Invictus
World Cup football fever is going to start in the not-too-distant future, but before that happens, and if you are a rugby fan – then go and see Invictus, Clint Eastwood’s new film about the 1995 Rugby World Cup. Though, obviously, it’s a lot more than a film about rugby.
I was in Cape Town last year when they were filming Invictus. I remember that the film crew (as film crews always do) had closed off part of a road I needed to use. I sweet-talked the security guard and managed to slip through the closed area. If time had permitted I would have auditioned for a part in the crowd scenes – however, Matt Damon had to play his rugby without my feverish cheering.
And feverish it would have been because I was living in Cape Town in 1995 when South Africa played the All Blacks. I would have had no problem letting loose the emotions that I, and millions of other South Africans, experienced that amazing day. It was not simply a day of rugby victory, it was a moment in history. When that final whistle blew, when Nelson Mandela wearing the honorary Number 6 green and gold team captain’s shirt raised his hand in salute – the whole nation went delirious. We ran into the streets like demented kids high on sugar at our very own birthday party.
A few nights ago I finally got to see Invictus and it stirred up those old emotions. In the year previously when the first democratic elections were held I stood in a very long queue outside the Sea Point library to cast my vote. It was cold and it was raining and I stood there for about four hours with hundreds of others who, like me, had never been allowed to vote in South African elections. Foreign news crews cruised the streets, cameras at the ready, waiting for the violence that many said would accompany the polling day. They were wrong. I remember clearly the elderly lady living in a flat opposite the library. She had a National Party banner draped from her balcony – and that meant she would be voting for the party that had upheld apartheid. She came down onto the street with a bin bag full of supermarket plastic packets and walked down the line handing them to whoever wanted one. There we were, black, white, Asian, coloured – standing patiently in the rain, waving to the frustrated news crews, with plastic supermarket bags tugged onto our heads against the rain.
And if you see the film Invictus – and you should, because Mr Eastwood and his screenwriter Anthony Peckham, use the film’s exposition to show not only the match in exacting detail, but also Nelson Mandela’s story and humanity in bringing a nation together.
So, who was this poet who inspired probably the world’s greatest leader?
William Ernest Henley was born in Gloucester, England in 1849 he was the son of a local bookseller. His courage was tested when he was 12 years old when diagnosed with a tubercular disease which resulted in the amputation of one foot. He was kept as a patient in an Edinburgh infirmary for twenty months, where, in 1875, he wrote Invictus – Latin for invincible. He went on to become a critic and editor, responsible for encouraging and promoting many of our most famous writers.
London’s National Portrait Gallery has a bust of him by Augustus Rodin.
And this is his poem that inspired and sustained Nelson Mandela during those long years of imprisonment.
Invictus
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll.
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.
William Ernest Henley: 1849 – 1903.
