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"FacebookPinterestInvictus still.jpg\n\nInvictus, Clint Eastwood's new film about the 1995 Rugby World Cup in South Africa, shows how a smiley Nelson Mandela endorsed an old symbol of Afrikaner power\u2014the underdog South African national rugby team\u2014to bring a racially divided nation together. And then the underdogs win the tournament and end racism forever! Or something.\n\nWe all know that history is not so neat. Invictus will warrant Oscar consideration as a Serious Film about the power of forgiveness, starring Morgan Freeman in a role he was born for and Matt Damon saying amusing things like \"howzit.\" Despite the encouraging ending of the movie, the real South Africa was and remains an uneasy society racked by corruption, discrimination, and AIDS.\n\nIn 2010, the country has to once again put on its best face to the world for the FIFA World Cup. And it has to do so during its cold, wet winter.\n\nFor insight into the events depicted in Invictus and what the world can expect to see in South Africa next year, GQ wrote to Afrikaner anti-apartheid dissident, acclaimed poet, and essayist Breyten Breytenbach.\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\nBorn in the Western Cape, Breytenbach left South Africa for Paris in the 1960s. He married a French woman with a Vietnamese heritage and hence was forbidden to reenter his homeland by the Prohibition of Mid Marriages Act of 1949 and the Immorality Act of 1950. In 1975, Breytenbach tried to use a false passport to visit home and was jailed seven years for high treason. It took nothing less than the intervention of Fran&amp;amp;#xC3;&amp;amp;#xA7;ois Mitterrand to get him out. He wrote about the experience in his book The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist. Breytenbach remains a vigilant observer of the Rainbow Nation, even as he teaches at NYU and lives in France. Intimate Stranger, a collection of his reflections on writing, was released by Archipelago Books in August.\n\nDid the Rugby World Cup, portrayed in Invictus as a crucible bringing formerly antagonistic racial groups together, really have that much political significance?\n\nSouth Africans of all origins and cultures are sports-mad. This in and of itself is a uniting factor even if rugby is still largely a \"white\" sport and soccer is nearly totally \"black.\" The World Cup was the first major international sport event to be hosted by the new nation. I think nearly everybody experienced the victory of the Springboks as a source of celebration for the country.\n\nNow, in hindsight, it may have been the high point of elation\u2014and illusion\u2014of the sense of shared purpose and future. The victory and ensuing celebration certainly make for uplifting cinema material, but the political significance was short-lived. The poor were still poor, and getting poorer and more desperate by the day; the rich, if they could, took their money elsewhere.\n\nMorgan Freeman plays Mandela as a sly politician who turns rugby from a white pastime into a national rallying cause. Is that a fair representation of Mandela's governing style?\n\nTata Mandela is first and foremost an astute politician. He is also a man of immense courage, endurance, and real moral stature. He practiced politics in a firm, paternalist way\u2014authoritarian when the occasion merited it.\n\nHis alpha and omega is the African National Congress. He will never disavow the ANC, which has become a significantly different animal from what it was in the days of Gandhi and Chief Luthuli, though it still feeds off the fat of historical injustice. To consolidate the gains of \"liberation\" without disturbing the riches of the country must have been a major goal. Usurping the symbols of the minority for the benefit of the majority would be a fair tactic. Some will say that in applying those skills he gave away too much to the whites and held back the revolution.\n\nIn his interview with GQ, Clint Eastwood acknowledges that this film is different from others in his oeuvre because it is about forgiveness and not revenge. How sincere was the goal of reconciliation during the Mandela presidency or subsequent administrations? \n\nBy the end of the eighties and all through the early nineties there was a genuine aspiration to put an end to apartheid, shared not only by nearly all the Africans but also by significant majorities among whites, Coloreds [one of four legally recognized racial categories used in South Africa] and Indians.\n\nThe concept for permitting a smooth and non-violent transfer of power from white minority government to the African National Congress representing the majority was \"reconciliation.\" A feature of the process was the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, probably conceived as a holding mechanism to defuse revolutionary ardor and allay white fears\u2014a contradiction in terms, for the more truth the less likely reconciliation could be, and for reconciliation to be accepted the truth had to trimmed and packaged. History will show, I believe, that Mandela was the leader who led his people, the black people, to freedom from centuries of colonialism and racist Apartheid oppression.\n\nGiven the historical context of the nineties and the rapidly developed material appetites of the ANC leadership, it was decided to keep the economic system with its advantages to the rich relatively intact. This may have looked like pragmatic \"reconciliation\" but in fact the ANC had reneged on its age-old mission of \"building a new nation.\" With the support of 80% of the African population (black, as opposed to white and brown Africans), as guardians of a capitalist system and with \"history on their side\" the ANC established de facto one-party rule with loyalty defined by patronage and obsequiousness, using the state as booty. The process is still called \"reconciliation.\" It now means the recognition and unchallenged acceptance of ANC \"victory.\"\n\nWith the arrival of the World Cup in South Africa, and renewed foreign attention due to a sporting event once again concentrating on the Rainbow Nation, what do you think international observers must realize about life and society in South Africa?\n\n\n\n That for the vast majority life in South Africa is short, brutal, brutish and desperate. That for the cadres it is a pig's trough. That for some whites it is still a paradise of cocktails and well-watered lawns at the same time it is a place of cynicism and fear to flee from if they can, and where racism is resurgent. That for most Coloreds it is a place of confusion, sometimes of posturing, often of bitterness.\n\nThat for foreign Africans it is mostly hell. A place where, it is predicted, two or more out of every five children in 15 years' time will be AIDS orphans. Where life expectancy has dropped by nearly seven years. Where Indians have collectively become the richest community. Where language policies are no longer a question of \"race,\" but of class. Where the wine is good and nature spectacular. Where people are immensely hospitable.\n\nWhere you will be killed for a cell phone and count yourself lucky not to have been tortured. Where everybody is a believer, and even robbers pray for success before going out on a killing spree. Where capital punishment has been abolished and, wherever possible, criminals are ecuted on the street in cold blood. Where the president is a crook, but also a great dancer.\n\nWhere history has not yet been written once and for all. Where the struggle continues."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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