South Africa

The sun will rise. The sun will set. South African rugby will be fraught with controversy. Some assertions are truisms.

The latest kerfuffle over the transformation of South African rugby is a revival of the question of whether to remove the Springbok as the national program’s emblem. For its critics, the Springbok is a symbol of white, and especially Afrikaner, supremacy and thus of Apartheid. For others, keeping the Springbok represents transformation at its best, an appropriation of a once racist symbol to represent the New South Africa.

The latest salvo comes from the legendary political activist and rugby star Cheeky Watson, whose son Luke’s placement on the Springbok team was controversial and appears to be over. Watson has asserted publicly that the Springbok has to go. Of course Watson also represents a father scorned, and he is also considering legal action on behalf of his son, who also is alleged to have spoken harshly about the Springbok symbol, so the personal and political intersect in this case.

Symbols are vitally important in South Africa. And transformation is still in its early stages. SA rugby reveals the nature of resistance to change even as it slowly lurches toward change on the pitch. Nelson Mandela was able to embrace the Springbok mascot. So too could millions of South Africans (indeed, the ANC has thrown its weight behind maintaining the mascot) if only those who want to maintain the mascot would yield in those areas that truly matter.  

Springbok fans can step off the ledge. At least for today. The Tri Nations has been undoubtedly disappointing this year, especially given the promise going in and the win at the House of Pain in July. But today the green and gold crushed the Wallabies 53-8 at Coca Cola Park in Johannesburg. Jongi Nokwe scored four tries, including a first-half hat trick to lead the Springboks in a Man of the Match performance. Both the margin of victory and Nokwe’s four tries were all-time Springbok records against the Australians.

This probably will not stanch the grumbling about Peter de Villiers’ coaching, team selection, or anything else. But give the man time. A post-World Cup hangover coupled with a coaching change probably meant there would be growing pains. De Villiers deserves a chance to put his imprint on the Springbok program. They will be fine, as will he.

Bill Keller recently reviewed John Carlin’s Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation in The New York Times. Keller’s review is glowing. I worry a bit that the book will be somewhat deterministic. The 1995 World Cup marked a nice moment for South Africa, and a profoundly powerful symbolic one at that, but South Africa’s democratic transition probably did not rise and fall based on Mandela’s willingness to embrace the Springboks. I am working on an article on rugby, race, and nationalism in South Africa since 1994 and so have more than a passing interest in receiving my copy of Carlin’s book.

The Tri-Nations tournament resumes this weekend at Cape Town’s Newlands Stadium. The Springboks will clash against the All Blacks in a game both sides will desperately want to win to keep their hopes alive of emerging as the winners of the annual clash of the giants of Southern hemisphere rugby. The home-field advantage will serve the host side well and i anticipate a closely fought match akin to those the sides played in New Zealand with South Africa emerging as 27-18 victors.

The biggest subplot of the weekend’s fixture is that Percy Montgomery, already the most capped Springbok of all time, and the leading scorer in South African test match history by a long distance, is set to earn his 100th cap.  He will become just the ninth player in world rugby to achieve this milestone. (As always, it seems, there have been some concerns raised about the side’s representativeness this weekend as the issue of transformation continues to haunt the sport most defined by race in the pre-1994 era.)

It was a good weekend to be a South African sports fan as both Bafana Bafana and the Springboks won big international matches. Bafana Bafana defeated Equatorial Guinea 4-1 in a game that serves as a qualifying match for the African Cup of Nations. It also was part of the World Cup Qualifying process, but of course South Africa, as hosts, receive an exemption. The Springboks, meanwhile, handled a good Wales team handily, 43-17, in Peter De Villiers’ debut as the national rugby team’s head coach. 

As a new international rugby season gets underway, the Springboks stand tall as the defending world champions . And yet the country’s fans still have a fixation on New Zealand’s mighty All Blacks. Mark Keohane wants to shake South Africans from their rugby inferiority complex and make them realize that they support the greatest team in the world. (That said, he warns that Peter de Villiers’ men should watch out for the Aussies when the Tri-Nations fixtures start up.)

The head coach of Bafana Bafana, Alberto Parreira, has resigned to spend time with his sick wife. When officials from the South African Football Association (SAFA) announce Parreira’s successor on May 6, many expect that they will settle on another Brazilian, Joel Santana. Naturally SAFA and the country’s rabid fan base hope to ease the transition, as the next few years will be crucial in South African soccer circles, as th4e next coach will presumably lead Bafana Bafana into the 2010 World Cup, which the country is, of course, hosting. Recent years have been unkind to South African football, which has declined significantly since Bafana Bafana’s 1996-1997 heyday. Perhaps Santana will be the man to lead the team and thus the country to glory. The Springboks and Proteas seem to have garnered the bulk of media attention in recent years, both for their successes and their controversies, and yet in the end, the masses of South Africans love football and Bafana Bafana foremost.

There are those who say that there is no place for politics in sport, or for sport in politics, but such people are knaves or fools. Sports and politics have always been linked, and those who decry the politicization of sport tend to have their own political axes to grind. Opposing the global boycott of South African sport during the apartheid era, for example, was itself an insertion of politics into sport. The idea that somehow boycotting sport was political but that playing games against a pariah state’s segregated sports team– that allowing sport to go on amidst people’s clear opposition to a noxious racist regime — was not represents a form of intellectual chicanery that warrants little more than scorn.

Inevitably sport reflects the societies in which it is played. Not surprisingly, then, racial transformation in South African sport is and will continue to be a contentious issue as two fundamental sides face off: One arguing that issues of race and transformation have no place on the sports fields and one asserting that the days of protecting and privileging the white minority should be long over and that conscious efforts to transform the South African sporting scene are overdue.

My own take is that the most important progress will happen at the developmental level, where sport is about far more than “merit” and winning or losing. But at the highest level there still should be a conscious effort made to field competitive, world-class teams while still pushing for inclusiveness in sports that intentionally were exclusive for decades. All things being equal, in other words, give the edge to the person who would not have been allowed on the team in the bad old days.

This debate is all over the sports pages of South Africa these days, no matter how stubbornly some believe in building a wall between sport and the real world, as if these are different things rather than sports being a component of the real world. Thus race arouses controversy in questions over Springbok selection (present but also past, as if the two are separable in the context of South Africa),  the increasingly controversial composition of the Proteas, and among the chattering classes of the sports commentariat, who make arguments criticizing “short-sighted administrators who, 14 years into democracy, continue to confuse transformation with discrimination” as if fourteen years represents a long period of time and under the presupposition that the ongoing attempts at transformation represent prima facie cases of discrimination, the apparent belief being that whites are entitled to spots on the country’s national and professional teams unless black players can prove otherwise.

Transformation of sport in the country is not going to happen without both concerted effort and the ruffling of feathers of those who feel entitled to spots in the country’s sporting elite simply because they have always held those spots.  Cynical knee-jerk invocations of “discrimination” should not successfully prevent necessary changes from taking place. South African sport is strong enough to endure these necessary adjustments that will do nothing more than make the games South Africans play (and the society in which they play them) better.

Although the ICC One Day cricket World Championship does not carry with it the cache of a World Cup title, it still would represent a nice feather in the cap of the Proteas. The South Africans are within range of claiming that title if they can just muster up two more wins over Bangladesh. Given the recent crises within the sport, the One Day crown might salve at least a few wounds.

Meanwhile, fresh off of their more significant rugby world championship, South Africans hope to host the Rugby World Cup in 2015, twenty years after the Springboks’ epochal home triumph in 1995. That South Africa has successfully hosted the event before, the country’s status as a global rugby power, the tie-in with 1995, the fact that South Africa shares a time zone with European nation (which thus makes it appealing from a television perspective), and the 2010 FIFA World Cup being held in South Africa all would seem to point to reasons for optimism that the bid will succeed.

Finally, a new season of Super 14 rugby is well under way.

The sun will rise, the sun will set, and South African sport will exist in a perpetual case of turmoil. Or so it seems. Winning the Rugby World Cup last year does not seem to have provided a balm to SARU’s (usually self-inflicted) wounds and in many ways seems to have rubbed them raw. Even the hiring of the first black coach in Springbok history has not alleviated the racial pressures that threaten to tear apart South African rugby. And the national cricket team has been the target of finger pointing and accusatory words as the result of the Proteas’ racial composition. Race and sport are deeply intertwined in South Africa, and the country is going to have to continue to wrestle with these issues, which rarely have easy solutions even if some have facile answers.

In fact, the hiring of Peter De Villiers may simply have exposed some of the uglier politics in South African rugby’s seemingly atavistically racist culture. Jake White, who led Amabokoboko to the world championship last year, believes that the politics that always threaten to tear apart what should be a thriving rugby infrastructure may cost De Villiers his job sooner than anyone imagines. A  t almost the same time as White was making his ominous prediction, Sports Minister Makhenkesi Stofile had some strong words of his own, warning that the government will not sit idly by if it perceives that South Africa’s sporting community is rife with racism. 

South Africa will be dealing with the turmoil of transformation, racial and otherwise, for some time yet to come. And that transformation will not always be easy. Sport carries such symbolic and cultural resonance in South Africa that it should not come as a surprise that the national teams are a flashpoint for political issues. Romantics and fools might argue that politics has no place in sport and vice versa, but sports history, in South Africa and worldwide, have always played a political role. Sports sometimes lead societal debates, sometimes follow them, but are almost never exempt from them. Some might wish that sport existed in a hermetically sealed universe. It does not, and wishing for something different will not make it so.