Cool Runnings 2: Mandela Strikes Back

Rating: Null/10 (31 January 2011)

Clint Eastwood rapes history with "Invictus", a film which tells the story of newly elected South African President Nelson Mandela's attempts to use the 1995 Rugby World Cup to bring whites and blacks together in the wake of almost half a century of apartheid.
Using a conventional fairy tale "sporting movie" narrative, the film watches as the underdog SA rugby team beats opponent after opponent before finding themselves in the World Cup final against New Zealand. As the final game is played, blacks and whites join hands and watch with shared anticipation. By the time the final game is won, racial and economic divisions have dissolved before our eyes, SA brought to racial harmony via the decimation of foreigners on a playing field by Gladiator-like thugs. The film's message: colonialism deserves forgiveness and dismissal, never justice, 50 years of racial segregation, persecution and murder have be healed through "sports" and "democracy", and Mandela was a kindly old man who brought unity to a country.
This, of course, is nonsense. Firstly, the film omits the embarrassing fact that the New Zealand team was poisoned, a fact which Mandela's former head of security, Rory Steyn, has recently publicly admitted. How much is victory worth when one hires an Eastern gambling syndicate to knock out one's opponent?
Secondly, their is little to no racial harmony in SA. Mandela, upon release from prison, was unwittingly used as a puppet. He became the "noble" face of new capitalism, yet another anti-authoritarian critic of old dictatorships who transformed into a 1980s-90s neoliberal ruler (Alfonsin (Argentina), Aquino (Philippines), Aristide (Haiti), Bhutto (Pakistan), Chiluba (Zambia), Dae Jung (South Korea), Havel (Czech Republic), Manley (Jamaica), Megawati (Indonesia), Mugabe (Zimbabwe), Museveni (Uganda), Nujoma (Namibia), Obasanjo (Nigeria), Ortega (Nicaragua), Rawlings (Ghana), Walesa (Poland), Yeltsin (Russia) etc). Under him, racial apartheid became class apartheid, SA sold off to foreign or local white multinationals, who kept the best land, mines, plants, financial institutions, who were pardoned for various crimes and were allowed to export vast quantities of capital. Such intra-elite economic deals, including the agreement to pay ridiculous debts accrued by the apartheid regime, worsened poverty, unemployment, inequality and exacerbated many racial, gender and geographical differences.
SA is now the most violent country outside a war zone, with the highest recorded per capita murder rate in the world. So violent is the "free" and "democratic" South Africa, that the ANC – the African National Congress – imposed an official blackout on national crime statistics. Even when statistics are released, they are heavily doctored.
With this instability, comes a flight of "white locals". Since 1994, more than a million whites and foreigners have left SA, mostly due to an increase in crime and social instability. The author of the book upon which "Invictus" was based himself emigrated after being the victim of several crimes. Meanwhile, a subgroup of fat-cats - both white and black - blossoms, slowly pillaging the country, through both design and ineptitude. In other words, the film completely ignores apartheid's continued, and deep-rooted, effects on the self-determination of modern SA. There is no "unity" or "harmony". There is no "rainbow nation". Apartheid level racial income inequalities still persist, whites are persecuted and blacks triply so, many dying at the hands of thugs paid to oversee black workers. Mandela would himself do a complete about turn on his 1990 pre-Presidence promise to nationalise resources, banks and monopoly industries. He went from a man whom Britain (MI5) and America (CIA) routinely tried to assassinate and eventually jailed, to a Western mascot. His wife would denounce him for betraying SA's blacks, allowing himself to be used by those in power to legitimise their post-apartheid manoeuvres.
Bizarrely, "Invictus" completely airbrushes white violence, but never black violence, which is always presented as a possibility and a threat. Likewise, racism and colonialism, for the whites, is never treated as being anything more than a lapse of judgement or unfortunate error. Elsewhere the film completely ignores one of the primary problems preventing "unity" in SA today. How does one apply the principle of Government of the People, by the People, for the People, if "The People" are divided (most of these divisions were specifically manufactured in the past for reasons of control), culturally, ethnically, linguistically, historically, economically and materially? The ANC's answer, like this film and the apartheid government before it, is to divide the country into a nation of blacks and whites, Us against Thems, Haves and Have Nots etc in order to further polarise the country's population along racial line for the purposes of engendering further political support.
Eastwood portrays Mandela giving SA's rugby captain a poem by William Henley called "Invictus". In reality, the literature Mandela gave was "The Man In The Arena", the title of a speech given by Teddy Roosevelt in Paris on April 23rd, 1910. Both pieces of writing are about self mastery, but with a very subtle difference, "Invictus" being a work of unabashed optimism ("I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul."), Roosevelt's being more downbeat: "there is only error and shortcoming" and yet "the credit belongs to the man who struggles in the arena for a worthy cause". The film's switch from Roosevelt to Henley epitomises its preference for fantasy and blind-eye turning.
The film stars actor Morgan Freeman as Nelson Mandela. It's a hagiographical portrait, Freeman portraying Mandela as a kindly old man who spews Yoda-like wisdom. The film also contains no references to the more militant backgrounds of Mandella, largely because white, middle class audiences are left confused and horrified by revolutionary violence. The point is not that Mandela was not a great man, but that "Invictus" ignores why he was great, distorts why he wasn't into something "great", and has very little bearing on reality. It is the Walt Disney version of history, shallow and dishonest.
4/10 – Worth one viewing.