South Africa

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.)

In a debate at the University of the Witwatersrand on Tuesday night Western Cape Premier Ebrahim Rasool drew a link between the recent wave of xenophobic violence and larger currents of intolerance in the country. “Xenophobia, racism, sexism, in fact all fundamentalism, all acts of intolerance belong to one family and if you are to deal with one member of the family, you have got to be consistent in dealing with all members of that family,” he said.

In a sense Rasool’s arguments most reminded me of the larger debates about transformation that characterized South African politics in the second half of the 1990s. That the country has already moved away from these fundamental tenets of the process embodied in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission process is dispiriting and Rasool is right to encourage South Africans to revive those principles and to remember the linkages of various forms of intolerance.

Crime is the domestic issue that evokes the most handwringing in South Africa, especially among a certain segment (read: affluent) of the white population. And crime certainly is bad, especially in the most highly populated areas. Virtually (and perhaps literally) all South Africans of every race and social class knows someone who has been victimized by crime, and while crime, and especially violent crime, looms large in the white South African mind, blacks are the most common victims of crime in the country.

 And yet it oftentimes seems that fears of crime really represent a surrogate for a whole range of fears and insecurities over the issue of change and transformation in South Africa. The narrative about crime, in other words, tends to be more unyielding than crime itself.

It is thus important to note that there appears to have been a drop in violent crime rates in the Western Cape of 32%, which is a remarkable achievement. Obviously one wonders if some of the statistics have not been cooked (for my American readers who watched The Wire, the greatest show, certainly the greatest drama, in the history of television, this question looms especially large) but if these numbers are even remotely representative of actual conditions on the ground, South Africans should rejoice. Sometimes, after all, narratives change. 

At The Mail & Guardian Adriann Basson uses the racist response ( “Daai boy is so goed, hulle kan hom nou maar wit verklaar” [”That black boy is so good, they can certify him white now]”) of a fellow Afrikaner to a Bryan Habana try to explore race, and racism, in South Africa.

I’m always astounded when [white] South Africans try to pretend that racism is a thing of the past. Then again, I’m always astounded when white Americans do the same thing.

The largest transaction to occur under the auspices of South Africa’s Black Economic Empowerment program appears set to go through, and most observers are lavishing praise on the deal and its ramifications. The Economist has the details.

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.

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.

Polokwane is not the only (or arguably even the most) contested political terrain in South Africa. One can be certain that the naming of Jake White’s successor as Springbok head coach will be every bit as full of recriminations, barbed comments, and backroom politicking as anything that happens among the ANC’s National Executive Committee in the next month. White, who just published his autobiography (which is flying off the shelves at a rate faster than any book in South Africa in recent memory), providing perfect synergy for South African Rugby Union’s (SARU) decision-making process, will be happy to leave behind some of the baggage that goes with the top coaching post in South African rugby. SARU has announced that the new coach will be named on January 9.

White, who spent much of his tenure under heavy fire from critics, but who left his Springbok post almost wholly vindicated, has also weighed in on his preferred replacement. If his will comes to pass, it will represent an epochal moment in South African rugby, as White would like to see Allister Coetzee become the first black Springbok coach. White believes that the front-runner is Bulls Coach Heyneke Meyer, the only white candidate on a short-list of four. the other candidates are South Africa under-21 coach Peter de Villiers and Chester Williams, 1995 World Cup-winning Springbok wing. (At the risk of self indulgence, I argued in my South Africa Year in Review, which was published yesterday, that you should “expect Allister Coetzee to gain traction as a possible White replacement.”)

I’ve been out of town for several days, which explains the light posting. I plan to write a great deal, especially about South African politics, next week when I return. In the meantime, Desmond Tutu recently visited the editorial offices of The Boston Globe, and he argued that the recent successes of the Springboks also point the way toward a reason to be optimistic about the general direction of South Africa. 

If’s a busy news cycle right now in Southern Africa. here are a number of stories that caught my eye in today’s chock-full Mail & Guardian and elsewhere:

As the thirteith anniversary of the murder of Steven Bantu Biko at the hands of the security forces approaches different South Africans remember Biko’s life and death differently.

the Zimbabwe crisis continues unabated. The economic calamity has opened the door for corruption. Some maintain hopes  that South African-brokered talked will lead to a resolution of the political elements of the country’s conflicts, but it seems that  this may not be the time for whistling past the graveyard.

Meanwhile, transformation isn’t always easy. Members of the Democratic Alliance (DA) are up in arms over the Tshwane metropolitan council’s reported ban on white businesses. If the allegations are accurate, the DA would certainly seem to have a case that they will bring before the Constitutional Court. Meanwhile in a  pronouncement that is likely to be equally tendentious, the Black Management Forum  (BMF)  has argued that white women should be removed from the list of groups previously disadvantaged ”in terms of . . . employment equity legislation.” It is a bit hard for white women who benefitted in every imaginable way from apartheid suddenly stepping forward to claim their lots alongside the black South Africans on whose backs the Apartheid system built white privilege.

Finally, the M&G’s longtime rugby columnist Andrew Capostagno has a nifty piece on how this Rugby World Cup represents a “big chance” for the Springboks. He concludes his historically astute article by arguing that if the Boks achieve their considerable promise and “Win this one” South Africans “can forget, for a long, glorious moment, about politics.”