In his recent article for the New Zealand Herald, Chris Rattue shot another broadside at one of his favourite targets, the prancing Springbok.
While he does raise some valid points about the country’s past, his opinions regarding the current political situation in South Africa, including the debate around naming the national rugby team the Springboks, reveals a lack of knowledge of the current state of South African society and what the true issues are.
Renaming the team would be as effective as placing a plaster over a bullet wound. The notion that changing the name of the national side would have any material affect on the current racial mix of players selected is absurd. Dropping the Springbok brand would only have a short term political gain for those opposed to the symbol and South African rugby would be back to where it started – with a much bigger issue to deal with. Justifying the racial make up of the team. This is the true problem at hand and the symbolism of the Springbok would be soon forgotten when it is realised that nothing has changed.
I purposefully called the Springboks a brand and for what is is worth the All Blacks’ haka forms part of their brand, a tradition in celebration of Maori culture that is imposed on every other rugby playing nation. I cannot deny that there is negative sentiment towards the emblem amongst sectors of the community, but what also cannot be denied is that these sectors are more vocal than the supporters and therefore receive all of the media attention. The number of people wearing their Springbok jersey on Bok Friday surpasses those attending a staged burning of the jersey. Peter de Villiers, a former Springbok coach, disappointed many of his former supporters when he got involved in this dispicable act. He was quite happy to accept his salary when he was Springbok coach…. An additional fact to be remembered is that it was decided that the national emblem for all sporting codes would be the King Protea and the protea takes pride of place on the left breast of the Springbok jersey.
The feeling I get out of the New Zealand Herald article is that the Springbok emblem is held onto by aged, white, racist Afrikaaners not willing to change. This could not be further from the truth. The last time I looked, Oregan Hoskins did not match that description. The Executive Council of the South African Rugby Football Union is 75% black. The South African Sports Confederation and Olympic Committee (SASCOC), which falls under the umbrella of the Department of Sports and Recreation which is a Department of the democratically elected goverment of South Africa (close to a two thirds majority at that stage), verified the concession to the South African Rugby Football Union to use the Springbok as its brand.
A far greater man than I made the desicion to wear Francois Pienaar’s number 6 Springbok jersey at the 1995 Rugby World Cup and in no way was that as awkward as claimed. In South Africa, it was a master stroke that went as far as changing many people’s opinions of each other at a very difficult time in the country’s history and was a symbol of acceptance across the racial and political divide. Certainly not a fix, but a gesture that was greatly respected by the nation. I fail to see how someone living on the other side of the planet would be in a position to comment on Nelson Mandela’s actions if they have not lived in the country or experienced the realities of apartheid and the comment is disrespectful to the legendary man.
What is not described to the reader is the amount of work being undertaken by the South African RFU in taking the game to children at a grass roots level. I will not fall into the same trap as many have and make a hugely generalised comment by saying that the black populace do not have a history of playing rugby. They do, especially in the Eastern Cape province where I have had the privelege of experiencing this first hand and in the Western Cape province. What SARFU have done is to try to take the game to broader rural South Africa and have targetted schools where rugby has never been played before. Literally hundreds of them. This is a concept that I do not expect a person who is used to rugby being the game of choice in their country, with rugby fields at every school and sports club, to understand. Currently, only 1 in 35 schools in South Africa play rugby. The truth of the matter is that football (soccer) is the game of choice in South Africa and this is not necessarily the sad by-product of apartheid. Football is the game of choice in Africa too and all other sports pale in comparison.
In 1988, the then South African Rugby Board under Doctor Danie Craven went against the wishes of the ruling National Party and met with the African National Congress in Zimbabwe in an attempt to leverage a return to international rugby during the isolation years. The ANC did not budge on isolation, but that meeting planted the seed for the creation of the South African RFU, the body under which all the previously racially segregated unions were unified.
The real issue in South African rugby is not in the name or lack of intent on the part of SARFU. There is still a lot of work to be done to ensure that black players are given a fair opportunity and the selection targets that all South African representative teams must abide by will certainly enable that notion. The elephant in the room though is one of social transformation. It is easy enough to throw a rugby ball to a kid and call him the next big thing in rugby, but it is not as simple as that. I have personally been involved with grass roots projects to take sport to disadvantaged areas and one of my main takeaways was that you cannot build the next generation of international sportsmen and women on a base of hungry children. Social transformation is not the responsibility of SARFU, that lands squarely at the feet of national Government.
For those intent on taking advantage of the lead up to the Rugby World Cup for their own political gain, I leave it to up to South Africa’s Minister of Sport and Recreation, Mr Fikile Mbablula, who makes an appeal to the entire nation to support the Springboks.
South African rugby is multi-faceted and the politics surrounding the game are not obvious and easy for the casual observer to understand. Calling for symbolic change from the cheap seats does not do justice to the deeper problems in South African society, and no changing of a symbol or even racial targets will address larger societal issues in the long term, just ask Kaya Malotana.
Kaya Molotana was the first professional black player capped for the Springboks and in my opinion he was spot on with his comments regarding the need for an all encompassing change throughout society in his interview with the Guardian. Building a tower from the top down makes no sense and the end result of a national rugby team that is representative of the racial demographics of the country will only be possible when the social remnants of apartheid are eventually corrected, something I unfortunately don’t see happening in my lifetime.
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