Entering the Scrum By Bil Keller, writing in the New York Times
Published: August 15, 2008
PLAYING THE ENEMY
Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation
By John Carlin
Illustrated. 274 pp. The Penguin Press. US$24.95
Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation
By John Carlin
Illustrated. 274 pp. The Penguin Press. US$24.95
The heart-lifting spectacle of South Africa’s first free election in April 1994 was, for Nelson Mandela and his followers, a triumph unimaginably sweet, but perilously incomplete. Mandela was keenly aware that his party’s victory, secured by a landslide of black votes, lacked the endorsement of alienated whites, and that whites retained sufficient wealth and weaponry to endanger his new democracy if they felt threatened. As John Carlin puts it in “Playing the Enemy,” paraphrasing Garibaldi on the birth of Italy, the election had created a new South Africa; now Mandela’s task was to create South Africans. This wonderful book describes Mandela’s methodical, improbable and brilliant campaign to reconcile resentful blacks and fearful whites around a sporting event, a game of rugby.
Read the full story in the New York Times online.
2 comments:
what page of the book was this quote on? help!!!
I don't have the book so I am sorry I can't look it up for you. That was posted over 5 years ago ! All I can suggest is link on to the New York Times link at the foot of my post. Or go to you public library and see if you can borrow the book?
Post a Comment