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Roundtable on Invictus

Saturday 24 June 1995 was a red letter day in South Africa. Before a capacity crowd at Ellis Park stadium in Johannesburg and with millions more watching the finals of the Rugby World Cup on television, the Springbok team narrowly managed to beat the much vaunted New Zealand All Black team in extra time through a drop goal by the fly half, Joel Stransky. South Africa was the new rugby champion of the world. On hand to present the Cup to the victorious captain, Francois Pienaar, was South Africa’s most celebrated prisoner-turned-president, Nelson Mandela, decked out, in an unmistakable show of identification and support, in Pienaar’s spare number 6 jersey. It was the perfect climax to a tournament that saw South Africa taking pride of place in the rugby world after the international sports isolation of the apartheid years. Unprecedented scenes of mass euphoria followed the Springbok victory; it unleashed a celebration of exhilarating excess, of hugs and hurrahs, of merriment and madness. From the staid, tree-lined, white suburbs to the dusty black township streets, it appeared that black and white South Africans had discovered a sense of common unity as the victory was toasted across the land. Given the country’s painful history of division and conflict, and, in the sporting arena, the longstanding perception of rugby as the game of the Afrikaner oppressors, such celebrations were extraordinary and thrilling. It was this occasion that launched the film Invictus, which exploits the dramatic elements of the event and popularizes its ‘‘feel-good’’ dimension on a global scale.