South Africa's Rugby World Cup Victory Is Far Greater Than Sport

Springbok Captain Siya Kolisi, middle, holds the William Webb-Ellis Trophy and celebrates with teammates. He is the first black player to serve as captain in the history of international test rugby. (Image)

Three weeks ago, on a chilly Saturday evening in Yokohama, Japan, twenty-three South African rugby players hailing from every corner of the country did what nearly nobody thought they could: they defeated a strong England side to capture the 2019 Rugby World Cup. It was a fast and tough match, sealed by South Africa’s heroic tackling and chess-like dismantling of the English defense. When the final whistle blew after eighty minutes, the “Springboks,” as they are known to the rugby world, were twenty points clear of the opponent. They were elated and defiant. They celebrated together. Together.

There is a turbulent history of separation and togetherness in the rainbow nation of South Africa. The story has been playing out on rugby pitches  for over one hundred years. Its latest chapter was written earlier this month, by those twenty-three players.

For half a century, the people of South Africa were separated by a system of law called Apartheid. It literally translates to “separate development.” And that was the way of the land: black South Africans were confined to unfarmable  “homelands” and left out of urban economic development. Laws were passed by a white only government to prevent race mixing, restrict the quality of education and curricula for black students, and control the movement of black people throughout the country. When South African students dared to protest these laws in 1976, they were massacred by the hundreds by the South African State Police. This violent episode is just one of many which defined the era.

This system of laws was only dismantled in the 1990s. The majority of the players on the World Cup winning squad were born before the first free election in South African history in 1994. When Tendai Mtawarira, the hulking prop-forward and veteran leader of this Springbok team, was a little boy, it would have been illegal for him to go to school with his white teammates, or join a game of playground rugby with them in the local park. Thirty short years ago.

What many don’t realize, though, is that the millions of black children born unfree in South Africa may not have even cared to play rugby. In fact, many hated it. These days, nearly all South Africans bleed rugby. But that wasn’t always the case. For a long time, rugby was the white man’s game.

The South Africa of Apartheid was largely composed of four national groups: black Africans whose ancestors were indigenous to the land, British colonists, white Afrikaners who were descended from the early Dutch colonists, and Indians. In the early days of South African rugby, it was a working class game, and the Afrikaners were the working class, so rugby became infused with the Afrikaner identity. The early Springboks national teams were all Afrikaner, and their success was hoisted as a testament to Afrikaner civilization. The Afrikaner National Party, explicitly founded to cultivate the supremacy of Afrikaners, was the party which ruled over the entirety of Apartheid, from 1948 until 1994. Rugby became intricately tied to constructions of white supremacy in South Africa.

Rugby was, in no uncertain terms, a site of Apartheid.

Black South Africans knew this, and for the most part they hated rugby. It was a symbol of the people who oppressed them, murdered them, and called them subhuman. The game was weaponized as a tool of formal and informal exclusion. To some black South Africans, it remains a reminder of violent segregation, and many who lived through Apartheid discourage black youth from participating in the sport. Rugby isn’t hard to play, nor is it expensive. Much like soccer, all one needs is a ball and some friends. The barrier was never physical. It was always cultural.

Skip to Nov. 2,  2019.

The South Africa team which won the day in Yokohama earlier this month, and the fans who travelled some fourteen thousand kilometers to support them, are living refutations of the norms, cultural barriers, and ethic of white supremacy which permeated those early days. The team featured key players who are black, white, and coloured - three of the four racial categories of Apartheid - putting their entire hearts and bodies on the line for one another. Trusting one another to do the same. The scene was a symbol of coming of age for the first truly born free generation. Free of the institutional-ideological barriers of their predecessors, one can imagine that these athletes were, in their youths, simply children who elected to play a game that they loved alongside their peers - race irrespective - who wanted to do the same. Whether they knew it or not, these players were eroding decades, and even centuries, of bitter hatred and mistrust. 

The international broadcasts of the match panned over thousands of rainbow colored South African flags, donned by supporters equally as diverse as the team, cheering with and embracing one another. It surely must have looked the same back home that night in the taverns, public squares, township streets, and living rooms across the nation. 

Many fans, through tears of joy, implored that this was more than a sports win. Pride and hope overflowed, reminding us that this is a flicker of unabated joy for a nation which is all to aware that it is “in a hard place right now.” The Desmond Tutu foundation, named for an instrumental figure in the Truth and Reconciliation healing after the fall of Apartheid, has gone so far as to say that this social moment of victory has “restored a self-doubting nation’s belief.” In the streets of Soweto and Cape Town, Durban and Johannesburg, South Africans celebrated. Together.

There is no illusion that this victory will eradicate poverty in South Africa, alleviate the burden of austerity that looms over the nation, or erase the decades of trauma which the nation is still processing. The players know that. The nation knows that. Mtawarira grew up amid that trauma, and acknowledges that “things are tough for a lot of people [and] we can’t ignore that,” but also reminds us that “it’s important to celebrate the good times.” What these celebrations show us is that there is a power - a real power - to immersing in moments of happiness. Be it for hope in the future, or simply as an escape for a moment, these experiences are formative - and perhaps even healing. That is what this team has given to its nation. 

The captain of the team, Siyamthanda Kolisi, is the first black captain in Springbok history. He grew up in a township called Zwide outside of Port Elizabeth, in the Eastern Province of South Africa. The surroundings of his early life mirror that of millions of black South Africans born near the end of Apartheid, and even today as this article is written: living at the margins. He played his first provincial rugby tryout in boxer shorts because he could not afford rugby shorts. His hard work and excellence in the sport took him to a preparatory school, where he began to dream big. And then it took him to the Western Province Academy in Stellenbosch, and then into a green-and-gold jersey with a springbok on the crest when he was twenty-one years of age. Three weeks ago, it took him to Yokohama, Japan, as leader of his nation’s team. He has never shied away, when speaking for the Springboks, to emphasize the importance of diversity to their mission and success. When asked after the game what made his team so special, why they were able to overcome the behemoth challenge before them, and the doubt cast over them, he answered, “we can achieve anything if we work together as one.”

These words surely hang in the air today in Mdestane and East London, Zwide and Bushbuckridge: a nation hears them, cheering side by side, elated and defiant.