A spoonful of sugar helps the history go down

I don’t read much non-fiction. I’ll occasionally go through a phase, but for the most part, I live real life. I read books to get away from it.

But when I do want something non-fiction, my favorite is the kind of history that views an event or era through a very particular lens the way that Seabiscuit did with horseracing and the 1930s. The book I just finished, Playing the Enemy by John Carlin, is another great example. It looks at South Africa and the end of apartheid through the lens of the 1995 rugby World Cup games.

I’ve always meant to really sit down and try to understand South Africa and apartheid. But trying to take in straight political history is not my favorite thing. Dates and names and political parties and who opposed who and why is just not easy for me to process. So I really needed a way into the story. But if I hadn’t read a really positive review of Playing the Enemy, I wouldn’t have chosen it as my window into that time. I’m not a real sports fan, with rugby being one of the sportiest sports in my mind. Giant men running into each other and playing under obscure rules doesn’t hit in my top ten of things to watch. I’m probably not the perfect target audience for this book.

But this is an absolutely extraordinary story, of how Nelson Mandela recognized that an international rugby embargo was a key to ending apartheid and how he then used the South African national team to begin the reconciliation of what was possibly the most fractured nation in history. It’s also a story of how after nearly 30 years in prison, Mandela used an extraordinary amount of trust and unshakeable good will to inspire change, even in people that most would have written off as unchangeable. And you really get a sense of the different people that were on both sides of the struggle for full democracy in South Africa. Politicians, lawyers, soldiers, writers, protesters, prisoners, clergy, people who never had a thought about politics, and, most definitely, rugby players.

I’m not telling you that you have to run out right now and get this book to read. (You could do that. It’s a great read.) But what I am saying is that if you don’t, write the name on a piece of paper and stick it in your wallet. Pull it out the next time you need inspiration. Amazing things can be done.