Invictus

The film begins in South Africa in 1990. A car drives down a road. On one side, white boys play rugby on green grass. On the other side, black children play football on brown ground. The children look at the car very differently. In the car is Nelson Mandela. He has just come out of prison after twenty-seven years.

Four years later, Mandela is the president. In the government offices, the white workers are packing their things. They think the new president will send them home. But Mandela asks them to stay. He also puts black and white men together in his own security team. Nobody is happy about this. They must work together anyway.

South Africa has a rugby team called the Springboks. They lose a lot, and most black people hate them. For those people, the green Springbok shirt is a symbol of the old, cruel government. When their team plays, black South Africans support the other side! One day, a sports committee votes to change the name and the symbol of the team. Mandela drives across the city and asks them to change their minds. Then he invites the young captain, François Pienaar, to tea.

Mandela and Pienaar drink tea together. Mandela asks him a strange question: how do you make people better than they think they can be? He talks about being an example for other people. Pienaar goes home and thinks about it carefully. Later, Mandela sends him a poem. It is a poem that helped Mandela in prison. It says: you can be strong inside, even when you have nothing.

The rugby players must now go and teach rugby to children in poor areas. At first they go slowly and do not want to be there. The children do not trust them. But after an hour, everybody is playing and laughing. The players must also learn the new national song. Some of them sing it badly. Some of them learn it well.

Pienaar takes the team to Robben Island, the island prison. He stands quietly in the very small room where Mandela lived for eighteen years. He looks out at the white stone quarry where the prisoners worked in the hot sun. He thinks: how can a man leave this place and not hate anyone? He does not say much.

The Rugby World Cup starts in South Africa. Nobody thinks the Springboks can win. But they play well, and they keep winning. Slowly, something changes in the streets. Black people and white people start to watch the same matches together. The film shows a black boy and two white policemen listening to the radio in a car. At the start of the day they do not like each other. At the end of the day they are jumping and shouting together.

The final is against New Zealand — the best team in the world. Their big, fast player has beaten every team in the tournament. The Springboks decide to stop him together, as one team. The match is very hard and very close. After eighty minutes the score is the same. They play extra time. Then a South African player kicks the ball high between the posts, and South Africa wins.

Mandela walks onto the field to give the cup to Pienaar. He is wearing a green Springbok shirt with the captain's number on the back — the same shirt that black South Africans hated for so many years. The stadium is full of white people, and they start to shout his name: "Nelson! Nelson!" He thanks Pienaar for what he did for the country. Pienaar says thank you back. The film ends here, in all the noise.

The poem "Invictus" is by an English writer, William Ernest Henley. He wrote it in 1875. It is true that Mandela loved this poem and said it to other prisoners on Robben Island. But the film is not correct about one thing. Before the tournament, Mandela gave Pienaar a different text: a famous part of a speech by the American president Theodore Roosevelt, called "the man in the arena". So the most famous moment in the film did not happen in that way.

The film also does not tell us that many New Zealand players were ill two days before the final. Some people in New Zealand still say the team was poisoned. Nobody has ever proved it, and South Africa says it is not true. It is a story with no ending — but the film simply leaves it out.

The film finishes when the match finishes, and it feels like the country's problems are finished too. That is not what happened. The big change was political, not sporting: Mandela was sent to prison for life in 1964, came out on 11 February 1990 after about twenty-seven years, and became president on 10 May 1994 after the first election where everybody could vote.

But the match did not make people equal. Today the World Bank says South Africa is still the most unequal country in its list of 164 countries. Rich and poor are still divided in the same way as before. And in 1995 there was only one black player in the South African team, a fast winger called Chester Williams. Years later, he said that the happy "rainbow nation" feeling did not last. The day was real and beautiful. But it was a beginning, not an ending.