Pod Insights The Rest Is History 682. South Africa: Mandela and the Death of Apartheid (Part 6) About this episode How did the rugby World Cup final of 1995 inspire South Africa’s totemic national anthem? Why does the story shed a light on the history of Apartheid in South Africa? And, after becoming president, following years of imprisonment, how did Mandela use rugby and the national anthem to forge a new South Africa?
Join Tom and Dominic as they discuss the inspiring story behind South Africa’s national anthem, the collapse of Apartheid, and Nelson Mandela’s presidency.
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Transcript 11,519 words · 6 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:01 Dominic Sandbrook? This episode is brought to you by Lloyds Business and Commercial Banking.
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0:33 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, well, that was one very big change, Tom, but another tax change is upon us. And this is the advent of Making Tax Digital for Income Tax. And if you're at all concerned about it, this is where Lloyds come in because they're here to help make that change much simpler for you with a useful HMRC recognised accounting tool that will help you stay in line with all the Making Tax Digital requirements.
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4:32 Dominic Sandbrook? Hello everybody, so those were the two opening verses of the South African national anthem, Nkosi Sikaili Afrika, which was sung by the Imelunzi Kantu Coral Society at the Rugby World Cup final of 1995. So I remember very vividly watching that final, a great match, incredibly tense, very exciting. So the match was held in Johannesburg at Ellis Park, the totemic stadium of the Springboks, South Africa, and they were playing the All Blacks, or New Zealand. Now, the All Blacks were overwhelming favourites. They were and are
5:11 Dominic Sandbrook? the dominant national team in any sport, not just rugby. The All Blacks had steamrolled their way through the tournament. They kicked off, of course, with the with the hacker, with their Maori dance, which intimidates their opponents. They had in Jonah Lomu, the star of the tournament, probably the most intimidating rugby player compared to his peers who has ever existed. Lomu, this absolute man-mountain, so anyone who remembers the All Blacks playing England in the semi-final will remember him absolutely crunching his way through the England defence to score try after try, crushing the Underwood brothers underfoot. And he scored four tries, and he's this massive, massive presence, isn't he, Tom, in the tunnel as
5:54 Dominic Sandbrook? the two teams are waiting to go onto the pitch. And basically, the eyes of the sporting world are not on the Springboks, even though they're the hosts, they're on the All Blacks, and everybody expects the All Blacks to win.
6:04 Tom Holland? Yes, and just to explain for people who have no idea about rugby or what it involves, I will quote from John Carlin, who wrote an entire book, Playing the Enemy, about this 1995 final. He describes rugby as being like a giant chess match, played at speed with great violence. And the reason that Lomu is widely regarded as the greatest rugby player of all time is that he's not only huge, he's also very, very fast. And so you combine those, and it makes him an absolutely terrifying prospect. And so Dominic, as you said, when they're waiting to go out in the tunnel before the match For South Africans, the Springboks cannot take their eyes off him. And to quote Joel Stransky, who was the Springbok fly-half, which for American listeners is kind of vaguely the quarterback,
6:49 Tom Holland? would that be?
6:50 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, the fly-half controls the game.
6:52 Tom Holland? Yeah.
6:52 Dominic Sandbrook? Basically, they did take the pace of the game.
6:54 Tom Holland? Stransky said, you know, he couldn't take his eyes off Lomu. He looked like a mountain, one that we had to climb. And in the event, Dominic, South Africa did climb that mountain.
7:06 Dominic Sandbrook? They did.
7:06 Tom Holland? Because the 1995 Rugby World Cup final turns out to be one of the great sporting upsets of all time. And the Springboks win in extra time by the skin of their teeth. And it's Stransky who scores all their points. Very unusual, I gather.
7:25 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
7:25 Tom Holland? Rugby, this doesn't often happen. And the measure of Stransky's impact is that he gets to be played by Clint Eastwood's son Scott in this film that was made in 2008 in Victus by Clint Eastwood himself. So listeners by this point may be wondering two things. Firstly, what on earth is Clint Eastwood doing, making a film about a rugby match? Doesn't seem an obvious kind of thing for him to be doing. And secondly, why is a series that is marking the Football World Cup going on about a World Cup in a completely different
8:03 Tom Holland? sport? And the reason for this is that the 1995 Rugby World Cup final was historic for reasons that completely transcended sport. And the singing of the national anthem, the South African national anthem, by the Springboks at the start of this Rugby World Cup final is a crucial, crucial part of what makes the match historic. So before we go into the details of The anthem and why it matters so much to this extraordinary match. First of all, just to explain the significance of rugby in South Africa. It is introduced, obviously, by the British who colonised South Africa.
8:48 Tom Holland? But it evolves to become preeminently the sport of another white people in South Africa. And these are the Afrikaners, a people who, over the course of the 20th century, had transformed their country into a prior state, cut off from the rest of the world by a whole kind of array of business boycotts, cultural boycotts, international boycotts, and sporting boycotts.
9:18 Dominic Sandbrook? And the sporting boycotts matter enormously because rugby is one of the absolute symbols of Afrikanadom and of Afrikaner identity.
9:26 Tom Holland? I mean, sport generally, but rugby in particular. So what had the Afrikaners done? Who are they? Why have they become so globally notorious? Why does no one want to play them at rugby or eat their oranges or whatever? So listeners who feel that we haven't had nearly enough Dutch history on this series so far will be delighted to learn that the Afrikaners were originally Dutch Calvinists, plus a few Huguenots from France, so Protestants from France.
9:55 Dominic Sandbrook? Calvin always shows up at World Cups on the rest of history, doesn't he?
9:58 Tom Holland? It always does. And in the 17th century, the Dutch and French Protestants had begun settling the Cape, so the southernmost point of Africa. But they didn't view themselves as colonists so much as a chosen people who had been brought into a promised land. So people will remember from the episode we did on the Dutch Republic that this was a crucial part of how the Dutch rebels saw themselves as a chosen people on the model of the Israelites who were led out of Egypt by Moses. And of course, just as the Israelites end up being led into Canaan and conquering the Canaanites and taking it and turning it into Israel. So do the Afrikaners see Africa in a similar manner?
10:42 Tom Holland? It is a land that has been given to them by God. And the fact that there are people already living there, well, that's all part of God's plan.
10:49 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, and they went on a great trek, didn't they? Rather like Exodus, so the Vaal Trek. And the trek becomes part of their mythology, the trek to the promised land.
10:57 Tom Holland? Well, they do this not because they're getting away from black Africans, but because they're getting away from the second wave of white colonial invaders, who are of course the British. And they end up absorbing the whole of South Africa, the Afrikaners included, into their empire. Even though the Afrikaners, as you say, they go deep into the interior. The British follow them and they find that they're a kind of diamonds and things. So, yeah, obviously the British aren't going to let the Afrikaners have them. So the Afrikaners find themselves part of the British Empire. They don't like it. They fight a war, another name by which they're known is the Burghs. So this is what the Burgh wars are all about. But all the while, conservative Afrikaners, they never doubt that God's plan is still working itself out,
11:41 Tom Holland? that they are bound by a covenant to God, that the British Empire will end up collapsing. And so the Afrikaners bide their time. And sure enough, in due course, by 1948, the sun is setting on the British Empire and a government dominated by these Afrikaner conservatives gets elected to power.
12:00 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
12:00 Tom Holland? And the voters at this point are only white. So black Africans do not have the vote. And this government that gets elected in 1948, its stated ambition is to solidify the Afrikaners' sense of themselves as a chosen people into an entire political programme. And what does this mean in practice? It means instituting a policy of what they call separateness, which in Afrikaans is apartheid. And so white rule is enshrined as the expression of God's will. The Afrikaners obviously are not instituting apartheid because they think it's wicked or evil. They think that it is expressive of God's purpose.
12:44 Tom Holland? However, the practical consequences of this is to enshrine. Racial segregation as the animating principle of the entire South African state. So whether it is buying a house or falling in love or sitting or not sitting on a bench in a park or getting an education, so pretty much every aspect of daily life in South Africa, the opportunities that you have are dependent on the colour of your skin. It is racist to the very kind of depths of its marrow.
13:21 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, and to give people a sense, by the way, the black population of South Africa in this point, the 1940s, is about two thirds. The white population is about a fifth. Then there's what's called a coloured population, which was mixed race, and labourers from India who have been brought in. So basically, you've got 20% of the population who are based governing the lives of the other 80%.
13:44 Tom Holland? Yes, and the 20% who are white are enshrined as the masters and the black population in particular are essentially a kind of a servant class, a helot class.
13:54 Dominic Sandbrook? Yes.
13:55 Tom Holland? And they are denied educational opportunities that would enable them to combat this. This is all part of the kind of the plan. And the role that rugby plays in this, so John Carlin in his book points out that rugby becomes the Afrikaner sport par excellence and it serves as a perfect metaphor for the brutality that is inherent in apartheid. So to quote him, successive South African national teams had built up a reputation during the 20th century as the most bruisingly physical rugby players in the world. So in other words, they essentially kind of trample down anyone in their path and shoulder them out of the way.
14:30 Dominic Sandbrook? And even now, they're the most physical of all teams by far.
14:33 Tom Holland? And you can see why, therefore, to black South Africans, rugby comes to seem symbolic of apartheid and the kind of the very distinctive green jersey of the Springboks, the South African national team, it becomes one of the defining emblems of the apartheid system that the black South Africans are kind of groaning under.
14:54 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
14:54 Tom Holland? And this is why anti apartheid campaigners who are emerging over the course of the 50s, 60s, 70s into the 80s are very, very keen to see South Africa banned from all international sport, but particularly from rugby, because they know, as you kind of implied, that is the ban that will hurt and upset the Afrikaners the most. And it's not until 1981 that a full boycott of the Springboks is successfully instituted. But it is brought in, and this means that in 1987, when the first Rugby World Cup is held in Australia and New Zealand, South Africa are not invited, they are not present. So too in 1991, when the Second World Cup is held in England, because at that point apartheid is still
15:38 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
15:39 Tom Holland? holding. But then in 1995, South Africa are not just participants, but the hosts. So obviously, something very dramatic has happened. Some radical change in the make-up of the South African government and constitution has occurred. And basically, that change has been a process, beginning in 1990, of the dismantling of the apartheid regime and a consigning of the entire doctrine of white supremacy to the ideological scrap heap. And it's a massive, massive story. You and I lived through it.
16:14 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, huge.
16:14 Tom Holland? But people who haven't may be startled to learn that there was a government so profoundly racist, and now it's kind of completely collapsed. And numerous factors contribute to the process of this collapse, the collapse of apartheid. So chiefly, there come to be massive black resistance movements. There are campaigns of mass civil disobedience. And by the late 1980s, going into the 1990s, this essentially is making South Africa pretty ungovernable.
16:43 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
16:43 Tom Holland? We've talked about the sporting boycotts, but I mean, it's the, I think the economic sanctions kind of cripple the South African economy, not immediately, but it's a kind of slowly deflating puncture. South African business classes can feel the life kind of whistling out of the economy.
17:00 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah. And I think the cultural sanctions actually are massively important as well, because they Create this sense of isolation, a sense that the rest of the world hates you. Remember that song in the
17:09 Tom Holland? Yeah.
17:09 Dominic Sandbrook? Styrical song in the 1980s, I've never met a nice South African.
17:13 Tom Holland? Yeah.
17:13 Dominic Sandbrook? I mean, there was a sense that South Africa, I think, was having been a sort of promised land for immigrants in their white imagination in the 20th century.
17:21 Tom Holland? Mrs Thatcher's son.
17:23 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
17:23 Tom Holland? Tony Gregg.
17:24 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
17:24 Tom Holland? Most of people, yeah.
17:26 Dominic Sandbrook? It becomes such a pariah that that cannot help but have an corrosive effect on Africaners' sense of self-worth, which goes to your next point, Tom, which is about their
17:36 Tom Holland? They lose self-confidence.
17:38 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, exactly.
17:39 Tom Holland? And they lose moral self-confidence. And I wrote about this in Dominion. I was amazed the degree to which kind of theological anxieties about whether apartheid was part of God's plan actually played a crucial role in deflating the self-confidence of the apartheid regime, because so many members, leading members of the South African government, were very devout Christians. And they started to worry that actually apartheid was, as the rest of the world was saying, a kind of mortal sin. You know, basically, they, it all kind of, you know, it's theologically deflated as well as economically and
18:13 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
18:14 Tom Holland? deflated in terms of law and order. But even so, they still might have decided to hold on. I mean, they, they're a massive minority. They have been suppressing the black majority for decades and decades and decades. They must be nervous about what their fate might be if they give up power. And so I think that even with everything that is going wrong for them, they might still have tried to maintain apartheid. Had it not been for the fact that there existed a black leader with whom the leaders of the apartheid regime could contemplate doing business. And this black leader is, of course, one of the most famous political figures of the late 20th century.
18:55 Tom Holland? And that is Nelson Mandela, by far the most formidable, the most celebrated of all the revolutionaries that the campaign against apartheid throws up in South Africa. A member of a OSA-speaking royal family. He becomes the deputy president of the African National Congress and the African National Congress, the ANC, is the leading organisation in the struggle against white rule. And Mandela founds the spear of the nation, which is in effect the armed wing of the ANC. And in his kind of career as the leader of the spear of the nation, he became famous for his ability to evade attempts to arrest him. And he becomes feted in the world's press as the Black Pimpernel.
19:38 Tom Holland? So he finally arrested in 1962, probably as a result of a tip off from the CIA. He was convicted of criminal sabotage in 1964 and he gets sentenced to life imprisonment.
19:51 Dominic Sandbrook? Gives a great speech at his trial, really moving, rousing speech.
19:54 Tom Holland? Yeah, and so when he goes into prison, he is globally accepted as not just the kind of political, but the moral leader of the campaign against apartheid. And perhaps because of that, initially, he's kept in very brutal conditions. So he's kept in a tiny cell. He has to wash in icy cold seawater. He's put to hard labour in a stone quarry and the glare of the sun in the quarry is so bright that it permanently damages his eyesight. So very tough conditions. And throughout this period, he never renounces violence. In 1985, the South African government say, look, we'll let you go free if you will renounce violence. And he retorts, only free men can negotiate.
20:37 Tom Holland? Prisoners cannot enter into contracts. He ends up being kept in prison for 27 years. And over the course of those years, he reflects on the limitations of violence. And this, I think, is in large part because of the spiritual, the ideological well springs that he's drawing on. So he'd been raised a Methodist. His faith is discreet, but committed, I think. In prison, he very rarely misses a service. He's reading the Bible all the time and he takes seriously what he reads in the Gospels. So the kind of incredibly subversive words of Jesus in the Gospels, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. And when at last, on the 11th of February, 1990, he is freed from prison.
21:21 Tom Holland? He's 71. Amazingly, he returns to the world determined not just to reclaim his freedom, but to do so in a spirit that is devoid of hatred and bitterness. And he's holding to this philosophy, not just as a kind of spiritual discipline, although I think that is absolutely what it is for him. But also because he is a true statesman and he sees this philosophy as the surest way to bind up the kind of the terrible wounds that have been afflicting South Africa for so long. And in short, his aim is to meet the people who had kept him in prison for so long and brutalised his people and discriminated against them and deprived them
22:03 Tom Holland? of every opportunity that they could. He's determined to meet them with forgiveness and he is trusting that they will answer this forgiveness with a mood of repentance.
22:16 Dominic Sandbrook? Right.
22:16 Tom Holland? And this essentially is where the Rugby World Cup comes in.
22:20 Dominic Sandbrook? So, South Africa had been out in the cold in rugby for a long time and more than a decade, which was a massive blow to Afrikaners' sense of self-confidence, I think. But it had been readmitted in 1992 and then awarded the World Cup as a sort of, as a gesture, I guess. You're back in the fold. So they were given the World Cup in 93 and then 1994 they have their first multiracial election, don't they? Properly democratic election.
22:50 Tom Holland? Yeah, so they get the World Cup before the election.
22:53 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, but in the expectation, of course, that things are going to change politically in South Africa, which they do, because the African National Congress, Mandela's party, wins a landslide majority in the first election and Mandela becomes the first black president. And his relationship with rugby and the way in which he uses it is actually a really, really interesting example of the political use of sport.
23:17 Tom Holland? Yeah, because South Africa would never have been given the Rugby World Cup had Mandela and the ANC not essentially given it the green light even before they become the government. And as you say, Mandela has picked up on the significance that rugby plays in the kind of Afrikaner soul.
23:35 Dominic Sandbrook? And by the way, you can't emphasise enough how unusual this is, because black South Africans did not, by and large, support the Springbok rugby team. Their sport was not rugby, it was football. Rugby was the game of the oppressed. So for Mandela to have any interest in this at all is groundbreaking, stunning.
23:56 Tom Holland? Well, it's part of a kind of broader programme of self-education Mandela puts himself through in prison to try, basically to try and understand the enemy. So he is learning Afrikaans, he's learning about the history of the Afrikaners, their heroes, their mythology, you know, how they understand their role in in Africa. Because of course, by this point, they have been in Africa for centuries and centuries. So they are essentially an African people. And Mandela absolutely kind of recognises that, that they have to be part of the settlement that Mandela is hoping will come. And so as well as studying Afrikaan history, he also tries to befriend his jailers, he treats them with respect in the expectation, which increasingly, the longer
24:37 Tom Holland? he's in prison, comes to be met, that the jailers will treat him with respect in return. And he ends up great friends in particular with one guard, Christo Brand. And it's Brand who, in the late 1980s, starts to educate Mandela in rugby. As you said, it's not just about the rules, it's not just about the players, it's about the role that it plays in Afrikaner culture. And so Mandela comes out of prison entirely understanding how potentially significant rugby might be. And he sees, I think, the World Cup as a way of securing two separate goals. So the first is that it might help win the support of Afrikaners,
25:18 Tom Holland? who are the most inveterate opponents of accommodation with black majority rule. It might help them kind of accept this new multiracial settlement. As you said, for most black Africans, rugby is the archetypal sport of the white oppressor, the Afrikaner oppressor. And so radicals in the ANC, they want to see, for instance, the distinctive green jersey of the Springboks band, they want to see the name Springboks band as well. And they push this demand and Mandela flatly refuses. Mandela has also made a point of reaching out to the captain of the Springboks, who is a guy called Francois Pienaar,
25:59 Tom Holland? getting Pienaar on board with the exciting progressive new slogan for the South African rugby team, "One team, one country", and Pienaar is essentially what AI would come up with if you typed in "Africana rugby player", you know, he doesn't really look like Matt Damon, who plays him in Victus and who just looks so unbelievably American, it's not true. Pienaar looks very, very South African.
26:27 Dominic Sandbrook? He looks incredibly hard, doesn't he? He's from a working class, trans vile family. So he's from the kind of, one of the kind of great African heartlands. And he looks like he's hewn out of wood or something, very bronze, incredibly tall, gigantic, an absolute alpha male.
26:42 Tom Holland? But he's very smart, he's educated and he's a deeply Christian man. And he is invited to the presidential palace for tea, meets Mandela, is completely charmed by Mandela. And Mandela, in turn, is very impressed with Pienaar, says about him, "He did not seem to me at all to be the typical product of an apartheid society. It was a pleasure to sit down with him." And Pienaar buys into Mandela's kind of goal. And between them, they managed to, to get the rest of the Springboks on board. So that by the time the World Cup comes around, all the South African team are aware of their mission, which essentially is not just to win the tournament, although that would be a massive bonus,
27:22 Tom Holland? but essentially to serve as symbols of the new Africa, you know, one team, one nation. But it's not just about winning the support of white South Africans for the new constitution for Mandela. He also has another goal, and this is much more difficult, which is to get black South Africans to back the Springboks.
27:44 Tom Holland? As their team, as their boys.
27:47 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
27:47 Tom Holland? I mean, obviously, they hate the Springboks because they were seen as a symbol of apartheid. But as you said, it's also because football is the mass game for for black South Africans. They don't people, most black South Africans don't understand rugby. And those who did understand it, if they watched a rugby match, an international rugby match, would always, as a point of principle, support the Springboks opponents. And it is an issue that going into the 1995 tournament, the South African team only has one non-white player in the entire squad, and this is a guy called Chester Williams, who is known as the Black Pearl. So it is, I think, for Mandela, a massive gamble. He's got to get the white rugby supporters backing the new multiracial settlement.
28:29 Tom Holland? And he's got to get the black South Africans supporting the Springboks as an emblem of this new South Africa.
28:35 Dominic Sandbrook? So how does he do it? I mean, the key thing, obviously, is they they win the World Cup.
28:40 Tom Holland? Yeah, that's a huge help, isn't it?
28:41 Dominic Sandbrook? So there is a conspiracy theory, isn't there? I know we have some listeners in New Zealand, and they will be absolutely pulling their hair out at this point and throwing their phones across the room because they will tell you, Tom, that their team were poisoned before the game. They had food poisoning.
28:56 Tom Holland? So like Gordon Banks?
28:57 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, well, much more than Gordon Banks. So a lot of the team, they say, had food poisoning. They were poisoned by the South Africans, and that's what the South Africans want. Now, at this point, our South African listeners will be going mad.
29:08 Tom Holland? Well, their manager said that it was dodgy milk.
29:10 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
29:10 Tom Holland? I mean, what is definitely a factor, I think, is the presence of Mandela himself.
29:13 Dominic Sandbrook? Huge gap.
29:15 Tom Holland? At the match. And Mandela, who's an incredibly cunning, cunning operator at every level. I mean, he plays a blinder. So before the the tournament begins, he does everything he can to get, you know, the ANC, the the kind of larger black constituency beyond them in South Africa, backing the the Springboks. He's absolutely insisting this is not a time for score settling. This is a time for generosity. He goes to the Springboks training camp before the tournament begins. He shakes all the hands of the various players. He's made sure he knows what their names are. He addresses them by name. And then he goes out and he publicly urges everyone in South Africa to back them. He says, we have adopted these young men as our boys, as our own children, as our
30:00 Tom Holland? own stars. And it helps, as you say, that the Springboks keep winning and winning and winning and they end up in the final. Mandela's most iconic performance of all comes on the day of the final because he turns up very famously wearing a Springboks shirt, the green shirt that had been an emblem of apartheid for so many decades. And on it, he has the number six, which is Pena's number on the back. And wearing this green shirt, he goes down into the bowels of this immense stadium. And first of all, he visits the All Blacks in their dressing room. And then he goes
30:42 Tom Holland? to see the Springboks. And this has a huge psychological impact on both teams because the All Blacks, to have the man who's probably the most admired person in the world at this point, turn up in a Springboks journey. I mean, their synapses are absolutely fizzing with this. They can't kind of synthesize it. And it's reported that Lomu was daunted to meet Mandela, and perhaps this had a kind of dispiriting impact on him. Whereas for the Springboks, of course, they are massively inspired by meeting Mandela. But the greatest moment is yet to come because Mandela, after he's been to the dressing rooms, then steps out onto the rugby
31:22 Tom Holland? pitch itself, onto the field of what Carlin in his book describes as Africanadums, Holy of Holies, the national rugby stadium. And it could so easily have gone wrong. He could have been booed. I mean, worst of all, he could have been shot. You know, there might have been a kind of, you know, a racist sniper up there in the stands. But it's a triumph. And the overwhelmingly Afrika crowd start chanting Nelson, Nelson. So it's like us when we're talking about the Battle of Trafalgar. And you can hear it on YouTube. It's a kind of amazing, kind of rapturous greeting of a man who, by most of the people in that stadium.
32:07 Tom Holland? Had been seen as a terrorist only a few years before and Mandela takes off his cap. He waves it in the air. You see it on YouTube. He's smiling. He's looking as happy as it's possible for a man to look. Amore de Plessis, who was the Springboks manager, great former South African rugby player. Former captain, yeah. He said of this moment, "It was a moment of magic, a moment of wonder. It was the moment I'd realised that there really was a chance this country could work. This man was showing that he could forgive totally and now they, white South Africa, rugby white South Africa, they showed in their response to him that they too wanted to give back." Oh, that's a very good version of the accent that people around the world have
32:49 Tom Holland? come to love. Thank you. Maybe he's a rugby player. I should have made it sound slightly more formidable, but. So, yeah, it sounded formidable. I was focusing on the vowels. Yeah, it sounded formidable in a slightly camp way. Anyway, the clock shakes towards the start of the match and of course, you know, it's a final of a World Cup. Yep. And they're going to begin by singing their national anthems. So a tense moment. Well, not just tense. I mean, it is the most symbolically freighted moment of the entire match, the entire tournament, perhaps the entire spell of time since Mandela had been released from prison. So the two teams, New Zealand and South Africa, they have to sing their respective national anthems. And of course, the tension, you could cut
33:34 Tom Holland? with a knife, Dominic, to coin a phrase. So we have the Imalongi Kantu Coral Society, who are going to be taking the lead in singing the anthems and they are a black choir from Soweto, which is the sprawling township outside Johannesburg where the Rugby World Cup final is being held and it had long served as the effective capital of the anti-apartheid movement. On top of that, this choir is going to be singing a song. That had only been South Africa's national anthem for a year since the election of the ANC government, and this is Nkosi Sikileli Africa.
34:11 Tom Holland? And it's a song that to Afrikaners had long symbolised subversion, revolution, terrorism, black power, everything that the apartheid regime had been committed to suppressing very brutally. And to reiterate, we are now in the great cathedral of Africanadom. So obviously, the Springboks had sung it before. It preceded previous matches, but never in a place, a time, a fixture with the amount of symbolic weight that this match had. So what's it going to mean for them to sing this anthem?
34:53 Tom Holland? But even more pressingly perhaps, how is the crowd in this great stadium overwhelmingly Afrikaner? How are they going to react with the eyes of the world upon them?
35:05 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah. And what about the anthem itself? Nkosi Sikileli Africa. Where's it come from and how has it ended up becoming this great anthem of black liberation? Well, we'll be answering all these questions after the break.
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36:30 Speaker 03 From the creators of Zootopia and Frozen comes Disney's Hext. Welcome to Hext and enter the world of witches, where it was foretold that an ordinary girl would become an extraordinary witch and save the world of magic. Disney's Hext arrives in theaters this Thanksgiving.
36:51 Speaker 04 I'm Dexter Morgan. I've been killing killers for half my life. It gets to you. You're having a midlife crisis. I'm not ready for that. I'm older. I'm wiser.
37:06 Speaker 04 Things are gonna get messy. But if I can't believe in myself, I can't believe in anything.
37:23 Dominic Sandbrook? Hello and welcome back to The Rest Is History. So this is the sixth Inagre series, tying in with the World Cup, looking at the stories behind the national anthems of some of the competing nations. And today, we are looking at the story of Nkosi Sikileli Africa, perhaps the most beautiful of all the African national anthems that people will be hearing at the FIFA World Cup, and certainly the most celebrated and the most historically fascinating. The interesting thing, though, is that, you know, we've done some anthems in this series, the origins of which are kind of shrouded in obscurity. So, you know, it's sometimes hard to tell exactly where they've come from. For example, "God Save the King",
38:06 Dominic Sandbrook? exactly who wrote it, we can't be sure. Same story with the Wilhelmus, the national anthem of the Netherlands. But we do know who wrote this anthem, and it's a man called Enoch Sontonga, isn't it, Tom?
38:18 Tom Holland? Yes, so he is the writer. And he was born in the early 1870s in the Eastern Cape Colony. And like Mandela, he was a native Mosa speaker. And again, I hope I've got the click right there. He moves northwards to Johannesburg and he becomes a teacher in a Methodist school in what will ultimately become the great township of Soweto outside Johannesburg. So you would think a teacher in a Methodist school in the 1880s and 1890s, unlikely to be a dandy, but in Santonga's case, you'd be wrong because there is a photograph showing him looking unbelievably natty.
39:00 Tom Holland? He has, he's got a hat, he's got a three-piece suit, must have been very hot in the South African sun, very natty, pocket square, and he's holding the chain of a fob watch. I mean, he looks very, very stylish indeed. We know incredibly little about him. We don't even know what he taught, but we do know that he runs the school choir and he's always writing songs for it. So he's clearly very musical. And one of these songs, which he scribbles down on a scrap of paper in 1897, is the song that becomes Cozy Sikaleli Africa, the song that will make him famous. But this fame is entirely posthumous because in 1905, Santonga, he's 32, he starts to
39:42 Tom Holland? get afflicted by stomach cramps and they are so hideous that actually it gets into the local newspaper. He's suffering so badly and the newspaper wrote, he suffered at times from stomachache to the extent that he would predict that these were his last days on this earth. And he's right.
39:59 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
40:00 Tom Holland? Because he dies shortly afterwards of gastroenteritis. And he's buried in the section of the Bramfontein graveyard in Johannesburg, which is reserved for black Christians. So the racism is evident even in cemeteries.
40:17 Dominic Sandbrook? Hmm.
40:18 Tom Holland? And in due course, the very location of his grave comes to be forgotten. And that is pretty much the sum total of what we know about him. So we do know, you know, we know who wrote this song, but you know, the life of the composer is pretty much failed in obscurity.
40:33 Dominic Sandbrook? And if we go to the, the song itself, written in Corsa and it's, it's means, Lord bless Africa, one verse and a chorus, right? That's all there is.
40:44 Tom Holland? Yes. And this, these words are, as well as the music, Santonga's written the words. As you say, a single verse, "Lord bless Africa, may her glory be lifted high. Hear our petitions, Lord bless us, your children." And then this chorus, "Descend, O Spirit, descend, O Holy Spirit." So, I mean, very evidently, a hymn, an anthem, if you like, and expressive of a kind of a broader trend in South African Christianity at the time Santongo writes it. So, white missionaries have been spreading Christianity in South Africa, among black South Africans, over the course of the centuries.
41:25 Tom Holland? And by the end of the 19th century, black Christians in South Africa are, I think, coming to resent the kind of the mood, the spirit, the vibe of paternalism with which they are being treated by white missionaries, by the predominantly white-led churches. And in reaction to this, they start to emphasise the antiquity of African Christianity and to argue that Christianity has been a presence in Africa for much longer than it had been, for instance, in either Britain or the Netherlands.
41:57 Dominic Sandbrook? But they're not wrong.
41:58 Tom Holland? They're not wrong, because they can focus specifically on Ethiopia. The kings of Ethiopia, people who listened to the episode we did on the Ark of the Covenant may remember that the Ethiopian kings claimed to be descended from Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. And in the Psalms, it had been prophesied that Ethiopia would quickly stretch out her hands to God. And in South Africa, Ethiopia comes to be a kind of synonym for the whole of Africa. And in The Acts of the Apostles, South Africans can read that one of the very first Gentile converts is an Ethiopian eunuch. And, as they say, you know, there's no Dutch, there's no British converts in The Acts of the Apostles,
42:42 Tom Holland? but an African convert, yes, there absolutely is. And so in 1892, five years before Santongo writes and coeses Ezekiel Ely Africa, a breakaway Christian movement has been founded by a Zulu Methodist minister, and this is called the Ethiopian Church. And so this is very much the spiritual climate in which Santongo is living. And it's a climate in which it's taken for granted. By black Africans that God holds Africa especially in his care, that he has plotted out a particular path for Christianity in black Africa. The hymn that Saint Onka writes is Pentecostal, meaning that it describes the Holy Spirit descending like fire.
43:27 Tom Holland? And this is entirely appropriate because the popularity of the hymn itself spreads like wildfire. And in 1912, it's sung at the inaugural meeting of a crucial convention. And this is a meeting of the South African Native National Congress. And this was held in Bloemfontein, and it is attended by chiefs and other leading black figures from across the country. And the aim of this congress is to oppose attempts by white legislators to introduce what in retrospect will very clearly come to seem one of the kind of, you know, the building blocks of what will be the apartheid regime. And specifically, it's essentially about enabling the whites to take the best bits
44:12 Tom Holland? of land in South Africa. So it's a native land act, that's what it's called, and allocates the ownership of 90% of South African land exclusively to whites. You know, the blacks can have the remaining 10%, which is all scrubby and rubbish and, you know, not fertile. So you can understand why black leaders are meeting up to oppose this. Inevitably, it fails. This Native's Land Act is passed the following year, so in 1913. But the members of the congress don't give up, and they're determined to continue the fight. And in 1923, they changed the name of their organisation to a much more inclusive one, and indeed much snappier.
44:57 Tom Holland? And so what had been the South African Native National Congress becomes the African National Congress. So, you know, you don't have to be a South African native. Anyone can join it. It's open to everyone.
45:12 Tom Holland? And it's two years after that that Nkosi is adopted as the ANC's official anthem. And it's quite, it's not maybe an obvious anthem because we said in the previous episode that we did on the Brazilian national anthem, that a lot of national anthems are really quite violent. They are, they need an enemy. And you'd think that the ANC might be tempted to go for an anthem in which the white rulers of South Africa are being damned, but not a bit of it, because there's actually very, you know, there's nothing martial, there's nothing aggressive, there's nothing militant about the lyrics of Nkosi, Sileleli, Africa
45:50 Tom Holland? at all. And even when in 1927, a Xhosa poet adds seven extra verses to it because one verse is decided it's not enough. I mean, it still remains a hymn. The tone of the song remains kind of Pacific in the way that it had previously been.
46:07 Dominic Sandbrook? But that kind of works, doesn't it, given the nature of their struggle? I mean, the struggle is punctuated with moments of martyrdom, with massacres, with funerals and trials and, you know, and suffering. It's a, the story of the ANC is a story about victory through suffering. And that's why this, as a hymn, it works really well.
46:27 Tom Holland? Yeah. So people who are being executed, ANC members who are being executed, as they, you know, are standing on the trap door that will drop and, you know, they'll kind of fall through the trap door, they are singing it. And in a sense, the fact that it's not aggressive, it's not violent, that it's a, it's a kind of hymn to God, I agree, it makes it all kind of all the more powerful. But equally, you can see why to the agents of the apartheid regime, the hymn of the ANC comes to seem something very menacing, something very aggressive.
47:01 Dominic Sandbrook? Well, not least because they can't understand it.
47:03 Tom Holland? Can't really understand it. And so they assume that it's a song that's kind of suffused with hate. And, you know, it comes to seem emblematic of everything that they're fighting. They really, really mistrust and dislike it. The idea that it might end up as the anthem of South Africa, just kind of monstrous possibility, not least because the apartheid state has its own national anthem, "The Call of South Africa". And just as white South Africans hate the ANC anthem, so black South Africans come to hate the apartheid anthem, I mean entirely understandably. Now, in fact, like the lyrics from Cozy, those of Dschtem are actually pretty mellow in tone.
47:47 Tom Holland? So there is one mention in it of the groan of the ox wagon, and this is an allusion to the Vua Trekkas, the the the Burz who had sought to escape British rule in the 19th century. You know, so migrating from the Cape Colony to the interior of South Africa. And when they get there, they kind of displace various native peoples, have repeated punch up with the Zulus, all this kind of thing. So the allusion to the Vua Trekkas is a kind of red flag, I guess, to to to black South Africans. But otherwise, there's nothing in the lyrics that would be obviously offensive. Because essentially, it's a hymn of love to the beauties of South Africa, and also thanks to God who had fashioned these beauties.
48:28 Tom Holland? So it's opening lines from the blues of our heavens, from the depths of our sea, over our everlasting mountains, where the cliffs echo back our calls. I mean, these are sentiments that that everyone in South Africa could agree with, absolutely, you know, absolutely ecumenical in tone.
48:46 Dominic Sandbrook? So the apartheid regime falls in the early 1990s. And the obvious question is, what is the new South African to adopt as this anthem? The majority is obviously black. You would assume they are simply going to throw out Dschtem and to replace it with Nkosi, which is, of course, a song that the majority, I guess, of black South Africans would get behind. But that's not quite what happens, is it?
49:12 Tom Holland? Yeah, so early in 1994, just before Mandela's inauguration as South Africa's first black president, the N C kind of Supreme Decision Making Caucus hold a meeting to decide what the anthem is going to be. And it's pressing because people from around the world are going to be coming for Mandela's inauguration. And so they do need an anthem. As you say, it's absolutely inconceivable that they will have Dschtem. And the kind of the overwhelming consensus is that it should be Nkosi. And they wait for Mandela to pop out for a phone call. And while he's gone to take the call, they say, yeah, we'll have Nkosi Sikaleli Africa. Mandela comes back, they tell him, this is our decision.
49:55 Tom Holland? He blows a gasket. He is furious. He tells them, this song, Dstem, that you treat so easily, holds the emotions of many people who you don't represent yet. With the stroke of a pen, you would take a decision to destroy the very, the only basis that we are building upon, reconciliation. So Mandela's solution, very centrist, keep both anthems. And also, just for good measure, include a translation in Kozie into a second South African language, Sosothu. So basically, everyone will be happy. I think, you know, kind of ticking all the boxes there. But there is a problem with this. Because if you play all three songs together, it lasts for more than five minutes. I mean, it just goes on and on. And at Mandela's inauguration,
50:38 Tom Holland? one of the guests is Prince Philip. Prince Philip is a man.
50:41 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, he calls it as he sees it.
50:43 Tom Holland? Yeah, he calls it as it is. And he jokes that he'd had to keep his hat off for so long, you know, as a mark of respect for the anthem, that he got sunstroke. And even Mandela himself acknowledges that it was all a bit boring by the end. So there's obviously an issue here. And so he comes up with the classic politician's wheeze when faced with an imponderable problem. He hands it over to a committee. I suppose you could say he kicks it into touch. Would that be a rugby kind of metaphor?
51:12 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, and then there's some line or metaphor to follow, no?
51:16 Tom Holland? So this committee meets early in 1995, the year of the Rugby World Cup. And to begin with, the committee are really struggling because the challenge is actually quite a serious one. Because Mandela's mandated them to to meet two seemingly contradictory objectives. So the first one is to ensure the anthem isn't too long. You know, he doesn't want dignitaries dying of heat stroke in the future. Simultaneously, it has to incorporate both the ANC anthem and the apartheid regime anthem. And Mandela's precise instructions are, don't scrap anything, be inclusive. So that's a real problem. It's kind of, yeah, make it a bit longer, but cut it.
51:55 Dominic Sandbrook? Also, yeah, do all that in two minutes or whatever.
51:59 Tom Holland? Yeah, and of course you've got the Rugby World Cup coming along, it's going to be held, the final is going to be held on the 25th of May. It's obvious that the anthem is not going to be ready in time for that. And that means that these two anthems, Kosi, Sicily, Africa and Ishtem are both going to have to be sung at the World Cup final, which in turn means that it's going to be a massive test for the Springboks, as we've said, you know, they've got to sing it in full view of the cameras of the world's media and for the crowd in Ellis Park Stadium. You know, how is the crowd going to respond to what for 70 years has been the ANC anthem? And the answer is they respond amazingly
52:40 Tom Holland? well. So the Springboks, they excelled themselves. And the reason for this is that a month before the final, they'd all been given lessons in how to sing the ANC anthem. Fortunately, two of them, who were farm boys raised in the eastern Cape, they already spoke Loosa. So that was good. The others, you know, they had no idea, but they throw themselves very gainly into learning it. And at the final, you know, they're lined up on the pitch before the start of the match, and all of them, you know, at the very least are kind of pretending to mouth the words. It doesn't look like they've got no idea. It does look like they know what the words of the song are. And actually, the only one who doesn't sing,
53:24 Tom Holland? if you look at the footage of it, the only one who doesn't is the captain, Francois Pena. And the reason for this, he said afterwards, I couldn't sing the anthem, I dared not, because I knew that if I did, I'd fall apart.
53:36 Dominic Sandbrook? Oh, he's a softy heart.
53:38 Tom Holland? Yeah. And in playing the enemy, John Carl insights what Sean Fitzpatrick, who was the all-black captain, later told Pena. So he told me that he looked over and saw a tear roll down my cheek. So an incredibly emotional moment. And it is respected as such by the crowd. You know, they, they really behaved very well. In the mythology of this occasion, it's kind of cast as something that inspires the entire notion of a rainbow country, a rainbow nation.
54:09 Dominic Sandbrook? Same bro nation.
54:10 Tom Holland? And I think it's it's kind of easy to be skeptical about that, to be cynical. But the converse, I think, is clearly true, that the spectacle of the Springboks failing to sing the ANC anthem, what is now the South African anthem. I think that would have dealt a really devastating blow to kind of any notion of one team, one country, any prospect of.
54:31 Dominic Sandbrook? Well, imagine if the crowd had booed it. I mean, that crowd is very white. Imagine if the white crowd booed the anthem. I mean, that would have, nothing more corrosive could be imagined.
54:40 Tom Holland? Yeah. And so I think it really, really mattered that they they didn't do that and that they behaved themselves. And at the end of the match, Pienaar, who is, you know, he's played a blinder throughout the tournament, he serves up the absolutely perfect soundbite. So a sports reporter asks him, how did it feel to have 62,000 fans supporting you here in the stadium? And Pienaar's answer does Mandela proud. We didn't have 62,000 fans behind us. We had 43 million South Africans. So not a dry eye in the house.
55:14 Dominic Sandbrook? But they've sung both anthems. They actually don't have one anthem at this point. So the committee doesn't come up with its report until two years after the World Cup, after the Rugby World Cup. And their solution, I mean, is it a fudge? Just I guess it is a fudge really, isn't it?
55:31 Tom Holland? Well, it's a fudge if you think that A Day in the Life, The Beatles' great song, which fuses two separate songs by John Lennon and Paul McCartney into what is often seen as the masterpiece on Sergeant Pepper. Whether that's a fudge, I don't think it's a fudge. I think they do exactly the same. They fuse Nkosi, Sikileli Africa and Ditem into a single song, and it works musically, but it also works ideologically as well. Because actually, when you pair the lyrics from the two songs, you realise that both of them have emerged from a common Christian African culture, because both songs are expressing
56:11 Tom Holland? an identical conviction, namely that God has bestowed particular blessings on South Africa and that people who live in South Africa therefore should be grateful for those blessings. So actually, they kind of, they blend perfectly. However, the the committee have really got the beep between their teeth because they feel that it's actually not enough just to have these two songs put together. We'd better chuck in a whole load of other stuff as well, you know, because there are loads and loads of languages of of different kind of peoples in South Africa. So they render the new anthem into no less than five of South Africa's 11 official languages. So one of them is obviously OSA, first two lines of Nkosi, Sicily, Africa, as Sontonga had written them.
56:55 Tom Holland? Then you have Zulu, so the third and fourth lines of of the original are translated into that. Then you have Sosoto, which is a verse asking God to protect South Africa. Then you have Dschtem, so that's Afrikaans. And then you have the last verse is in English, composed specially for the new anthem, and this is very bland. Sounds the call to come together and united we shall stand. Let us live and strive for freedom in South Africa, our land.
57:21 Dominic Sandbrook? I mean, when they're singing before a rugby match, their kind of voices are rising at that point. It is a very powerful climax, I think.
57:27 Tom Holland? Yeah, I mean, the lyrics are not as powerful perhaps as the early ones, but they they do what they've got to do. So you have these five, five different languages in the South African national anthem, and that makes it very, very exceptional. And in fact, there is only one other country that has a multilingual anthem, and this is Suriname, so a country on the the north coast of of South America. It had originally been an English colony, so back in the 17th century. Then in 1667, it gets swapped by the Dutch for New Amsterdam, which becomes New York. So the English get what will become New York and the Dutch get Suriname.
58:11 Tom Holland? And I think basically the English have the better of that deal. However, having said that, I mean, the English end up losing New York, of course, but the Dutch keep Suriname for almost 350 years and Suriname only obtained its kind of ultimate independence in 1975. But even before that, it had adopted an anthem that had two verses, so one in Dutch and one in a language called, I hope I'm pronouncing this right, Saranen Tong, which is an Anglo-Dutch creole.
58:40 Dominic Sandbrook? Means sort of Suriname tongue presumably.
58:42 Tom Holland? Yes, yeah. So I think it's a kind of, it's the language that was spoken by the, the slaves there.
58:47 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
58:48 Tom Holland? And it may be there's something about kind of Anglo Dutch colonial fusion that fosters multilingual national anthems because there is clearly a kind of correspondence between the history of Suriname and South Africa.
58:59 Dominic Sandbrook? And I know you've seen your notes, you say that as fine as the Suriname national anthem is, it can't really compose within Cozy Sicalali Africa. Is, tell me through the Suriname national anthem, how fine is it?
59:10 Tom Holland? It's not very fine.
59:10 Dominic Sandbrook? It's not very fine?
59:12 Tom Holland? Well, it's all right, but I don't think it's a banger.
59:13 Dominic Sandbrook? Have you actually ever heard it?
59:14 Tom Holland? Yes, I have. I listened to it.
59:15 Dominic Sandbrook? Oh, well done.
59:16 Tom Holland? Because I was wondering if it was, you know, if it was going to be any good.
59:18 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
59:19 Tom Holland? And actually, I mean, it's all right, but it's, that's literally nothing else. Well, I mean, it's, it's one of two multilingual national anthems. I think that makes it stand out from the crowd. I mean, we've only talked about the anthems of two South American countries in this series, Brazil and now Suriname. So.
59:35 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, this is a terrible result for Argentina. They would, they'll be fuming. Right. So let's get back to the South African anthem. You say it's the most haunting and historically resonant of 20th century national anthems. And I guess that's true, isn't it? Because um, there are, we've done a lot of anthems with a lot of history, but none whose past is so kind of freighted with suffering and martyrdom and stuff.
1:00:01 Tom Holland? And it is a haunting melody. The words are obviously haunting, even though um, I have to have them translated. And it lacks the kind of rolling brass based strut that tends to be a characteristic of most national anthems that have originated in the 19th century, I think, has a very, very different quality.
1:00:25 Dominic Sandbrook? It's almost like a lament, isn't it? I always think the sound of it.
1:00:27 Tom Holland? Yeah, it's, it's really powerful. And so on that note, the lament, uh, let's, let's end this episode and the series by going back to Eric Sotonga, the man who, who wrote it. And we said that um, after his burial in the Bramfontein graveyard in Johannesburg, all the traces of his grave um, were lost. He's a famous figure in um, ANC mythology, the guy who wrote their anthem. And so there had been lots of attempts to try and identify it. Nobody could find it. But then finally, in the early 1990s, and you can see why this, you know, Mandela's release has stimulated a kind of renewed attempt to try and track it down. A researcher has the kind of brainwave.
1:01:10 Tom Holland? Why not look up in the cemetery records, not for a Sontonga, but for an Enoch, his first name, and there, sure enough, they find him, grave number 4885. His surname had been completely erased and replaced by the insulting Afrikaans word for a black person, and they were able, as a result of this, to work out where the grave was, and in 1996, so one year after his hymn had been sung at Ellis Park Stadium, heard by people around the world, Ellis Park Stadium was only about three miles away from the cemetery in which he'd been buried, Nelson Mandela arrived to unveil a memorial to Sontonga
1:01:54 Tom Holland? that had been raised on the site of his grave, and Mandela said this, "By the pride with which he bellowed your melody and its lyrics, in good times and bad, we were saying to you, Enoch Mankei, that with your inspiration, we could move mountains." And I guess, in a sense, they had.
1:02:20 Dominic Sandbrook? Oh, that's a nice ending. It's nice to have another happy ending on the rest of this history. We don't have enough. So that's an amazing story, fascinating story, brilliantly told. Thank you, Tom. So that's the end of our World Cup series.
1:02:35 Tom Holland? I think a better series than the actual World Cup. They've got too many teams in the World Cup, whereas we limited ourselves.
1:02:42 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah. I think a World Cup with only six teams would be very punchy, wouldn't it?
1:02:45 Tom Holland? It would be punchy, but it would be elite, and we're all about elite, elite content.
1:02:50 Dominic Sandbrook? Well, it would be like the rugby, actually. It would be like, what was it, the Six Nations?
1:02:53 Tom Holland? Exactly. Yeah, it would be like the Six Nations.
1:02:55 Dominic Sandbrook? They'd all play each other.
1:02:56 Tom Holland? So, talking of elite content, we are returning next week with an absolutely elite series, because not only is this summer the summer of the Football World Cup, it is the summer in which the tax revolt of 1776 will be 250 years old.
1:03:17 Tom Holland? Back taxes to be paid.
1:03:19 Dominic Sandbrook? And the rebel state formed as a result of that event is marking its 250th anniversary. I think the world is looking at the United States of America and saying, how have things worked out for them? How are, how are their, how are their politics looking now? You know, are they perhaps regretting? Are they, are they in danger of crawling back and asking to be readmitted?
1:03:43 Tom Holland? I mean, the, the, the problem with that diagnosis, Dominic.
1:03:46 Dominic Sandbrook? To the family of civilized nations.
1:03:48 Tom Holland? Well, yeah, I mean, that implies that Britain's been doing better. I'm not entirely sure that that's.
1:03:54 Dominic Sandbrook? On the other hand, of course, they could look north and say Canada is the country they could have been. Anyway, uh, to mark this event, because we do like our American listeners, to reach out to them and to give them a little favour. We are going to be doing a series about the founding fathers.
1:04:08 Tom Holland? Four of them.
1:04:09 Dominic Sandbrook? Yes, George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton. And we shall of course be treating them, Tom, with the reverence and respect that they deserve. With exactly the amount of respect and reverence they deserve. So for our American listeners, it should be an eye opening experience. Now, if, if our American listeners, I imagine even now that they're like, they're scrabbling desperately their keyboards, trying to work out how they can get access to this series early to hear this patriotic fest. Because it'll really broaden their minds. Tom, is there any way, is there any mechanism or process by which somebody could listen to all of that series on Monday if they wanted to?
1:04:49 Tom Holland? They absolutely could. They could sign up to the Rest Is History Club. You know, as we've said, there's a lot of back tax to be paid. It's actually unbelievably good value, just.
1:05:00 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
1:05:00 Tom Holland? Every tiny minute number of your tax dollars could go on it. I mean, just insane value because you get a whole load of additional benefits as well. I don't think we've ever, we've ever mentioned that before. So very, very exciting. And of course you don't have to be American to do that either, do you? Because the founding fathers are remarkable characters. Their stories are remarkable. So of interest to one and all. So we. I hope you enjoy that series coming up, starting next Monday.
1:05:32 Dominic Sandbrook? Brilliant. So we'll see you on next Monday for the Founding Fathers. But until then, Tom, thank you very much. That was a brilliant episode. Bye bye, everybody.
1:05:39 Tom Holland? Bye bye.
1:07:27 Speaker 03 From the creators of Zootopia and Frozen comes Disney's Hext. Welcome to Hext and enter the world of witches, where it was foretold that an ordinary girl would become an extraordinary witch and save the world of magic. Disney's Hext arrives in theaters this Thanksgiving.
1:07:52 Dominic Sandbrook? Hi everybody, it's Dominic Sandbrook here. There are two weeks to go until the Rest is History's inaugural festival at Hampton Court Palace. And frankly, I could not be more excited. There's going to be medieval combat, there are going to be all sorts of big name historians, you can go to the palace, you can feast like Henry VIII on the very lawns where he walked. In the sunshine, I'll be talking to Tracy Borman about the Tudors, I'll be talking to Katja Hoyer about Weimar Germany, I'll be talking to Ian Hislop about the history of satire. So it's on two days, it's on Saturday the 4th of July and Sunday the 5th of July. The bad news is, we have actually sold out the allocations that we were given by Hampton Court for both days. The good news however, we have persuaded Hampton Court to let us have more people.
1:08:37 Dominic Sandbrook? So there will be a handful of extra tickets available for both the Saturday and the Sunday. Now, we do expect all of those extra tickets to sell out really quickly, so please do not wait to get your hands on them. The tickets are exclusive for club members, it's one of the benefits of being a member of the Rest is History Club. Frankly, if you're not a member and you would like to go to the festival, the only way to do that is by joining the club. So you have to head to therestishistory.com to sign up and then you go to the members area once you've signed up and you select festival to get your tickets. We are really hoping to see as many of you there as possible in the sunshine at Hampton Court. Bye bye.
1:09:21 Dominic Sandbrook? Hi everybody, Dominic here from the Rest is History. You knew who it was. So, we have just recorded a brilliant episode of our new mini-series about the World Cup and dictatorships with Paul Rouse of University College Dublin. We were just talking about Pele and Brazil and the dictatorship that ruled Brazil between 1964 and 1985. We had a lot of fun and we thought you might like to hear a little clip from it to whet your appetite if you're not a member of the Rest is History Club. So here it is, enjoy. So I guess the question with Brazil in particular is, we think that Brazil is defined more than anything else by football. The football is absolutely central to Brazilian national identity. The classic thing that people think, when we were talking about this before we started
1:10:06 Dominic Sandbrook? recording, the football is an expression of the Brazilian national soul in some way that it isn't in other countries. How and when does this idea become popular?
1:10:17 Speaker 05 So in a global sense, it really took hold from the 1950s onwards. Brazil's successes in the 58 and 62 World Cup. And then, of course, they did three in a row in 1970. Unfortunately, it wasn't possible to play a World Cup in 1966.
1:10:37 Speaker 05 So, so they
1:10:37 Dominic Sandbrook? That's poor from you, Paul. Why do you, I mean, as we always say, why do you hate Britain?
1:10:46 Speaker 05 So, so that was important. That was important in the winning of a World Cup at the very moment when television pictures begin to flow around the world of sporting. So the late 50s, sport on television was beginning to be broadcast by 1962. You had a international broadcast through Telstar, through the satellite. But by 1970, you have the projection around the world.
1:11:11 Dominic Sandbrook? In colour.
1:11:11 Speaker 05 In colour, but most people have still a black and white telly. So we have to be careful not to over, not to overstate that. But it is the projection of this Brazilian greatness at the very moment that you get an explosion of interest in television.
1:11:26 Dominic Sandbrook? Thank you for listening. Hope you enjoyed it. If you want to hear more, of course, you could go to therestishistory.com. You can subscribe, you'll hear the rest of that series and you'll get a wonderful range of supplementary benefits.
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