At one level it is possible to sympathise with Trevor Manuel with regard to his support for the All Blacks over the Springboks. If there is a game that conjures up the bad old days of apartheid it is rugby, a sport that tends to attract the passions of the sort of people (among others) who beat farm labourers to death. But, for all that, Manuel is quite wrong to make a public parade of his political support for the visiting New Zealanders.
When South Africa characterises itself as “one nation” it is less a statement of fact than the expression of an aspiration. Only a fool would imagine that ours is a united country. It was, in fact, the recognition of the fractured nature of our society — and the violently destructive consequences if we did nothing about it — that led us to the constitutional settlement.
Inherent in that settlement was a vision of national unity fabricated in the hope that the wish would prove to be father of a future reality — that if we repeated the mantra often enough of “one people, one nation” we would in time create the society that would allow the survival of our children.
At this early stage in that exercise in nation- building it is easy to ridicule the pretension, to cry out like the little boy that “the emperor has no clothes on”. Some foreign observers do so, priding themselves on their perspicacity in seeing through our delusions. They are also fools for failing to understand the desperate game we play.
And we have been playing it well.
Nelson Mandela played it well at last year’s World Cup final. Watching him one could almost believe that it was the realisation of a childhood dream for this paragon of black nationalists to don the Springbok captain’s jersey in front of a crowd of screaming whites at Ellis Park.
The Springboks themselves do it well when they mouth the national anthem. Watching them, one could almost believe they know the words of Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika. Morne du Plessis played it well when he appealed to fans to stop displaying the old South African flag. Hearing him one could almost believe the performance of the Springbok team depended on it.
It is in this spirit that we would invite Trevor Manuel to join us in playing the game. If he will do so we will continue to play our part … by pretending to believe our minister of finance has the faintest clue about economics.