Cinemagoers who felt that Morgan Freeman didn’t quite hack it as the voice of Nelson Mandela will be delighted to find the Old Man playing himself in a documentary based, like Invictus, on John Carlin’s book, Playing the Enemy.
Directed by Clifford Bestall (Killers Don’t Cry, Frontline’s Apartheid’s People and the series The Long Walk of Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela) and narrated by Freeman, the The 16th Man, I must say, is a much better product than the feature film. Perhaps that stems from the fact that the statesman plays himself — there’s no voice-coached American trying to imitate that impossible Mandela tonal voice in the documentary. Freeman’s powerful, affective baritone steers the narrative, the rugby story the world doesn’t seem to get tired of.
The 16th Man uses archival footage of the rugby matches of the 1995 World Cup — white militias clad in black training in the veld — and contains interviews with former players such as François Pienaar, Joel Stransky, politician Tokyo Sexwale and others. The film’s unlikely, uneasy fulcrum is in Upington, then the hometown of Justice Bekebeke, one of the 14 people condemned to death by an apartheid judge on May 26 1989 for the murder of a policeman.
A trigger-happy cop, without provocation, shot at a group of Upington residents coming from a meeting convened to discuss a municipal rate hike. The enraged residents ran after him, disarmed him, beat him up and then killed him. In the assault Bekebeke played a disproportionate role — he was the one who, according to a newspaper report by Carlin, “crushed his skull with the butt of the gun”.
Bekebeke, who was working as a nurse before he went to prison, later trained as a lawyer in tribute to their lawyer, Anton Lubowski, himself a victim of apartheid’s death squads, who was shot outside his home in Windhoek.
Bekebeke left prison in January 1992 and is now an electoral commission bureaucrat, wearing a pinstripe suit, a different character from the anguished inmate who lived through prison hell. Every week he heard people screaming, being dragged to the gallows.
A clear speaker (he’s a lawyer, after all), emotive, given to drama and gesture, he provides the human element in what could have been a hackneyed narrative — how the rugby World Cup probably averted a civil war. Predictably, Bekebeke took the view (perhaps initially held by many black South Africans) that rugby was the oppressors’ sport and that Mandela was bending over rather too far to accommodate the Afrikaner.
The conclusion seems a bit contrived, but The 16th Man is an immensely watchable, competently made film.