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About the Author
John Carlin (b. 1956) is an English author who writes about sports and politics. During his early years, he lived in Argentina but returned to England for much of his school years. Carlin has worked as a journalist for numerous newspapers in various parts of the world, including South Africa. He has also written the scripts for documentary films and other television broadcasts about Nelson Mandela and South Africa.
Nonfiction
my Notes
Playing the Enemy:
Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation
by John Carlin
The President and the Captain:
1 Dressed in a dark suit and tie, Pienaar entered through a small door at the buildings’ west wing, ducked through a metal detector, and presented himself before two policemen waiting for him at a desk behind a green-tinted window of thick bulletproof glass. Both being Afrikaners,1 they immediately started engaging him animatedly on rugby. The policemen dropped him off at a small waiting room, bare save for a table and some leather chairs, into which stepped Mandela’s personal assistant, a tall imposing black lady called Mary Mxadana who asked him to take a seat and wait a moment. He sat in the room alone
for five minutes, his palms sweating. “I was incredibly tense as the moment arrived when I would meet him,” he recalled. “I was really in awe of him. I kept thinking, ‘What do I say? What do I ask him?’”
***
2 Pienaar looked around the large wood-paneled office, vaguely registering a blend of décor old South African and new; ox-wagon watercolors side by side with shields of leather hide and wooden African sculptures. Mandela broke in. “Do you take milk, Francois?”
3 In less than five minutes Pienaar’s mood had been transformed. “It’s more than just being comfortable in his presence,” Pienaar recalled. “You have a feeling when you are with him that you are safe.”
***
4 Pienaar would not have guessed it at the time, but winning him over — and through him, enlisting the rest of the Springbok team — was an important objective for Mandela. For what Mandela had reckoned, in that half instinctive, half calculating way of his, was that the World Cup might prove helpful in the great challenge of national unification that still lay ahead.
1 Afrikaner: a South African of European descent
Unit 3 • Choices and Consequences 233
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