Invictus

The film opens on a road outside Cape Town in February 1990. On one side, a manicured field where white schoolboys are playing rugby; on the other, a bare patch of ground where black children are playing football. A convoy passes between them. Nelson Mandela has just been released after twenty-seven years in prison, and the two groups of children react in completely opposite ways. That road is the whole country in one shot.

Four years later Mandela is president. He walks into offices where the white civil servants are already packing their boxes, certain they are about to be dismissed, and asks them to stay. His personal bodyguard is a small team of his own ANC men; he then quietly adds several white officers from the old security police — the men who used to hunt people like them. Nobody in the room wants this. He makes them work together anyway.

Meanwhile the national rugby side, the Springboks, are losing badly and are loathed by most of the country. For black South Africans the green-and-gold jersey is a symbol of the regime that oppressed them; they cheer for whichever foreign team is playing against it. When a sports committee votes to scrap the Springbok name and emblem altogether, Mandela leaves a meeting, drives across town and asks them to reverse their own vote — to his own supporters' fury. He then invites the young captain, François Pienaar, to tea.

Over tea, Mandela asks Pienaar an oddly technical question: how do you inspire people to be better than they think they can be? He talks about leading by example, and about the value of surprising people who expect the worst of you. Pienaar leaves confused and slightly overwhelmed, and gradually works out what has actually been asked of him. Later Mandela sends him a poem that, he says, held him steady in prison — verses about staying master of your own soul when everything else has been taken.

The team is sent out to run rugby clinics in the townships. They arrive reluctant and awkward; the children are suspicious; a hesitant hour later there is something close to a game. At the same time, the players are asked to learn the full new national anthem, including the part in Xhosa and Zulu that most of them have never sung. Some do it with grudging bad grace. Some do it properly.

Pienaar takes the squad to Robben Island. He stands alone in the tiny cell where Mandela spent eighteen of those twenty-seven years, looks at the lime quarry that ruined the prisoners' eyes, and tries to imagine coming out of that place without hatred. He does not say much. He does not need to.

The World Cup begins, and the Springboks — written off as underdogs — keep winning. Something shifts in the streets. The film keeps returning to a small, telling detail: a black boy outside the stadium, and two white policemen in a patrol car with the radio on, who begin the day wary of each other and end it in a heap of shouting.

The final is against New Zealand, whose enormous wing has been flattening every defence in the tournament. The Springboks decide their only chance is to stop him as a unit. The match is agonising, low-scoring and level at full time. It goes to extra time. Late on, the fly-half drops a goal from distance, and the country loses its mind.

Mandela walks out to present the cup wearing a replica Springbok jersey with the captain's number on the back — the shirt the crowd had spent decades hating, worn by the man it had been used against. The stadium, overwhelmingly white, begins chanting his name. He thanks Pienaar for what he has done for the country; Pienaar turns the thanks straight back at him. The film ends there, in the noise, with the deliberate implication that this was the day the new country began.

The Springbok was not a neutral badge. Under apartheid the ruling National Party had adopted the team's success as its own, and the emblem came to stand, for many South Africans, for the regime itself and for who was permitted to represent the country. After 1994 every other national side had moved to the king protea, the country's national flower, and the National Sports Council — the body that had driven the international sporting boycott — wanted rugby to do the same and make the protea the single emblem.

Mandela argued the other way: that keeping the Springbok, rather than abolishing it, was the thing most likely to bring the country together. He was overruling allies, not enemies. The film compresses this into a single dramatic meeting; in reality it was a longer argument, and the Sports Council only formally confirmed the Springbok as rugby's emblem in March 1996 — nine months after the final that is supposed to have settled it. And the squad that carried it onto the pitch that day contained exactly one player of colour, the wing Chester Williams.

The poem. "Invictus" is by the English poet William Ernest Henley, written in 1875 and published, untitled, in his 1888 Book of Verses; the title was given to it later, by the editor Arthur Quiller-Couch, for the 1900 Oxford Book of English Verse. Mandela's connection to it is genuine and documented — he recited it to fellow prisoners on Robben Island. But the film's central device is a dramatic licence. The text Mandela actually gave Pienaar before the tournament was not Henley's poem: it was the "man in the arena" passage from Theodore Roosevelt's 1910 speech Citizenship in a Republic. Both texts say something similar about enduring; only one of them makes a title.

The lunch. The film says nothing about the fact that the New Zealand squad fell ill before the final — by most accounts around 27 of the 35-man party, at a lunch in the days before the final. The All Blacks' coach Laurie Mains long maintained that they were deliberately poisoned, and a waitress remembered as "Suzie" became part of New Zealand rugby folklore. Nothing has ever been proven. The team's manager, the great Colin Meads, put it down to bad milk; South African officials rejected the allegation outright; a private investigation produced no public evidence. It is an unresolved story, not a hidden fact — but leaving it out entirely makes the victory tidier than it was.

The film ends at the final whistle, and the implication is that a nation was made that afternoon. It is worth being honest about the thirty years since. The political transformation was real and enormous: Mandela was convicted at the Rivonia Trial and sentenced to life imprisonment in June 1964, served about 27 years, was released on 11 February 1990, and was inaugurated as president on 10 May 1994 after the country's first non-racial election. That is the achievement, and no rugby match produced it.

What the match did not do is redistribute anything. South Africa remains, on the World Bank's measurement, the most unequal country in its database — a Gini coefficient of about 67, first out of 164 countries — and that inequality still runs closely along the lines apartheid drew. Chester Williams, the one black player in the 1995 side, said in later years that the rainbow-nation feeling of that afternoon had turned out to be temporary. The moment was real. It was a beginning offered to the country, not a conclusion delivered to it — and what happened next was, and still is, up to politics rather than sport.