(John McCann/M&G)
The 2023 Rugby World Cup is here.
Sport — and rugby in particular — has played a prominent role in South Africa’s political and socio-economic history. It was used to oppress, but also liberated. It divided and humiliated, but also united and inspired.
During my recent attendance of the Springboks’ 43 – 12 win over Australia at Loftus in Pretoria I was overawed to see, hear and feel almost 50 000 cheering South Africans in green, waving Springbok flags. The many paper trays full of beer might have helped. When one spectator spilt my beer by accident, he offered me his.
I saw no racial tension — and very little racism. The way “coloureds” were mentioned in the row behind me did make me nervous every time Manie Libbok had to kick. Afterwards, below the stadium, a muscular 24-year-old farmer from Mpumalanga, with two beers in his hands and more in his veins, became very friendly, but used the k-word. When I objected, he did not dônner me, but apologised and said his father had also told him to delete this nasty term from his vocabulary.
Sixty years earlier I attended my first rugby test, also at Loftus, against John Thornett’s Wallabies. From the standing space behind the goal posts my father and I consumed our cold chicken, boiled eggs and coffee from early in the morning. Then we saw Tommy Bedford’s try in his first Springbok appearance. His long stomach slide on the loose brown dry winter grass impressed me forever.
All the spectators were white. At Newlands in Cape Town brown people cheered for the All Blacks from behind the posts. When black South Africans supported American boxers like Big John Tate against white hope Gerrie Coetzee in the late 1970s, white fans pretended not to understand their unpatriotic treasonous behaviour. Yet, after a long trial, judge (later chief justice) Franz Rumpff had already found in 1961 that Nelson Mandela and his co-accused could not be guilty of high treason, because they did not enjoy the rights of citizenship.
The impressive book Pitch Battles: Sport, Racism and Resistance by Peter Hain and award-winning historian André Odendaal provides important insight into the role of sport in apartheid. Lord Hain attended high school in the shadow of Loftus and became a minister in Tony Blair’s government. Professor Odendaal played first class cricket and was with Tommy Bedford and others — including me — on the 1987 “Dakar safari” to meet the banned ANC in exile. They point out that discrimination in sport was imported by British colonisers long before the implementation of formal apartheid. For example, the devastatingly fast Yorkers of a young bowler, William Henry “Krom” Hendricks, impressed the 1894 English touring team of Walter Read when he played against them for the “Cape Malay 11”. But he was omitted from the South African touring team to England because of a conspiracy by “the arch-imperialist Cecil John Rhodes, and his right-hand man, Sir William Milton, a former England rugby player and South African cricket captain …. Rhodes, Milton and their jingoist and racist allies formalised segregation and apartheid as official policy ….”
Organised resistance against segregated sport emerged locally and internationally in the 1950s and kept growing. “No normal sport in an abnormal society” became a popular slogan. The apartheid regime, its supporters and some naïve rugby lovers argued that politics had to be kept out of sport. If only someone had told that to Rhodes and the apartheid leaders, who — by the way — hated him.
After the 1960 Rome Games we were banned from the Olympics for more than three decades. Cricket provided an international turning point. In 1968 prime minister John Vorster prevented England from touring here, because of the inclusion in their team of the “non-white” Cape-born player, Basil D’Oliviera, who became one of the most influential sportsmen ever.
Rugby captures national pride in a different way to other sports. With power, speed and skill, sometimes bloodied gladiators grind their opponents into the grass and mud, before running around them with the agility of — well — a Springbok in full flight. And, of course, we are all experts on game plans and team selection.
When mixed trials for the selection of Springbok teams were called for, apartheid supporters protested: Never! This could result in the evil of selection on merit! What if players of colour tried to dance with white women at post-match receptions? To preserve Christianity and Western civilisation in the southern point of Africa, teams consisted of 15 quota players. Many of them were good. Whether they were the best, we will never know.
The 1969-70 Springbok tour of the British Isles was disrupted by protests, led by Hain and others. Police clashed with protesters, thumb tacks were strewn on playing fields … and the Boks lost often. The popular highly emotional Afrikaans radio commentator Gerhard Viviers called the protesters dirty long-haired apparitions without principles. On their return, the team received a hero’s welcome, as apartheid prime minister Hendrik Verwoerd did in 1961, after our expulsion from the Commonwealth.
Leonard Cohen sang: “There is a crack in everything; that’s how the light comes in.” One such crack in the apartheid wall was the presence in the 1970 All Blacks team of the strong Samoan wing, Bryan Williams, an early Jonah Lomu. With whom Sir Bryan KNZM OBE danced, I do not know, but the shamelessly racist Herstigte Nasionale Party left the National Party. Moreover, the Springboks won.
The 1981 New Zealand tour by one of the best Springbok teams ever, including stars like Theuns Stoffberg, Naas Botha and Danie Gerber, was disastrous. The inclusion of one player of colour, fly-half Errol Tobias, meant little besides annoying some white fans who wanted to see the Free State’s De Wet Ras in the team. The Boks slept on squash court floors before important games; during a test match a scarily low-flying aircraft dropped flour bombs on the playing field; and the rugby-loving New Zealand public was divided very deeply.
The isolation deepened, together with international sanctions and internal unrest. “Rebel” rugby and cricket tours were never the real thing.
After Dakar, Bedford connected the ANC’s Essop Pahad to long-time rugby boss Danie Craven. Nelson Mandela was released in 1990. Negotiations commenced. The spectre of continuing sports isolation featured prominently in the 1992 referendum about negotiations to end apartheid. The majority of white voters were “gatvol” of the boycott.
After the legendary 1995 World Cup triumph around Mandela in his Springbok captain’s jersey, with Chester Williams’ smile the only dark face on the team photograph, former All Black supporters danced in the streets of Cape Town and sang “Hie kommie Bôke”! The rainbow nation was born, many thought.
In 2007 coach Jake White had little interest in transformation. His excellent team, with stars like Victor Matfield, Bakkies Botha, Fourie du Preez and Percy Montgomery, delivered the World Cup into the hands of president Thabo Mbeki. Bryan Habana killed the presumption that players of colour were undeserving affirmative action selections.
The glory of Siya Kolisi’s much more representative 2019 Boks is fresh in the mind. Preparation focused heavily on their duty to bring some pride to the poor and the lonely old. Regardless of Prince Harry’s gossip in his book Spare, he showed more insight and sensitivity than many England supporters by congratulating the Springboks in their dressing room for demolishing his team. On their return, the team encountered bigger welcome receptions than Verwoerd and the unfortunate 1969-70 outcasts.
An Economic Freedom Fighters spokesperson saw fit to congratulate only Kolisi. To hell with brilliant try scorers Makazole Mapimpi and Cheslin Kolbe, I suppose.
Is anything left of 1995’s “rainbow nation”? Crime, at least partly resulting from poverty, intimidates, paralyses and further impoverishes us; gender-based violence sickens us; corruption, fuelled by woeful administration and service delivery, devours us. We are the world’s most unequal society; a failing state some say.
Bob Dylan sang: “It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there.” The light we sometimes see at the end of the tunnel may come from an unstoppable approaching train. We are less apart than when the 1963 Wallabies toured here. But we approach courts to decide whether songs calling for the killing of segments of our society constitute constitutionally prohibited hate speech, or robust debate about land restitution. If we disagree, we can argue that judges have been captured.
The men in green and gold can’t rescue us. Can the Springbok, who divided us for long, once more unite and inspire us for a brief moment?
Losers do not easily inspire. We are tired of hearing from our cricket teams collapsing in world cup competitions that they had learnt much; and to see our soccer teams losing against Lesotho or Mauritius.
We can be eliminated in the first round if we lose to first-ranked Ireland and fifth-ranked Scotland, with four South Africans in their team. We may then say that rugby is only a game. Or we could blame the coaches, apartheid, or “quotas” and transformation — like we keep blaming one another for everything all the time.
We can also become the first country to win the World Rugby Cup four times. Then we will again celebrate in the streets, with or without Eskom.
Johann van der Westhuizen, who assisted in drafting the Constitution, is a retired justice of the constitutional court, founding director of the University of Pretoria’s Centre for Human Rights and a former inspecting judge of Correctional Services. The views expressed are his own.