Read Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation for Free Online

there was the way he shook hands. He never stooped, he did not incline his head. All the movement was in the socket of the arm and shoulder. Add to that the massive size of his hand and its leathery texture, and the effect was both regal and intimidating. Or it would have been were it not for Mandela’s warm gaze and his big, easy smile.
    “He was a natural,” Coetsee recalled, sparkling with animation, “and I realized that from the moment I set eyes on him. He was a born leader. And he was affable. He was obviously well liked by the hospital personnel and yet he was respected, even though they knew that he was a prisoner. And he was clearly in command of his surroundings.”
    Mandela mentioned people in the prison service they knew in common; Coetsee inquired after Mandela’s health; they chatted about a chance encounter Coetsee had had with his wife, Winnie, on an airplane a few days earlier. Coetsee was surprised by Mandela’s willingness to talk in Afrikaans, his knowledge of Afrikaans history. It was all terribly genteel. But both men knew very well that the significance of the meeting lay not in the words they exchanged, but in those that were left unsaid. The fact that there was no animosity in the encounter was in itself a signal, transmitted and received by both men, that the time had come to explore the possibility of fundamental change in how black and white South Africans related politically to one another. It was, as Coetsee would see it, the beginning of a new exercise, “to talk, rather than to fight.”

    The absence of cameras, the anodyne hospital setting, the pajamas, the inconsequential affability of the chat all disguised the truth that Mandela had pulled off the seemingly impossible feat that the ANC had been striving toward for seventy-three years. How had he done it? Like everyone who is very good at what they do—be they athletes, painters, or violinists—he had worked long and hard to develop his natural talent. Walter Sisulu had spotted the leader in him the first day the two men met, in 1942. Sisulu, six years older than Mandela, was a veteran ANC organizer in Johannesburg; Mandela, twenty-five, had just arrived from the countryside. Mandela was a bumpkin to Sisulu’s city slicker, but as he sized up the young man standing tall before him, the canny activist in Sisulu saw something that he could use. “He happened to strike me more than any person I had met,” Sisulu said more than half a century after that first encounter. “His demeanor, his warmth . . . I was looking for people of caliber to fill positions of leadership and he was a godsend to me.”
    Mandela often joked that had he never met Sisulu, he would have spared himself a lot of complications in life. The truth was that Mandela, whose Xhosa name, Rolihlahla, means “troublemaker,” went out of his way to court complication, deploying a gift for striking poses to valuable political effect during the peaceful resistance movement of the 1940s and ’50s. Public acts had to be staged that would raise political consciousness and set an example of boldness to the black population at large. Mandela, as the so-called “Volunteer in Chief ” of the “Defiance Campaign” of that period, was the first to burn his black man’s identity document, known as “the pass book,” a humiliating method the apartheid government imposed to ensure black people entered white areas only in order to work. Before burning the document, he chose the time and place with a view to maximum media impact. Photographs of the time show him smiling for the cameras as he broke that cornerstone apartheid law. Within days, thousands of ordinary black people were following suit.
    As president of the ANC Youth League in the fifties, he stood out as a uniquely self-confident individual. During a meeting of the ANC’s top leadership, a black-tie event at which he showed up in a dapper brown suit, he shocked everyone present by giving a speech in which he