682. South Africa: Mandela and the Death of Apartheid (Part 6)

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[Music] [Music] Hello everybody so those were the two opening verses of the South African National Anthem and Kozy Sikei Lille Africa which was sung by the Imilunci Cantu Coral Society at the Rugby World Cup final of 1995 so I remember very vividly watching that final a great match incredibly tense very exciting so the match was held in Johannesburg at Ellis Park the totemic stadium of the spring box South Africa and they were playing the all blacks or New Zealand now the all blacks were overwhelming favourites they were and are the dominant national team in any sport not just rugby the all blacks had steam roller their way through the tournament they kicked off of course with the with the hacker with their Mary dance which intimidates their opponents they had in Jonah Lomu the star of the tournament probably the most intimidating rugby player compared to his peers who has ever existed Lomu this absolute man man since everyone who remembers the all blacks paying England in the semi-final will remember him absolutely crunching his way through the England defence to score try after tried crushing the underwood brothers underfoot and he scored four tries and he's this massive massive presence isn't he Tom in the tunnel as the two teams are waiting to go into the pitch and basically the eyes of the sporting world are not on the spring box even though they're the hosts they're on the all blacks and everybody expects the all blacks to win yes and just to explain for people who have no idea about rugby or what it involves I will quote from John Carlin who wrote an entire book playing the enemy about this 1995 final he describes rugby as being like a giant chess match played at speed with great violence and the reason that Lomu is widely regarded as the greatest rugby parable time is that he's not only huge he's also very very fast and so you combine those and it makes him an absolutely terrifying prospect and so Dominic as you said when they're waiting to go out in the tunnel before the match starts the South Africans spring box cannot take their eyes off him and to quote Joel Straski who was the spring box fly half which for American listeners is kind of vaguely the quarterback would that be yeah the five half controls the game yeah basically they did take the pace of the game Straski said you know he couldn't take his eyes off Lomu he'd look like a mountain one that we had to climb at in the event Dominic South Africa did climb that mountain because the 1995 rugby world cup final turns out to be one of the great sporting upsets of all time and the spring box win in extra time by the skin of their teeth and it's Straski who scores all their points very unusual like other rugby this doesn't often happen and the measure of Straski's impact is that he gets to be played by Clint Eastwood's son Scott in this film that was made in 2008 in Victus by Clint Eastwood himself so listeners by this point maybe wondering two things firstly what on earth is Clint Eastwood doing making a film about a rugby match doesn't seem an obvious kind of thing for him to be doing and secondly why is a series that is marking the football world cup going on about a world cup in a completely different sport and the reason for this is that the 1995 rugby world cup final was historic for reasons that completely transcended sport and the singing of the national anthem the South African national anthem by the spring box at the start of this rugby world cup final is a crucial crucial part of what makes the match historic so before we go into the details of the anthem and why it matters so much to this extraordinary match first of all just to explain the significance of rugby in South Africa it is introduced obviously by the British who colonize South Africa but it evolves to become preemanantly the sport of another white people in South Africa and these are the Afrikaners a people who over the course of the 20th century had transformed their country into a pariah state cut off from the rest of the world by a whole kind of array of business boycotts cultural boycotts international boycotts and sporting boycotts and the sporting boycotts matter enormously because rugby is one of the absolute symbols of Afrikaner and of Afrikaner identity I mean sport generally but rugby in particular so what had the Afrikaners done who are they why have they become so globally notorious why does no one want to play them at rugby or eat their oranges or whatever so listeners who feel that we haven't had nearly enough Dutch history on this series so far will be delighted to learn that the Afrikaners were originally Dutch Calvinists plus a few Huguenots from France so Protestants from France Calvin always shows up a World Cup on the rest of history doesn't always does in the 17th century the Dutch and French Protestants had begun settling the Cape so the southernmost point of Africa but they didn't view themselves as colonists so much as a chosen people who had been brought into a promised land so people will remember from the episode we did on the Dutch Republic that this was a crucial part of how the Dutch rebel saw themselves as a chosen people on the model of the Israelites who were led out of Egypt by Moses and of course just as the Israelites end up being led into Canaan and conquering the Canaanites and taking it and turning it into Israel so do the Afrikaners see Africa in a similar manner it is a land that has been given to them by God and the fact that there are people already living there well that's all part of God's plan yeah and they went on a great trek didn't they rather like Exodus so the war trek and the trek becomes part of their mythology the trek to the Promised Land well they do this not because they're getting away from Black Africans but because they're getting away from the second wave of white colonial invaders who are of course the British and they end up absorbing the whole of South Africa the Afrikaners included into their empire even though the Afrikaners as you say they go deep into the interior the British follow them and they find that there are kind of diamonds and things so yeah obviously the British target let the Afrikaners have them so the Afrikaners find themselves part of the British empire they don't like it they fight a war another name by which they're known as the birds so this is what the bird wars are all about but all the while conservative Afrikaners they never doubt that God's plan is still working itself out that they are bound by a covenant to God that the British empire will end up collapsing and so the Afrikaners buy their time and sure enough in due course by 1948 the sun is setting on the British Empire and a government dominated by these Afrikaner conservatives gets elected to power and the voters at this point are only white so Black Africans do not have the vote And this government that gets elected in 1948, its stated ambition is to solidify the Afrikanas' sense of themselves as a chosen people into an entire political program. And what does this mean in practice? It means instituting a policy of what they call "separateness", which in Afrikaans is apartheid. And so white rule is enshrined as the expression of God's will, the Afrikanas obviously are not instituting apartheid because they think it's wicked or evil. They think that it is expressive of God's purpose. However, the practical consequences of this is to enshrine racial segregation as the animating principle of the entire South African state. So whether it is buying a house or falling in love or sitting or not sitting on a bench in a park or getting an education, so pretty much every aspect of daily life in South Africa, the opportunities that you have are dependent on the color of your skin. It is racist to the very kind of deaths of its marrow. Yeah. And to give people a sense, by the way, the black population of South Africa in this point, the 1940s, is about two thirds. The white population is about a fifth, then there's what's called a colored population, which was mixed race and laborers from India who have been brought in. So basically you've got 20% of the population who are based governing the lives of the other 80%. Yes. 20% who are white are enshrined as the masters and the black population in particular are essentially a kind of a servant class, a hellet class. Yes. And they are denied educational opportunities that would enable them to combat this. This is all part of the kind of the plan. And the role that rugby plays in this, so John Carlin in his book, points out that rugby becomes the Afro-Carnisport part of excellence and it serves as a perfect metaphor for the brutality that is inherent in a partite, so to quote him, "Successive South African national teams had built up a reputation during the 20th century as the most bruisingly physical rugby players in the world." So in other words, they essentially kind of trample down anyone in their path and shoulder them out of the way. Many of them now, they're the most physical of all teams, by far. And you can see why, therefore, to black South Africans, rugby becomes the seem symbolic of a partite and the kind of the very distinctive green jersey of the spring box, the South African national team. It becomes one of the defining emblems of the apartheid system that the black South Africans are kind of groaning under. Yes. And this is why anti-apartheid campaigners who are emerging over the course of the 50s, 60s, 70s into the 80s are very, very keen to see the South Africa band from all international sport, but particularly from rugby because they know, as you kind of implied, that is the band that will hurt and upset the Afrikanas the most. And it's not until 1981 that a full boycott of the spring box is successfully instituted. But it is brought in and this means that in 1987, when the first rugby world cup is held in Australia and New Zealand, South Africa are not invited, they are not present. So 2 in 1991, when the second world cup is held in England, because at that point apartheid is still holding. But then in 1995, South Africa are not just participants, but the hosts. So obviously, something very dramatic has happened, some radical change in the makeup of the South African government and constitution has occurred. And basically that change has been a process beginning in 1990 of the dismantling of the apartheid regime and a consigning of the entire doctrine of white supremacy to the ideological scrap heap. And it's a massive, massive story. You and I lived through it. Yeah. People who haven't may be startled to learn that there was a government so profoundly racist and now it's kind of completely collapsed. A numerous factors contribute to the process of this collapse, the collapse of apartheid. So chiefly, there come to be massive black resistance movements. There are campaigns of mass civil disobedience and by the late 1980s going into the 1990s, this essentially is making South Africa pretty ungovernable. Yeah. We've talked about the sporting boycotts, but I mean it's the, I think the economic sanctions kind of cripple the South African economy, not immediately, but it's a kind of slowly deflating puncture. South African business classes can feel the life kind of whistling out of the economy. Yeah. And I think the cultural sanctions actually are massively important as well because they create the sense of isolation, a sense that the rest of the world hates you. Remember that song in the, yeah, it's a bit of a musical song in the 1980s, I've never met a nice South African. Yeah. I mean there was a sense that South Africa I think was having been a sort of promised land for immigrants in their white imagination in the 20th century. Mrs. Thatcher's son, Tony Greg, who's the people, yeah, it becomes such a pariah that that cannot help but have a corrosive effect on African sense of self-worth, which goes to your next point, which is about there, they lose self-confidence. Yeah. Exactly. And they lose moral self-confidence. And I wrote about this in Dominion, I was amazed the degree to which kind of theological anxieties about whether a partite was part of God's plan actually played a crucial role in deflating the self-confidence of the apartheid regime because so many member, leading members of the South African government were very devout Christians. And they started to worry that actually apartheid was, as the rest of the world was saying, a kind of mortal sin, you know, basically they, it all kind of, you know, it's theologically deflated as well as economically and deflated in terms of law and order. But even so, they still might have decided to hold on. I mean, they, they're a massive minority. They have been suppressing the black majority for decades and decades and decades. They must be nervous about what their fate might be if they give up power. And so I think that even with everything that is going wrong for them, they might still have tried to maintain apartheid had it not been for the fact that there existed a black leader with whom the leaders of the apartheid regime could contemplate doing business and this black leader is, of course, one of the most famous political figures of the late 20th century. And that is Nelson Mandela, by far the most formidable, the most celebrated of all the revolutionaries that the campaign against apartheid throws up in South Africa, a member of Osir speaking royal family. He becomes the deputy president of the African National Congress and the African National Congress, the ANC is the leading organization in the struggle against the white rule. And Mandela found the spear of the nation, which is in effect the armed wing of the ANC. And in his kind of career as the leader of the spear of the nation, he became famous for his ability to evade attempts to arrest him and he becomes fated in the world's press as the black Pimpanel. So he finally arrested in 1962, probably as a result of a tip off from the CIA. He was convicted of criminal sabotage in 1964 and he gets sentenced to life imprisonment. It gives a great speech as a trial, really moving, rousing speech. Yeah. And so when he goes into prison, he is globally accepted as not just the kind of political, but the moral leader of the campaign against apartheid. And perhaps because of that, initially, he's kept in very brutal conditions. So he's kept in a tiny cell. He has the wash in icy cold sea water. He's put to hard labor in a stone quarry and the glare of the sun in the quarry is so bright that it permanently damages his eyesight. So very tough conditions. And throughout this period, he never renounced his violence. In 1985, the South African government say, "We'll let you go free if you will renounce violence." And he retorts only free men can negotiate prisoners cannot enter into contracts. He ends up being kept in prison for 27 years. And over the course of those years, he reflects on the limitations of violence. And this, I think, is in large part because of the spiritual, the ideological wellsprings that he's drawing on. So he'd been raised a Methodist. His faith is discreet, but committed, I think. In prison, he very rarely misses a service. He's reading the Bible all the time. And he takes seriously what he reads in the Gospels. So they're kind of incredibly subversive words of Jesus in the Gospels, love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you. And when it lasts on the 11th of February 1990, he is freed from prison. He's 71. Amazingly, he returns to the world determined not just to reclaim his freedom, but to do so in a spirit that is devoid of hatred and bitterness. And he's holding to this philosophy, not just as a kind of spiritual discipline, although I think that is absolutely what it is for him, but also because he is a true statesman. And he sees this philosophy as the surest way to bind up the kind of terrible wounds that have been afflicting South Africa for so long. And in short, his aim is to meet the people who had kept him in prison for so long and brutalized his people and discriminated against them and deprived them of every opportunity that could. He's determined to meet them with forgiveness and he is trusting that they will answer this forgiveness with a mood of repentance. And this essentially is where the rugby world cup comes in. So South Africa had been out in the cold in rugby for a long time and more than a decade, which was a massive blow to Africa on a census cell conference I think. But it had been re-admitted in 1992 and then awarded the World Cup as a gesture, I guess, you're back in the cold. So they were given the World Cup in '93 and then 1994 they have their first multi-racial election, don't they? Properly democratic election. Yeah, so they get the World Cup before the election. Yeah, but in the expectation, of course, that things are going to change politically in South Africa, which they do because the African National Congress Mandela's party wins a landslide majority in the first election. Mandela becomes the first black president and his relationship with rugby and the way in which he uses it is actually a really, really interesting example of the political use of sports. Yeah, because South Africa would never have been given the rugby world cup, had Mandela and the ANC not essentially given it the green light even before they become the government. And as you say Mandela has picked up on the significance that rugby plays in the kind of africana soul. And by the way, you can't emphasize enough how unusual this is because black South Africans did not by and large support the Springbok rugby team. Their sport was not rugby, it was football. Rugby was the game of the oppressor. So for Mandela to have any interest in this at all is groundbreaking. It's stunning. Well, it's part of a kind of broader program of self-education that Mandela puts himself through in prison to try, basically, to try and understand the enemy. So he is learning Afrikaans, he's learning about the history of the Afrikanas, their heroes, their mythology, you know, how they understand their role in Africa. Because of course, by this point, they have been in Africa for centuries and centuries. So they are essentially an African people. And Mandela absolutely kind of recognizes that, that they have to be part of the settlement that Mandela is hoping will come. And so as well as studying Afrikaan history, he also tries to befriend his jailers. He treats them with respect in the expectation, which increasingly the longer he's in prison comes to be met, that the jailers will treat him with respect in return. And he ends up great friends in particular with one guard, Chris, they brand. And it's brand who in the late 1980s starts to educate Mandela in rugby. As you said, it's not just about the rules, it's not just about the players, it's about the role that it plays in Afrikaana culture. And so Mandela comes out of prison entirely understanding how potentially significant rugby might be. And he sees, I think, the World Cup as a way of securing two separate goals. So the first is that it might help win the support of Afrikanas who are the most in veteran opponents of accommodation with Black Majority Rule. It might help them kind of accept this new multiracial settlement. As you said, for most Black Africans, rugby is the archetypal sport of the White oppressor, the Afrikaner oppressor. And so radicals in the ANC, they want to see, for instance, the distinctive green jersey of the spring box band. They want to see the name spring box band as well. And they push this demand. And Mandela flatly refuses. Mandela has also made a point of reaching out to the captain of the spring box, who is a guy called François Pina, getting Pina on board with the exciting progressive new slogan for the South African rugby team, one team, one country. And Pina is essentially what AI would come up with if you typed in Afrikaner rugby player. You know, he doesn't really look like Matt Damon, who plays him in Invictus and who just looks so unbelievably American, it's not true. Pina looks very, very South African. He looks incredibly hard, doesn't he? He's from a working class trans-vile family. So he's from one of the kind of great Afrikaner heartlands. And he looks like his hewn out of wood or something, very bronze, incredibly tall, gigantic, an absolute alpha male. But he's very smart. He's educated and he's a deeply Christian man. And he is invited to the presidential palace for tea. Meets Mandela is completely charmed by Mandela. And Mandela in turn is very impressed with Pina, said about him. He did not seem to me at all to be the typical product of an apartheid society. It was a pleasure to sit down with him. And Pina buys into Mandela's kind of goal. And between them, they manage to get the rest of the spring box on board. So that by the time the World Cup comes round, all the South African team are aware of their mission, which essentially is not just to win the tournament, although that would be a massive bonus, but essentially to serve as symbols of the new Africa. You know, one team, one nation, but it's not just about winning the support of white South Africans for the new constitution for Mandela. He also has another goal, and this is much more difficult, which is to get black South Africans to back the spring box as their team, as their boys. Yeah. I mean, obviously, they hate the spring box because they were seen as a symbol of apartheid. But as you said, it's also because football is the mass game for Black South Africans. Most Black South Africans don't understand rugby. And those who did understand it, if they watched rugby match, an international rugby match, would always as a point of principle support the spring box opponents. And it is an issue that going into the 1995 tournament, the South African team only has one non-white player in the entire squad. And this is a guy called Williams. Chester Williams, who is known as the Black Pearl. So it is, I think, for Mandela, a massive gamble. He's got to get the white rugby supporters backing the new multi-racial settlement. And he's got to get the Black South Africans supporting the spring box as a emblem of this new South Africa. So how does he do it? I mean, the key thing, obviously, is they went the walk up. Yeah, that's a huge help, isn't it? So there is a conspiracy theory, isn't there? I know we have some listeners in New Zealand, and they will be absolutely pulling their hair out at this point and throwing their phones across the room, because they will tell you, Tom, that their team were poisoned before the game. They had food poisoning. So like Gordon Banks? Yeah, well, much more than Gordon Banks. So lots of the team, they say had food poisoning. They were poisoned by the South Africans, and that's what the South Africans want. Now at this point, South African listeners will be a match. Well, their manager said that it was dodgy milk. Yeah. I mean, what is definitely a factor, I think, is the presence of Mandela himself. Huge gap at the match. And Mandela, who's an incredibly cunning, cunning operator at every level. I mean, he plays a blinder. So before the tournament begins, he does everything he can to get, the ANC, the kind of larger black constituency beyond them in South Africa, backing the spring box. He's absolutely insisting this is not a time for school settling. This is a time for generosity. He goes to the spring box training camp before the tournament begins. He shakes all the hands of the various players. He's made sure he knows what their names are. He addresses them by name. And then he goes out and he publicly urges everyone in South Africa to back them. He says, we have adopted these young men as our boys, as our own children, as our own stars. And it helps, as you say, that the spring box keep winning and winning and winning. And they end up in the final. Mandela's most iconic performance of all comes on the day of the final, because he turns up very famously, wearing a spring box shirt, the green shirt that had been an emblem of apartheid for so many decades. And on it, he has the number six, which is Pina's number on the back. And wearing this green shirt, he goes down into the bowels of this immense stadium. And first of all, he visits the all blacks in their dressing room. And then he goes to see the spring box. And this has a huge psychological impact on both teams, because the all blacks to have the man who's probably the most admired person in the world at this point turn up in a spring box journey. I mean, their synapses are absolutely fizzing with this. They can't kind of synthesise it. And it's reported that Lomu was daunted to meet Mandela. And perhaps this had a kind of dispiriting impact on him. Whereas for the springbacks, of course, they are massively inspired by meeting Mandela. But the greatest moment is yet to come, because Mandela, after he's been to the dressing rooms, then steps out onto the rugby pitch itself onto the field of what Carlin in his book describes as Afro-Canadaum's holy of holies, the national rugby stadium. And it could so easily have gone wrong. Now, he could have been booed. I mean, worst of all, he could have been shot. You know, there might have been a kind of racist sniper up there in the stands. But it's a triumph. And the overwhelmingly Afro-Canada crowds start chanting Nelson, Nelson. So it's like us when we're talking about the Battle of Trafalgar. And you can hear it on YouTube. It's a kind of amazing kind of rapturous greeting of a man who by most of the people in that stadium had been seen as a terrorist only a few years before. And Mandela takes off his cap, he waves it in the air, you see it on the on YouTube, he's smiling, he's looking as happy as it's possible for a man to look. And Monet de Plessy, who was the spring box manager, great former South African rugby player from Captain. Yeah. He said it of this moment, it was a moment of magic, a moment of wonder. It was the moment I realised that there really was a chance this country could work. This man was showing that he could forgive totally, and now they, white South Africa, rugby white South Africa, they showed in their response to him that they too wanted to give back. Oh, that's a very good version of the accent that we people around the world have come to love. Thank you. Maybe he's a rugby player, I should have made it sound slightly more formidable. So yeah, I sounded familiar. I was focusing on the vowels. Yeah, it sounded familiar, but in a slightly cam way. Anyway, the clock shakes out towards the start of the match. And of course, you know, it's a final of a world cup. Yep. And they're going to begin by seeing their national anthems. So a tense moment. Well, not just tense. I mean, it is the most symbolically freighted moment of the entire match, the entire tournament. Perhaps the entire spell of time since Mandela had been released from prison. So the two teams, New Zealand South Africa, they have to sing their respective national anthems. And of course, the tension you can cut with a knife, Dominic, to coin a phrase. So we have the Imelongi Cantu call society who are going to be taking the lead in singing the anthems. And they are a black choir from Soweto, which is the sprawling township outside Johannesburg, where the rugby world cup finally is being held. And it had long served as the effective capital of the anti-apartheid movement. On top of that, this choir is going to be singing a song that had only been South Africa's national anthem for a year since the election of the ANC government. And this is Cozy Sicily Africa. And it's a song that to Africaners had long symbolized subversion, revolution, terrorism, black power, everything that the apartheid regime had been committed to suppressing very brutally. And to reiterate, we are now in the great cathedral of Afro-Canadam. So obviously the spring box had sung it before. It preceded previous matches, but never in a place, a time, a fixture with the amount of symbolic weight that this match had. So what's it going to mean for them to sing this anthem? But even more pressingly perhaps, how is the crowd in this great stadium overwhelmingly Afro-Canadam? How are they going to react with the eyes of the world upon them? Yeah, and what about the anthem itself? And Cozy Sicily Africa? Where has it come from and how has it ended up becoming this great anthem of black liberation? Well, we'll be answering all these questions after the break. This episode is brought to you by Lloyds. Now when you have ambitions, being able to see the bigger picture is just so important. And history definitely teaches us that. My favorite example, not necessarily a brilliant man, but the Spanish conquistador Enlan Cortez. 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Gel to mist technology locks in your look for up to 24 hours, with flexible all-day comfy grip. No tightness, no stickiness, no residue, just plum, dewy, hydrated skin that still feels like your skin. Try new Grippy Setting Mist from Mavily New York. Maybe it's Maybelline. Hello and welcome back to The Rest Is History. So this is the sixth in our great series tying in with the World Cup, looking at the stories behind the national anthems for some of the competing nations. And today we are looking at the story of and Cozy Sicilyly Africa, perhaps the most beautiful of all the African national anthems that people will be hearing at the FIFA World Cup, and certainly the most celebrated and the most historically fascinating. The interesting thing though is that, you know, we've done some anthems in this series, the origins of which are kind of shrouded in obscurity. So, you know, it's sometimes hard to tell exactly where they've come from. For example, God save the king. Exactly who wrote it we can't be sure. Same story with the Ville Helmus, the national anthem of the Netherlands. But we do know who wrote this anthem and it's a man called Enoch Sontonga, isn't it Tom? Yes. So he's the writer and he was born in the early 1870s in the Eastern Cape colony. And like Mandela, he was a native Loser speaker. And again, I hope I got to click right there. He moves northwards to Johannesburg and he becomes a teacher in a Methodist school in what will ultimately become the Great Township of Soweto outside Johannesburg. So you would think a teacher in a Methodist school in the 1880s and 1890s, unlikely to be a dandy. But in Sontonga's case, you'd be wrong because there is a photograph showing him looking unbelievably natty. He's got a hat, he's got a three-piece suit, must have been very hot in the South African sun, very natty pocket square and he's holding the chain of a fog watch. I mean, he looks very, very stylish indeed. We know incredibly little about him. We don't even know what he taught, but we do know that he runs the school choir and he's always writing songs for it. So he's clearly very musical. And one of these songs, which he scribbles down on a scrap of paper in 1897, is the song that becomes cosy sicklyly Africa, the song that will make him famous. But this fame is entirely posthumous because in 1905 Sontonga, he's 32, he starts to get afflicted by stomach cramps and they are so hideous that actually gets into the local newspaper. He's suffering so badly and the newspaper wrote. He suffered at times from stomach ache to the extent that he would predict that these were his last days on this earth. And he's right. Yeah. Because he dies shortly afterwards of gastroenteritis. And he's buried in the section of the Blamphontine Graveyard in Johannesburg, which is reserved for black Christians. So the racism is evident even in cemeteries. And in due course, the very location of his grave comes to be forgotten. And that is pretty much the sum total of what we know about him. So we do know, you know, we know who who wrote this song, but you know, the life of the composer is pretty much failed in obscurity. And if we go to the the song itself written in course that and it's it's means Lord bless Africa, one verse and a chorus, right? That's all there is. Yes. And this these words are, as well as the music, Sontonga's written the words. As you say, a single verse, Lord bless Africa, may her glory be lifted high. Here are petitions. Lord bless us your children. And then this chorus descend O spirit descend O holy spirit. So I mean, very evidently, a hymn, an anthem, if you like, an expressive of a kind of a broader trend in South African Christianity at the time, Sontonga writes it. So white missionaries have been spreading Christianity in South Africa and among black South Africans over the course of the centuries. And by the end of the 19th century, black Christians in South Africa are I think coming to resent the kind of the mood, the spirit, the vibe of paternalism with which they are being treated by white missionaries, by the predominantly white lead churches. And in reaction to this, they start to emphasize the antiquity of African Christianity and to argue that Christianity has been a presence in Africa for much longer than it had been, for instance, in either Britain or the Netherlands. But they're not wrong. They're not wrong because they can focus specifically on Ethiopia. The kings of Ethiopia, people who listened to the episode we did on the arc of the covenant may remember that the Ethiopian kings claimed to be descended from Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. And in the Psalms, it had been prophesied that Ethiopia would quickly stretch out her hands to God and in South Africa, Ethiopia comes to be a kind of synonism for the whole of Africa. And in the Acts of the Apostles, South Africans can read that one of the very first Gentile converts is an Ethiopian Unic, and as they say, there's no Dutch, there's no British converts in the Acts of the Apostles, but an African convert, yes, there absolutely is. And so in 1892, five years before Sontonga writes in Kozy, Sicily, Africa, a breakaway Christian movement has been founded by a Zulu Methodist minister, and this is called the Ethiopian Church. And so this is very much the spiritual climate in which Sontonga is living, and it's a climate in which it's taken for granted by Black Africans that God holds Africa, especially in his care, that he has plotted out a particular path for Christianity in Black Africa. The hymn that Sontonga writes is Pentecostal, meaning that it describes the Holy Spirit descending like fire. And this is entirely appropriate because the popularity of the hymn itself spreads like wildfire. And in 1912, it sung the inaugural meeting of a crucial convention. This is a meeting of the South African Native National Congress, and this was held in Blumfontein, and it is attended by chiefs and other leading Black figures from across the country. And the aim of this Congress is to oppose attempts by white legislators to introduce what in retrospect will very clearly come to see in one of the kind of, you know, the building blocks of what will be the apartheid regime. And specifically, it's essentially about enabling the whites to take the best bits of land in South Africa. So it's a native land act, that's what it's called, and it allocates the ownership of 90% of South African land exclusively to whites. You know, the blacks can have the remaining 10%, which is all scrubby and rubbish, and, you know, not fertile. So you can understand why black leaders are meeting up to oppose this. Inevitably, it fails. This NATO's land act is passed the following year, so in 1913. But the members of the Congress don't give up, and they're determined to continue the fight. And in 1923, they change the name of their organization to a much more inclusive one, and indeed much snappier. And so what had been the South African native national Congress becomes the African national Congress. So, you know, you don't have to be a South African native. You can anyone can join it. It's open to everyone. And it's two years after that, that in Cozy is adopted as the ANC's official anthem. And it's quite, it's not maybe an obvious anthem, because we said in the previous episode that we did on the Brazilian national anthem, that a lot of national anthems are really quite violent. They are, they need an enemy, and you'd think that the ANC might be tempted to go for an anthem in which the white rulers of South Africa are being damned. But not a bit of it, because there's actually, you know, there's nothing marshal, there's nothing aggressive, there's nothing militant about the lyrics of in Cozy, Sicily, Africa at all. And even when in 1927, a Khosa poet adds seven extra verses to it, because one verse is decided it's not enough. I mean, it still remains to him. The tone of the song remains kind of Pacific in the way that it has previously been. But that kind of works, doesn't take even the nature of their struggle. I mean, the, the struggle is punctuated with moments of martyrdom, with massacres, with funerals and trials and, you know, and suffering. It's a, the story of the ANC is a story about victory through suffering. And that's why this, as a him, it works really well. Yeah, so people who are being executed, ANC members who are being executed as they, you know, are standing on the trap door that will drop. And, you know, they'll kind of fall through the trap door. They are singing it. And in a sense, the fact that it's not aggressive, it's not violent, that it's a, it's a kind of hymn to God. I agree. It makes it all kind of all the more powerful. But equally, you can see why to the agents of the apartheid regime, the hymn of the ANC comes to seem something very menacing, something very aggressive. We're not at least because they can't understand it. Can't really understand it. And so they assume that it's a song that's kind of suffused with hate. And, you know, it comes to seem emblematic of everything that they're fighting. They really, really mistrust and dislike it. The idea that it might end up is the anthem of South Africa, just kind of monstrous possibility, but at least because the apartheid state has its own national anthem, the stem of end to South Africa, the call of South Africa. And just as white South Africans hate the ANC anthem, so black South Africans come to hate the apartheid anthem, I mean, entirely understandably. Now, in fact, like the lyrics from Cozy, those of Dichdem are actually pretty mellow in tone. So there is one mention in it of the groan of the Oxwagon, and this is an illusion to the Vertreckers, the, the, the Boers who had sought to escape British rule in the 19th century, you know, so migrating from the Cape Colony to the interior of South Africa, and when they get there, they kind of displace various native peoples, have repeated punch up with the Sulu's, all this kind of thing. So the illusion to the Vertreckers is a kind of red flag, I guess, to, to black South Africans, but otherwise, there's nothing in the lyrics that would be obviously offensive. Because essentially, it's a hymn of love to the beauties of South Africa, and also thanks to God who had fashioned these beauties. So it's opening lines from the blues of our heavens, from the depths of our sea, over our everlasting mountains, where the cliffs echo back our calls. I mean, these are sentiments that, that everyone in South Africa could agree with, absolutely, you know, absolutely ecumenical in tone. So the apartheid regime falls in the early 1990s. And the obvious question is, what is the new South Africa into Doctor's Anthem? The majority is obviously black. You would assume they are simply going to throw out Dishdem and to replace it with Mkozy, which is, of course, a song that the majority, I guess, of blacks, South Africans would get behind. But that's not quite what happens, is it? Yeah. So early in 1994, just before Mandela's inauguration, as South Africa's first black president, the ANC kind of supreme decision making caucus, hold a meeting to decide what the anthem is going to be. And it's pressing because people from around the world are going to be coming from Mandela's inauguration. And so they do need an anthem. As you say, it's absolutely inconceivable that they will have Dishdem and the kind of the overwhelming consensus is that it should be Mkozy. And they wait for Mandela to pop out for a phone call. And while he's gone to take the call, they say, yeah, we'll have Mkozy, sickle, ale, Africa. Mandela comes back, they turn, this is our decision. He blows a gasket. He is furious. He tells them this song, Dishdem, that you treat so easily, holds the emotions of many people who you don't represent yet with the stroke of a pen, you would take a decision to destroy the very, the only basis that we are building upon reconciliation. So Mandela's solution, very centrist, keep both anthems. And also just for good measure, include a translation in Mkozy into a second South African language, so so through. So basically everyone will be happy. I think, you know, kind of ticking all the boxes there. But there is a problem with this. Because if you play all three songs together, it lasts for more than five minutes. I mean, it just goes on and on. And at Mandela's inauguration, one of the guests is Prince Philip. Prince Philip is a man. Yeah, he calls it as he sees it. Yeah, he calls it as it is. And he jokes that he'd had to keep his hat off for so long, you know, as a Mark of respect for the anthem, that he got sunstroke. And even Mandela himself acknowledges that it was all a bit boring by the end. So there's obviously an issue here. And so he comes up with the classic politicians wheeze when faced with an imponderable problem. He hands it over to a committee. I suppose you could say he kicks it into touch with that. Yeah. Or I could be kind of a metaphor. Yeah. And then there's some line our metaphor to follow, no? So this committee meets early in 1995, the era of the rugby world cup. And to begin with, the committee are really struggling because the challenge is actually quite a serious one. Because Mandela's mandated them to meet two seemingly contradictory objectives. So the first one is to ensure the anthem isn't too long. You know, he doesn't want dignitaries dying of heatstroke in the future. Simultaneously, it has to incorporate both the A and C anthem and the apartheid regime anthem. And Mandela's precise instructions are, don't scrap anything, be inclusive. So that's a real problem. It's kind of, yeah, making a bit longer, but cut it. Also, yeah, do all that in two minutes, sort of. Yeah. And of course, you've got the rugby world cup coming along. It's going to be held. The final is going to be held on the 25th of May. It's obvious that the anthem is not going to be ready in time for that. And that means that these two anthems in cozy, um, sicklele Africa and dished them are both going to have to be sung at the World Cup final, which in turn means that it's going to be a massive test for the spring box. As we've said, you know, they've got to sing it in full view of the cameras of, of the world's media. and for the crowd in Ellis Park Stadium. You know, how is the crowd going to respond to what for 70 years has been the ANC anthem? And the answer is they respond amazingly well. So the spring box, they excel themselves. And the reason for this is that a month before the final, they'd all been given lessons in how to sing the ANC anthem. Fortunately, two of them who were farm boys raised in the Eastern Cape, they already spoke Rosa. So that was good. The others, you know, they had no idea, but they throw themselves very gainly into learning it. And at the final, you know, they're lined up on the pitch before the start of the match. And all of them, you know, at the very least, are kind of pretending to mouth the words. It doesn't look like they got no idea. It doesn't look like they know what the words of the song are. And actually, the only one who doesn't sing, if you look at the footage of it, the only one who doesn't, is the captain François Pinault. And the reason for this, he said afterwards, I couldn't sing the ANC anthem, I did not, because I knew that if I did, I'd fall apart. - Oh, he's a softy hat. - Yeah, and in playing the enemy, John Karl insights what Sean Fitzpatrick, he was the all black captain, later told Pinault. So he told me that he looked over and saw a tear rolled down my cheek. So an incredibly emotional moment. And it is respected as such by the crowd. You know, they, they really behave very well. And in the mythology of this occasion, it's kind of cast to something that inspires the entire notion of a rainbow country, a rainbow nation. And I think it's kind of easy to be skeptical about that, to be cynical. But the converse, I think, is clearly true, that the spectacle of the spring box failing to sing, the ANC anthem, what is now the South African anthem. I think that would have dealt a really devastating blow to kind of any notion of one team, one country, any prospect of. - Well, imagine if the crowd had booed it. I mean, that crowd is very white. Imagine if the white crowd had booed the anthem. I mean, I wonder if that was nothing more corrosive could be imagined. - Yeah, and so I think it really, really mattered that they didn't do that and that they behaved themselves. And at the end of the match, Pinault, who is, he's played a blinder throughout the tournament, he serves up the absolutely perfect sound bite. So a sports reporter asks him, how did it feel to have 62,000 fans supporting you here in the stadium? And Pinault's answer does Mandela proud. We didn't have 62,000 fans behind us. We had 43 million South Africans. So not a dry eye in the house. - But the sun, both anthems, they actually don't have one anthem at this point. So the committee doesn't come up with its report until two years after the World Cup, after the rugby World Cup. And their solution, I mean, is it a fudge? I guess it is a fudge, really, isn't it? - Well, it's a fudge if you think that a day in the life, the Beatles' great song, which fuses two separate songs by John Lennon and Paul McCartney, into what is often seen as the masterpiece on Sergeant Pepper, whether that's a fudge, I don't think it's a fudge. I think they do exactly the same. They fuse in cozy Sicily Africa and dish them into a single song, and it works musically, but it also works ideologically as well. Because actually, when you pair the lyrics from the two songs, you realize that both of them have emerged from a common Christian African culture because both songs are expressing an identical conviction, namely that God has bestowed particular blessings on South Africa and that people who live in South Africa therefore should be grateful for those blessings. So actually, they blend perfectly. However, the committee have really got the beat between their teeth because they feel that it's actually not enough just to have these two songs put together. We better chuck in a whole load of other stuff as well, because there are loads and loads of languages of different people in South Africa. So they render the new anthem into no less than five of South Africa's 11 official languages. So one of them is obviously Osir, first two lines in cozy Sicily Africa as Sontonga had written them. Then you have Zulu, so the third and fourth lines of the original are translated into that. Then you have Sosotu, which is a first asking God to protect South Africa. Then you have Dishdem, so that's Afrikaans. And then the last verse is in English, composed specially for the new anthem, and this is very bland. Sounds the call to come together and united we shall stand. Let us live and strive for freedom in South Africa, our land. I mean, when they're seeing it before we match, they kind of voices are rising at that point. It is a very powerful climax, I think. Yeah, I mean, the lyrics are not as powerful perhaps as the early ones, but they do what they've got to do. So you have these five different languages in the South Africa National Anthem. And that makes it very, very exceptional. And in fact, there is only one other country that has a multilingual anthem. And this is Suriname, so country on the North Coast of South America. It had originally been an English colony, so back in the 17th century. Then in 1667, it gets swapped by the Dutch for New Amsterdam, which becomes New York. So the English get what will become New York and the Dutch get Suriname, and I think basically the English have the better of that deal. However, having said that, I mean, the English end up losing New York, of course. But the Dutch keeps Suriname for almost 350 years and Suriname only obtained its kind of ultimate independence in 1975. But even before that, it adopted an anthem that had two verses, so one in Dutch and one in a language called, I hope I'm pronouncing this right, Seran and Tongue, which is an Anglic Dutch Creole. - I mean, sort of Suriname tongue, presumably. - Yes, yeah. So I think it's the language that was spoken by the slaves there. And it may be there's something about Anglic Dutch colonial fusion that fosters multilingual national anthems, 'cause there is clearly a kind of correspondence between the history of Suriname and South Africa. - And I know you've seen your notes, you say that as fine as the Suriname National Anthem, I guess it can't really compose in Kozy, Sicily, Africa. It's told me through the Suriname National Anthem, how fine is it? - It's not very fine. - Well, it's all right, but I don't think it's a banger. - Have you actually ever heard it? - Yes, I have, I listened to it. - Oh, well done. - Because I was wondering if it's gonna be any good. - Yeah, and actually, I mean, it's all right, but it's literally nothing else. Well, I mean, it's one of two multilingual national anthems. I think that makes it stand out from the crowd. I mean, we've only talked about the anthems two South American countries in this series, Brazil, and now it's Suriname, so. - Yeah, this is a terrible result for Argentina, they'll be fuming. - Right, so let's get back to the South African Anthem. You say it's the most haunting and historically resonant of 20th century national anthems. And I guess that's true, isn't it? Because there are, we've done a lot of anthems with a lot of history, but none who's passed is so kind of freighted with suffering and martyrdom and stuff. - And is haunting melody, the words are obviously haunting, even though I have to have them translated. And it lacks the kind of rolling, brass-based strut that tends to be a characteristic of most national anthems that have originated in the 19th century, I think, has a very, very different quality. - It's almost like a lament, isn't it? I always think the sound of it. - Yeah, it's really powerful. And so on that note, the lament, let's end this episode on the series by going back to Eric Satonga, the man who wrote it. And we said that after his burial in the Bramphontine Graveyard in Johannesburg, all the traces of his grave were lost. He's a famous figure in ANC mythology, the guy who wrote their anthem. So there had been lots of attempts to try and identify it. Nobody could find it. But then finally, in the early 1990s, and you can see why this Mandela's release has stimulated a kind of renewed attempt to try and track it down, a researcher has the kind of brain wave, why not look up in the cemetery records and not for a Sontonga but for an enoc, his first name, and they're sure enough, they find him grave number 4,885. His surname had been completely erased and replaced by the insulting Afrikaans word for a black person. And they were able, as a result of this, to work out where the grave was and in 1996. So one year after his hymn had been sung at Ellis Park Stadium, heard by people around the world, Ellis Park Stadium was only about three miles away from the cemetery in which he'd been buried. Nelson Mandela arrived to unveil a memorial to Sontonga that had been raised on the side of his grave. And Mandela said this, "By the pride with which we bellowed your melody and its lyrics in good times and bad, we were saying to you, enoc, maniai, we were saying to you, enoc, mankei, Sontonga, the with your inspiration, we could move mountains." And I guess, in a sense, they had. - Oh, that's a nice ending. It's nice to have another happy ending on the rest of the history we don't have enough. So that's an amazing story. fascinating story brilliantly told. Thank you, Tom. So that's the end of our World Cup series. I think a better series than the actual World Cup. They've got too many teams in the World Cup, where it's really limited ourselves. Yeah. I think a World Cup with only 16, I mean, it'd be very punchy, wouldn't it? It would be punchy, it could be elites. We're all about elite content. Well, it would be like the rugby, actually. It'd be like the six nations. Exactly. Yeah, we'd be like the six nations. They go play each other. So talking of elite content, we are returning next week with an absolutely elite series, because not only is this summer the summer of the football World Cup, it is the summer in which the tax revolt of 1776 will be 250 years old. God, so many backtaxes to repaid. And the rebel state formed as a result of that event, is marking its 250th anniversary. I think the world is looking at the United States of America and saying, how have things worked out for them? How are they politics looking now? Are they perhaps regretting? Are they in danger of crawling back and asking to be re-admitted? I mean, the problem with that diagnosis, Dominic, to the family of civilised nations. Well, yeah, I mean, that implies that Britain's been doing better. I'm not entirely sure that that's. On the other hand, of course, they could look north and say Canada is the country they could have been. Anyway, to mark this event, because we do like our American listeners to reach out to them and to give them a little favor, we are going to be doing a series about the founding fathers. Four of them. Yes, George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and Alexander Hamilton. And we should of course be treating them, Tom, with the reference and respect they just with exactly the amount of respect and reverence they deserve. So for American listeners, it should be an eye-opening experience. Now, if our American listeners, I imagine even now that they're like, they're scrappling desperately their keyboards, trying to work out how they can get access to this series early to hear this patriotic fest because it'll really broaden their minds. Tom, is there any way? Is there any mechanism or process by which somebody could listen to all of that series on Monday if they wanted to? They absolutely could. They could sign up to the rest is history club. As we've said, there's a lot of backtax to be paid. It's actually unbelievably good value, just very tiny, minute number of your tax dollars could go on it. I mean, just insane value because you get a whole load of additional benefits as well. I don't think we've ever mentioned that before. So very, very exciting. And of course, you don't have to be American to do that either, do you? Because the founding fathers are remarkable characters. Their stories are remarkable. So of interest to one and all. So we hope you enjoy that series coming up starting next Monday. Brilliant. So we'll see you on next Monday for the founding fathers. But until then, Tom, thank you very much. That was a brilliant episode. Bye-bye, everybody. Bye-bye. [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] The great game, strategic struggle between Britain and Russia. We assess Prime Minister with high confidence it was Russian. Holding the Russians accountable is world war. They took down a British passenger chair containing 350 people. Man in the Kremlin is playing Alex. Got to ask yourself, you want to play? Or not? You're the Prime Minister. If done, nothing! We would need to understand the policy context. All the relevant context will be structured as a framework today. And disseminated into an operation order. Or Frago. And a Frago that says to kill the President of Russia. Yes. New from Golhanger. Who is going to be able to pull this off? [Music] An audio drama journey like no other. Men like Duffy, they are our most valuable weapons. Devised as a technically rigorous geopolitical action forever. We're Britain plays its strongest arm against its strongest foe. Don't do it Duffy! [Music] Bear hunt. Available now wherever you get your podcasts. [Music] Hi everybody, it's Dominic Sandbrook here. There are two weeks to go until the rest is history's inaugural festival at Hampton Court Palace. And frankly, I could not be more excited. There's going to be medieval combat. There are going to be all sorts of big-name historians. You can go to the palace. You can feast like Henry VIII on the very lawns where he walked. In the sunshine, I'll be talking to Tracy Bournemann about the tutors. I'll be talking to Katja Hoyer about via my Germany. I'll be talking to Ian Hisselop about the history of satire. So it's on two days. It's on Saturday the 4th of July and Sunday the 5th of July. The bad news is we have actually sold out the allocations that we were given by Hampton Court for both days. The good news, however. We have persuaded Hampton Court to let us have more people. So there will be a handful of extra tickets available for both the Saturday and the Sunday. Now we do expect all of those extra tickets to sell out really quickly. So please do not wait to get your hands on them. The tickets are exclusive for club members. It's one of the benefits of being a member of the rest is history club. Frankly, if you're not a member and you would like to go to the festival, the only way to do that is by joining the club. So you have to head to the rest is history.com to sign up and then you go to the members area once you've signed up and you select festival to get your tickets. We are really hoping to see as many of you there as possible. In the sunshine, Hampton Court. Bye-bye. Hi everybody. Dominic here from the rest is history. You knew who it was. So we have just recorded a brilliant episode of our new mini series about the World Cup and dictatorships with Paul Rouse of University College Dublin. We were just talking about Pele and Brazil and the dictatorship that ruled Brazil between 1964 and 1985. We had a lot of fun and we thought you might like to hear a little clip from it to wet your appetite if you're not a member of the rest is history club. So here it is. Enjoy. So I guess the question with Brazil in particular is we think that Brazil is defined more than anything else by football. The football is absolutely central to Brazilian national identity. The classic thing that people think when we were talking about this before we started recording, the football is an expression of the Brazilian national soul in some way that it isn't in other countries. How on when does this idea become popular? So in a global sense it really took hold from the 1950s onwards. Brazil's success is in the 58 and 62 World Cup and then of course they did three in a row in 1970. Unfortunately it wasn't possible to play a World Cup in 1966. So the four for you Paul. Why do you hate? I mean as we always say why do you hate Britain? So that was important. That was important in the winning of a World Cup. At the very moment when television pictures begin to flow around the world of sporting. So the late 50s sport on television was beginning to be broadcast by 1962. You had an international broadcast through Telstar, through the satellite. But by 1970 you have the projection around the world in color in color, but most people have still a black and white telly, so we have to be careful not to over, not to overstate that, but it is the projection of this Brazilian greatness at the very moment that you get an explosion of interest in television. Thanks for watching.