Interviewed in Edinburgh, Minister of Sport Steve Tshwete said the enemies or reform in South African sport are digging in. Kevin Mitchell reports
‘When we won the Rugby World Cup in 1995, never once in the history of that country, never for a single moment before, were the people so solidly united. Never! That was a remarkable, remarkable moment … When they arrive here in November, I can tell you there is going to be jubilation at home every time they lose, make no mistake about that. We have lost the moment. It is sad.”
Minister of Sport Steve Tshwete growls the words in that deep, rolling cadence of his people. A face wearied more by ugly experience than age, one not easily given to embracing lightheartedness, stiffens. His eyes are impenetrable behind thickly glassed spectacles.
The enemies of reform in South Africa are digging in, says Tshwete. And nowhere is resistance more entrenched than in the the headquarters of the South African Rugby Football Union (Sarfu). There Louis Luyt is marshalling a defence of his presidency – one blighted by allegations of exclusion and racism, not to mention disharmony among leading players – against the challenge of Keith Parkinson, the Natal Rugby Union president and Mluleki George, an African National Congress MP who, like Tshwete, was once incarcerated on Robben Island by the white elite Luyt represents.
Luyt, one of the most combative rulers in world rugby, has threatened to challenge Tshwete in court for introducing a quota system for picking black and coloured players, as well as a commission to investigate why Sarfu’s reforms have stalled, why no black layers are coming through to the highest level, why the hope of 1995 has been dashed. “What I have instituted is a short-term strategy to address an obvious injustice. Nobody can tell me Western Province can’t field a black player, or Eastern Province or Border can’t, or Natal can’t, any one of the nine provinces for that matter. Nobody can convince me of that. There is a problem somewhere, all kinds of pressure is present.
“The disenchantment is becoming manifest right now. There is anger, real anger, every day. You watch in the World Cup next year, you will see. When we went to Barcelona, there was not a single black woman in that team; the Commonwealth Games in Canada – not one black woman in that team. We went to Atlanta – there was not one black woman in that team. These loudmouths from the Democratic Party and the National Party, supported by the media, are happy with things as they are. That is why they never had a sports policy while they were in power. White sport has always been organised through school, university, private clubs, so they never had to bother with state patronage. They were well financed, looked after.”
These are not issues with which Luyt and others are comfortable. Tshwete, more sad than bitter, says he will not be silenced. “The disenchantment is just going to be made worse by people refusing to be investigated, but we are going to probe them, even though they are resisting. It is the white oligarchy resisting. It is polarising society. Luyt still has a lot of power.”
Tshwete was in Edinburgh, along with representatives of 40 Commonwealth countries, as a guest of the United Kingdom Sports Council, to discuss the role of sport in society. With no disrespect to the other delegates, none was more qualified. Tshwete, a reasonable rugby player in his youth, was jailed in 1964 for his alleged activities with Umkhonto weSizwe. He would spend 15 years on Robben Island and would learn that sport was more than a tool for burning energy. His experiences would inform the strategy of healing that Nelson Mandela has sought to impress upon South Africans since coming to power in 1994.
There was no more potent image of that process than the one beamed around the world from Johannesburg on the Saturday afternooon of June 25 two years ago when Mandela, a beguiling mix of joyous schoolboy and international statesman in his Springbok shirt and peaked cap, embraced the captain, Francois Pienaar, in victory.
On Robben Island, victory came in a different form. “When we got to the island,” Tshwete recalls, “the situation was one of hostility not just between ourselves and the white warders, but between the ANC and the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC).
“The authorities went all out to exterminate us, and that is no mere figure of speech. It was a process of physical brutality and mental torture, even cold- blooded murder. Our situation at one time was reminiscent of that in Germany in the concentration camps. But we fought, of course – and one of the things we fought for was our right to sport. There was no way we were going to spend all day in the cells, for the lengthy period of time that they had sent us there for. What they had to be made aware of was that sport is part of the inherent make-up of the human being.
“We decided that we must rearrange things so that membership was not along political lines, ANC vs PAC. We had leagues for athletics, tennis and other codes. Tensions just vanished like dew under the glare of the sun. This is the magic power of sport. It went further, to the warders, some of whom even became members of our clubs, against their own regulations.”
Outside this very real world, back in the abnormal society they would seek to transform, Mandela and Tshwete would find the ancien regime resistant.
“One of our biggest challenges is the unification and reconciliation of people who have been divided on racial lines. Even before the ANC ascended to the leadership, it had always recognised the role of sport in this process.”
To that end, Tshwete, in exile in Lusaka since 1985, had played a vital role in bringing together the ANC and Dr Danie Craven , then president of the all-white South African Ruby Board, at secret meetings in 1988. Craven underwent a wondrous conversion. Others followed. Politicians, seeing the inevitable before the inevitable saw them, wilted too. Mandela was released and history shifted hugely in the direction of change, and reconciliation of a deeply divided people.
But the disappointment in Tshwete’s voice is now palpable. “Sport, because it speaks a simple language, becomes an ideal bridgehead. We saw this in the Rugby World Cup and (soccer’s) African Nations Cup in 1996. but cracks are beginning to appear in rugby. The ‘they’ and ‘we’ syndrome of pre- freedom is moving once again to centre stage. Fingers are also beginning to be pointed at cricket, seen as the exclusive grazing pastures of white athletes.”
It is rugby union though that remains the most visisble running sore of South African sport. “It is of their own creation,” says Tshwete. “It is back to the way it was before, worse even. The boys were beginning to pick up together. The star of the World Cup Francois Pienaar is saddened because he had his heart in the right place. Jettisoned. Luyt wanted him out. He was deprived of the captaincy, then they chopped him from the side, Stransky too.”
Last Tuesday the Springboks sacked the sixth of their England-bound professionals, Fritz van Heerden – alongside Pienaar, Stransky, Rudi Straueli, Gavin Johnson and Garry Pagel – who has joined Leicester for 100 000 a season. It would seem a straightforward commercial row, Sarfu being unable to match the money available in England. Others see it as representative of a general malaise, a cleansing of the enemy within.
Tshwete acknowledges he is up against a bruiser but will not give ground to a man for whom he otherwise has little respect. He will not listen to the “loudmouths”. “We shall ignore them with contempt, because they are a relic of the past. We have no respect for their views because our programmes have the support of the large majority of the people, black and white.
“If we in South Africa are allowed to go backwards, to the standards of the apartheid days, when the blacks would support the visiting sides against he Springboks, it would be very, very sad.”