Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation Book

I'm not going to belabor the point here, as I ususally do.

We often act, despite everyone's acknowledgement to the contrary, as if our generation invented racism, homosexuality, godlessness, greed, gluttony, and, sometimes hate. If we don't buy in to that common portrayal of who caued history's woes we sometimes still seem to see these things as "ours to fix" and take ownership where it's difficult to establish who is responsible for what. "We must stop this NOW!" yet, if the problem has lasted for centuries, why bring the same arguments and tools to the table that have never worked in the past?

Now we sit in ivory towers under white buildings, that look as if someone has set an overturned coffee cup on top of a rectangular whit box, and draw battle lines on paper instead of in the sand. Money becomes blood. Law becomes the sword, and we call ourselves civilized while, in practice, little changes save what one side or the other's needs for a new battle.

Try as we might, we look back at our history, in our past, and scour present with fine toothed combs, struggling to find heroes with perfect faces that can be mounted on milk cartons and billboards to show off dazzling smiles. Failing to do that, we make up or own, and post their images, choosing to believe as truths that really came from the darkest imagination in which they had been created. In ignorance, we ignored the true heroes who toil in obscurity to overcome massive mountains of trumped up thought with ages of experience at believing imagined rights and wrongs. Faces that failed the test of photogenics and lighting, or voices that seemed drol and ordinary instead of heroic.

While most of us in the US were absorbed in our own misery and joy, either make believe or real, in South Africa from 1985 to 1995 a battle raged. Sometimes the battle involved blood and bone, blade and bullet. Sometimes these battles involved paper and law, authority and anarchy. Sometimes it involved thoughts and emotions, both real and self-cultivated, and, sometimes, politics. This was nothing as simple as a war of guns and bullets, though there was plenty of that to go around, this was a war for hearts and minds. A war over that fragile, illusive thing we choose as our Identity as a person and a nation and the relationship between us.

While most of the United states continued about their lives in blissful ignorance, tipping the metaphorical hat at news stories and other odd things in press and on television, the most important battle of our time had been started, fought, and won, steming the tide of bloodhsed, rather than causing more to bleed. It was perhaps the most important battle of all time about human rights and human dignity and the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness with no barriers or glass ceilings decided by the colour of your skin and no privlidges ripped away by an angry fledgling government of wounded victimized warriors.

This book reads like a 300 page newspaper article. John Carlin is, after all, a journalist. It starts with a long history lesson, that is as distasteful as it is interesting and wicked as it is wise. In the middle the book turns to a tale of manipulation, cunning and charm. By the end, it's a tale of triumph. A bloodless coup where there were no casualties and the enemy joined the victors in celebration, dancing in the streests...and the rest of the world slept with only a few even registering the importance of what was going on. Our acknowlegement of what had passed held in check our need to have villains and faces to rail at and call shameful names, and make believe heroes to occupy our guilt.

This book reads like the weather in Maine. The first part is the cruel winter that seems to last well more than it's fair quarter. A brief spring that is far to short, a blistering summer and a beautiful autum with gold and red leaves dancing in the wind. As they say in Maine, "If you don't stay for the winters, then you do not deserve the spring and summer."

Let no man be so foolish as to think that sports, a national sport is only a thing of fancy or a bottle passion for sale to the highest bidder. Surely, those things can happen, but here, the galvanizing agent that started a healthy conversation about how Blacks and Whites in South Africa could live in peace without fear of eachother started with a "A Hoolagin's sport played by gentleman." A brutal sport of Contact and bone jaring collision, amazing speed and skill played by strong men with the hearts of lions.

For Whites, as one Rugger in the book put it. "For once we were not the bad guys, everybody's favorite villains. The people were behind us. The whole world was behind us and we felt it. We had regained our dignity after years of being everyone's enemy." For blacks, led by Nelson Mandella, it was a chance to show, that victors are not always vengeful. Sometimes they are thoughttful and caring and understanding of simple pleasures. That your fears of us are not waranted, this is how we prove it.

It's a great book. Everyone should read it.