Black? White? Who cares anymore?
When Coach Jacques Nienaber announced the starting fifteen for this past Saturday’s Springbok Test against the kilted warriors at the spiritual home of Scottish rugby, Murrayfield, there were nine players of colour in the fifteen. Who is counting, you may ask? Well – many South Africans, for starters. You see, race has always been an issue in our national sporting teams. Until 1993, the Springboks had been the exclusive domain of white players. There had in fact been only one previous player of colour representing the Springboks, Errol Tobias, who played six tests for the Springboks between 1981 and 1984.
After Nelson Mandela’s release and the unification of sport in this country, only then could players of colour be routinely selected to represent the Springboks.
During the 1995 Rugby World Cup hosted by South Africa, Chester Williams was the only black player in the Springbok squad. He represented the hopes and ambitions of many budding black rugby players who had been barred from representing their country only because of the apartheid policy of selecting only white players to represent the national side.
South African rugby made some key appointments for that tournament, one of which was that of Morné du Plessis as the Springbok manager. Morné came from a sporting family. His dad, Felix, captained the Springboks and his mom, Pat, captained the women’s national hockey team. So clearly there was some leadership in his genes. During the five years from 1975 to 1980 that he served as captain, the Springboks won thirteen of fifteen matches.
His role during the 1995 World Cup was to be extensive, from making the side and the entire country buy into the Springbok campaign’s slogan of “One Team, One Country,” to handling everything that happened off the field, making sure all the travel arrangements and logistics ran flawlessly. Critically, Morné’s role would be to make the players realise that they were playing for an entire nation, both black and white. One stroke of genius was when Morné roped in his good friend Anne Munnik, a Xhosa teacher, to meet the squad and teach them the new national anthem. Here was a group of predominantly Afrikaans-speaking rugby players who were now going to tackle the task of learning an anthem with verses in Xhosa, Zulu, and Sesotho.
As Anne Munnik was about to wrap up the lesson, the squad’s three biggest Afrikaans players asked if they could sing the anthem once more, on their own. The rest of the players just stood and stared. As quoted by John Carlin in Playing the Enemy, Anne described it as follows:
And then they began, like three giant choirboys, softly at first, rising, rising to the high notes. They sang it so, so beautifully. The other players just stood there with their mouths open. No laughing, no jokes. They just stood and stared.
All South Africans know how that tournament ended: with Francois Pienaar lifting the trophy and being embraced by Nelson Mandela, himself wearing a Springbok jersey.
In order to redress the imbalances of the apartheid past, selection targets or quotas were introduced in the prominent post-apartheid South African national sports teams, in particular cricket and rugby. This caused endless anxiety – many black players knew for a fact they were being selected only because of the colour of their skin. And many white players felt excluded because they knew they were better than said black players. It was a somewhat controversial process, but it was something we had to endure. It was one of the growing pains of our new South Africa.
Fast forward to 2019 when Siya Kolisi, a black Eastern Cape-born rugby player, captained the Springboks at the World Cup in Japan. The bones of the skeletons of the apartheid architects must have been rattling in their graves. And when Siya lifted the William Webb-Ellis trophy as captain of the winning nation, having smashed the English team, those bones must have shuddered even more. Only in their wildest nightmares would a black player be captaining their darling national sport, let alone leading his team to victory in a World Cup.
And so this coming Saturday when Siya leads the Boks at fortress Twickenham against the old foe, England, he will be leading a totally transformed team from the teams we grew up watching in the old South Africa. When the team links arms and sings the National Anthem, we won’t be counting the number of black or white players, English-, Afrikaans-, Xhosa- or Zulu-speaking. We will only be seeing a team which truly represents the Rainbow Nation and with one goal in mind: to represent every single South African, regardless of the colour of their skin, and to beat the Poms in their own back yard.
And when the local fans break out into their rendition of “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” let’s hope every one of the thousands of Bok fans in the stadium will bellow out their own version of our very own “Shosholoza” - an Nguni song that was sung by the mixed tribes of gold miners in South Africa - and drown them out.
Every time this Bok team runs onto the field, Madiba must raise a glass of his favourite ginger beer and toast them. After all, he uttered these words at the inaugural Laureus Sports Awards in Monaco on 25 May 2000:
Sport has the power to change the world. It has the power to inspire, it has the power to unite people in a way that little else does. It speaks to youth in a language they understand. Sport can create hope, where once there was only despair. It is more powerful than governments in breaking down racial barriers. It laughs in the face of all types of discrimination.
And amidst all the challenges we are facing as a nation, this team gives us the opportunity to briefly forget our troubles and wallow in their success. They are just a wonderful group of men who passionately put their bodies on the line for all of their countrymen, black, white, and other, wherever they are in the world. I salute them and thank them for who they are.
Andrew Russell, 19 November 2021
Note: This article includes extracts from my book about the lessons from Nelson Mandela and Christo Brand, the prisoner who became president and the prison guard who became his friend. Christo’s book Doing Life with Mandela will be republished in an updated edition, and my book will be published, by Ethan Casey of Blue Ear Books in 2022.