The Springboks are losing to the All Blacks and many people believe the black community in South Africa is also on the losing side, writes Nicola Byrne
WHEN South Africa take the field on Saturday for their second match in the Test series against New Zealand, once again the only black players on the pitch will be wearing the opposing team’s colours.
With the row over the South African Rugby Football Union’s (Sarfu) commitment to the new South Africa still simmering, Sports Minister Steve Tshwete this week admitted to the Mail & Guardian that his power to coerce the rugby authority was limited.
Speaking after a meeting with Sarfu officials on Tuesday, Tshwete said: “We’ve made it quite clear that if they don’t follow our suggestion, then they are living in the past. We have to keep putting pressure on them and persuade, persuade them. We have no other means.
“We can’t take a big stick and beat them — unfortunately funding isn’t something we can use against them. They are even richer than my department.”
Tuesday’s hastily convened meeting came as a result of the sports minister’s criticisms of Sarfu’s development policies last week. On the day the Springboks suffered their second successive defeat at the hands of the All Blacks, Tshwete asserted that the association’s development policies were nothing more than a ploy to get white rugby back into the international arena. His outburst provoked an angry reaction from Sarfu, but this week the minister went on to make the point further.
“Blacks are already finding it hard to identify with what they are calling a lily-white team. If there is no visible development at upgrading black players at junior levels, then the Springboks will forever be a white team and they will not be representative of this country.”
Tshwete’s comments were especially injurious to Sarfu, given their timing at the end of a week when the association launched its new development programme, a high proportion of which concentrates on the promotion of the game in the black areas.
Certainly on the surface, the association appears ready for change. An impressive development budget shows R15-million spent already this year, a sizeable percentage of which was used to provide and upgrade facilities for young black players. In the Blueprint for a Dream brochure, which accompanied the launch of the development programme, it’s difficult to spot a white face. Even the association’s new letterheads are printed in Xhosa along with the traditional English and Afrikaans, although the effect is somewhat negated by the choice of Leon Shuster as the musical accompaniment on their telephone answering system.
The association strongly denies its embracing of the black community is purely cosmetic. Sarfu’s commitment to the new South Africa is so strong, according to chief executive Rian Oberholzer, that “the Springboks are the only team selected on merit. All our other representative teams are chosen with an affirmative action policy. With this new programme, we’re going even further to develop black interest in the game.”
However, Tshwete is not convinced: “Their development programme is porous in a number of areas. They need to go back and tighten up their development of black clubs. Neither are they paying attention to the development of the game in black schools.”
The result of Tuesday’s negotiations was a temporary truce between the sports ministry and Sarfu. Tshwete says he will now wait to see whether the association will act on his recommendation, namely the setting up of a rugby academy “which will concentrate on the develpment of players of colour” and a heavier emphasis on the development of black clubs. With both the minister’s and Sarfu’s repeated emphasis on developing the game at junior level, it’s unlikely that South Africa will field a proliferation of black players at senior national and provincial level in the near future.
While the authorities continue to thrash out policy, the mangement of one of Gauteng’s handful of black rugby clubs, Eldoronians Football club in Lenasia, says that Sarfu’s new initiatives will have little effect on their week-to-week activities.
“We’ve got our allocation from the Transvaal Rugby Union, it’s unlikely that Sarfu will give us more,” says club chairman Marlon Adams. “We find that the unions are not really interested in helping out black senior players. If there’s a black and white player at junior level, each with the same potential, then you’ll find the rugby union will take each of them away and watch their development, give them training and so on. If you have a black and white player with the same potential at senior level, then they’ll only be interested in the white player.
Last year with the aid of four white players, the second division team progressed to within two places of promotion. This season, their fortunes haven’t been so good. “We lost our white players,” explains Adams. “We didn’t have the money to pay them and they left. We wrote 40 to 50 letters to companies looking for sponsors and we couldn’t get one. A lot of them say `You belong to one of the richest rugby federations in the world why don’t you ask them for money’.”
Lack of funding is something plenty of white rugby clubs have in common with Eldoronians. However a credibility problem is not.
“Some people still think it’s strange to see coloured people playing rugby and it’s hard for them to take us seriously,” says Adams. “Racism is by no means gone from the game. It’s not what it used to be say three or four years ago but it’s not completely out of rugby and it won’t be for another 20 or 30 years.
The eradication of racism from rugby is something in which the media can play large part, according to Sarfu’s chief exectuive. Maintaining that the development of the game was not just down to his association, Oberholzer said the media can and must play a part in changing the perception that rugby is a white elitist sport and that black players don’t want to participate in the game.
Responding to his comments, Moplefi Mika, sports editor of the Sowetan said that if there were more black players in the game, his newspaper would allot more coverage proportionally.
“Show me a black Springbok, show me a black Western or Eastern Province player,” he said. “If they were there, we’d put them in our paper.”
Mika also questioned the commitment of the current senior national side to developing the game into a non-racial one. “Recent things suggest that some people haven’t been honest and the Springbok captain Francois Pienaar is one of them. Nelson Mandela fought hard against opposition to give them their Springbok emblem and this is what they say as a thank you.
“Pienaar portrays himself as a captain who has support in the black townships. Then he goes and welcomes the old flag to games. I’m not sure these guys know what they’re doing.”