mandela’s captaincy of his soul could vary, however. He was tested most of all when things got very personal.
 
His then wife Winnie Mandela was refused visitor’s access to him in 1975 – officers told her (a total lie) that her husband didn’t want to see her. Mandela went into a rage. He confronted the lieutenant in charge, moving as to strike him, but in the end simply loosed off a stream of abuse and left the office.
 
On his return to the cellblock he was seen still panting, and both Kathrada and Daniels were astonished to hear him cursing. He was promptly put on a charge of threatening an officer … but by then his calm had returned and he defended himself with a well-argued counter-accusation, and the charge was dropped.
 
The evidently more romantic side of Mandela called up other verses besides Invictus to sustain his spirit, and that of his fellow-prisoners. The old Scottish standard Bonnie Mary of Argyle was another lyric that he taught to Daniels and others. He sang it solo when once at Christmastime inmates were allowed to present, from their isolation cells, some celebratory song, joke or recitation.
 
Daniels recalled the evening hauntingly for me, using Mandela’s honorific clan name, Madiba:
 
“Madiba’s cell was almost at the beginning of the prison corridor while mine was almost at the end … and to listen to Madiba’s melodious voice singing this beautiful romantic ballad as it gently floated along this cold, grim corridor was quite thrilling.” 
 
 
A QUARTER OF A CENTURY LATER a now-freed Eddie Daniels, and his wife Eleanor (as Scottish as the song, I’m happy to report, but now sadly dead) were allowed to visit Mandela, as moves were rapidly proceeding for his 1990 release, and he was being housed in a fairly comfortable prison bungalow.
 
They hugged each other and all three sang “Bonnie Mary” together. And maybe to complete the 27-year circle, Daniels told me, “I recited the poem INVICTUS to him”.
 
 
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