Master of my Fate | The Buzz | Movie

A Nepali watching Invictus can't but help draw striking parallels between post-Apartheid reconciliation in South Africa and our own shaky peace process. What helped South Africa was that it had a statesman of the stature and wisdom of Nelson Mandela.

Invictus is the story of Mandela's determination to unite South Africa from the divisions wrought by its racist past. Even though he suffered two decades of incarceration at Robben Island, Mandela was willing to forgive and take Blacks and Whites together towards a prosperous new South Africa.

It was a formidable task in the early 1990s since Mandela had to convince a bitter White population, and Blacks bent on revenge.

Eastwood's film takes the case study of the South African rugby team, and how Mandela used that White-dominated sport to forge unity and inspire the team to an improbable, but symbolic, victory in the 1995 rugby world cup in South Africa.

Watching Invictus, you wonder when we will get a neta who will say, "The past is the past, we look to the future now", as Mandela does, and really mean it. Or, when his former ANC guerrilla body guard wants to accompany him to a function, Mandela tells him to stay away from view with the words:
"I don't want to talk to them hiding behind men with guns."

Mandela is played convincingly by Morgan Freeman, who even cultivates a faint Afrikaans accent, as he forces his Black body guards to work with White body guards. "Reconciliation starts here," Mandela reminds the former enemies, "forgiveness starts here…forgiveness removes fear."

Mandela uses the medium of sport, in this case rugby, to stitch his country back together through a sense of national pride. Although Eastwood's film depicts this as a success, we all know that the reconciliation process hasn't been all that smooth in South Africa. Maybe this year's football World Cup will help Mandela finish what he started out with rugby 15 years ago.

Mandela's words in the movie has a haunting relevance to the state of our own country. "In order to build our nation, we all need to exceed our expectation," he says, "we need inspiration." What a contrast to our paranoid leaders and their angry speeches, and the evening tv news filled with bile and venom. Not one of our leaders seems to be able to rise above personal and partisan interest. None of them have learnt from the bloody history of our recent past.

The film is named after a poem (Invictus means unvanquished) by an obscure Victorian poet named William Ernest Henley, the words of which Mandela says helped get him through the long years of detention. The lesson for us in Nepal, perhaps, is that destiny is not fated, we have to carve it out of our present.

Kunda Dixit