South Africa will relive the 1995 world cup this week as the new Clint Eastwood film "Invictus" premieres in Johannesburg today.
"At first we could not believe it when we saw him," recalled former rugby player John Allan, who was in Johannesburg's Ellis Park stadium for the final against New Zealand on June 24, 1995.
"All the crowd was silent and then... the whole crowd virtually erupted en masse," he said.
By wearing the jersey and walking on the field, Mandela strode into a sport beloved by Afrikaners, descendants of the first European settlers who institutionalised a violent racial segregation and imprisoned Mandela for decades.
"It was the greatest thing he could do," said Steven Roos, operations manager at Rugby SA, who was also in the stadium at the time. "At that point in time, we (the whites) knew about Nelson
Mandela as an ANC member, and the ANC (African National Congress) was a terrorist group," he said.
Mandela emerged smiling, wishing good luck to a team whose only non-white member was the mixed-race winger Chester Williams. On the president's back was emblazoned an enormous 6,
number of the Springboks captain François Pienaar.
In hindsight, analyst Aubrey Matshiqi of the Centre for Policy Studies said the euphoria of the rugby World Cup overshadowed the inequalities that remain in South Africa. "Because he became the symbol of reconciliation, it masked the reality of the lack of reconciliation among South Africans," Matshiqi said.
