This isn’t a movie for rugby nuts. All you need is a soft spot for letting a classic narrative lead you through an epic and emotional journey.
Invictus is the screen version, simplified and embellished accordingly, of how Nelson Mandela cannily co-opted a symbol of apartheid.
It’s a reminder about how he successfully converted Springbok rugby into a personal and national triumph.
The film evokes nostalgia by nursing a moment that’s now lost to the past. It skilfully reconstructs the euphoria of the 1995 Rugby World Cup victory, revives long-forgotten feelings and inspires the hope that there could a repeat.
It’s now many years since Mandela donned the number six Springbok jersey in an audacious demonstration of his politics. That gesture helped the country’s rugby team power to victory in international rugby — and, more to the point, with wide-based national support.
The poignancy of Invictus today is in the contrast between the once agile leader playing out a far-sighted strategy, and the frail old man now long departed from centre stage — leaving lesser leaders in the limelight.
Reinforcing this sense of distant times, the Springbok jerseys in the movie carry sponsorship logos for Lion lager — a beer that’s now extinct.
They serve as unintended pointers that the overly rose-tinted sentiments of the time have been buried in subsequent history.
Also remote is the ethos of a global sports competition being primarily about nationality and nation-building; money is almost invisible in Invictus. In contrast, the current zeitgeist has shed such romanticism in favour of a fairly single-minded focus on the economic spoils.
But the celebratory reconstruction of the 1995 Cup as a key moment in the moulding of a South African identity cannot but raise the question of the future. It begs the question of what national sentiments might evolve out of the coming Soccer World Cup.
With enthralling magic having been conjured up in 1995, might it be that South Africans could experience déjà vu in 2010? After all, against many odds, the unifying Rugby World Cup experience was not exactly expected.
And that the rugby legacy was not long-lived does not reduce its magnitude — or the possibility of a repeat.
The Invictus story therefore raises the question: What will be the buzz around the Soccer World Cup in comparison to the Rugby World Cup? To answer this means recognising that the same conditions don’t exist to make things come together as happened in 1995.
First, there’s no Mandela hero out there, holding fast at the helm of a fragile and unstable new order that’s searching for direction.
And, as convivial as President Jacob Zuma attempts to be, he lacks media charisma. Mandela, in contrast, was as talented a communicator as Bill Clinton — as noted by John Carlin, the author of the Invictus story.
Secondly, there’s also not a national team that is likely to get through to the final in 2010.
Yet despite these differences, embers of aspirations for unity still exist. We can expect them to glow and highlight new meanings of what “South Africanism” means.
This time around, the tournament is about a sport which is historically popular with the mass of South African men. It’s also a game that’s less reliant on brute force to prevail.
Such “signs of the times” make the event more expressive of majority (male) culture than was the case in 1995. As the games unfold, it’s likely that South Africans across the board will develop national enthusiasm as hosts of the affair.
While South Africans are less racially united than was the case at that special moment in 1995, colour-based identities today are still less rigid and resentful than they were before the rugby experience.
Thus, many white men whose first love is rugby may, willy-nilly, find themselves reciprocating the support and interest that they received back in 1995. In this regard, some reconciliation enchantment will be back.
Another possibility is the extent to which South Africanism becomes located within an inspirational African identity.
Former president Thabo Mbeki, who had little time for Mandela’s stress on an inclusive South Africanism, liked to address people as (pan)-Africans. His invocation failed to take root, and the country still has septic wounds wrought by citizens who read their problems in xenophobic terms.
Back in 1995, as the book version of Invictus especially reminds us, an inclusive approach to rugby helped to undercut the real threat of white terrorism. What’s needed now is for the 2010 games to undercut the virus of xenophobia.
Given that the other African teams in the Soccer World Cup are likely to go further than Bafana Bafana, there’s a good chance that many South Africans will relocate their allegiance to these players.
In short, while the Soccer World Cup won’t be the same identity watershed that the Rugby World Cup was, it is likely to have some positive impact.
Go see Invictus and ponder about how the spectacle of sports, and its construction in books and movies, can play with identity.
It will stimulate you to imagine whether South Africans can take another step forward.
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This column is made possible by support from fesmedia Africa, the Media Project of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung in Africa, www.fesmedia.org. The views expressed in it are those of the author.