S. Africa’s Political Football
It costs $7 a year to attend the public school here, a faded red-brick campus where officials can’t even afford to mow the playing field. But amid the prickly weeds and teeming anthills, Jacob Sebatane is plotting his future as an international rugby star.
Sebatane, 18, got started last year by writing to the South African Rugby Football Union, the game’s rich and powerful governing body. I want to play rugby, he wrote, but my school has no money. Can you help?
It was the kind of letter that a few years ago would have ended up in the wastebasket. Today, it exemplifies something good in the changing South Africa: A black student, oblivious to color, turns for help to the national board of rugby, the favorite pastime of South Africa’s erstwhile white oppressors and a symbol for many blacks of apartheid-era racism.
“In my life, I have chosen rugby, and that is what I am going to play,” Sebatane said during a practice in knee-high grass scattered with cow dung. “It is not an issue of being black or white anymore.”
His confident smile and dogged optimism--he got rugby officials to foot the bill for equipment and uniforms--are the kinds of qualities that are slowly loosening the grip that white South Africans maintain on the beloved rough-and-tumble sport.
But much too slowly, many blacks complain.
Four years into black-majority rule, black South Africans are growing tired of cheerfully chipping away at the racism they see persisting at the highest levels of one of the country’s most popular and lucrative spectator sports--a game regarded by blacks and many whites as dramatically out of step with the new South Africa.
“It is believed by the public that there is something drastically wrong,” President Nelson Mandela testified last month at a court hearing about rugby’s problems.
Sebatane and other would-be players, critics say, are being duped by the sport’s white establishment: Despite decades of playing in the shadow of whites--until several years ago in segregated leagues--blacks have yet to land a player on the prestigious national Springbok squad, the reigning world champions who remain almost as white as an Alpine ski team. (One player of mixed raced, known here as Colored, played on the championship squad.)
And those blacks included on lesser regional and provincial teams under recent quota requirements more often than not warm the bench. All but four of the 120 players recently selected to represent South Africa in the so-called Super 12 international competition are white, even though whites make up just 13% of the population and blacks and Coloreds have been looping, mauling and rucking on rugby fields since the 1890s.
“We are still fighting racism in rugby,” said Bill Jardine, a provincial sports official of mixed race who resigned last month from the national rugby union because of the slow pace of bringing blacks into the sport. “The ghost of apartheid is very much around.”
With black empowerment programs changing the white face of everything in South Africa from wine production to television sitcoms, pressure is being exerted as never before to open rugby’s ranks to people of color.
But the country’s painful process of integration, being played out in schools, industry and government offices, has rarely been as emotional as the drive to remove white dominance in a game long revered as “the chosen sport of a chosen people,” as sport historians Robert Archer and Antoine Bouillon once described rugby and its Afrikaner following.
“It comes down to a broad sense among whites that blacks have taken over everything in South Africa and whites have only rugby left,” said Edward Griffiths, a sports executive with the South African Broadcasting Corp. who was fired in 1996 as the rugby union’s chief executive after clashes with its iron-fisted president. “It is an attitude of mind more than anything else, and it plays well in rugby’s conservative Afrikaner audience.”
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The National Sports Council, a voluntary umbrella organization promoting nonracialism in South African sports, has threatened to organize an international boycott of the game--reminiscent of apartheid-era sports sanctions--and to revoke the national team’s cherished 92-year-old springbok emblem unless the union’s white-dominated executive board steps down. The union has been given until Saturday to comply.
“They have no right to the springbok, they have no right to our national anthem, and they have no right to our flag because they do not honor them,” said Jardine, who drafted the ultimatum approved by the council last month. “The situation has now reached crisis proportions.”
Not surprisingly, white rugby leaders are not surrendering without a fight. The national union held an emergency session last week in which it agreed to meet with the sports council today but avowedly rejected calls for the leadership to resign.
Union officials, led by longtime rugby president and former fertilizer magnate Louis Luyt, have branded the council’s ultimatum unwarranted meddling in a private sports organization, insisting that its ruling body is democratically elected and free to reject outside demands. They also claim that efforts to seize the springbok emblem are illegal because the union registered the famed leaping antelope with the Department of Trade and Industry in 1996.
“It is clear that they are not allowed to interfere,” union spokesman Anthony MacKaiser said.
Some of the rugby union’s supporters allege that the sports council--which is headed by Mluleki George, an unsuccessful candidate for the union’s presidency and an activist in Mandela’s African National Congress--is “abusing the sport” for the government’s own political purposes.
They say black sports officials are bent on bashing the country’s 3 million Afrikaners, the white descendants of Dutch and French settlers, who devised the apartheid system of racial separation but who now say they just want to be left alone.
“Sport will remain a political football in this country as long as sport administrators like Mr. George of the ANC are in control,” said Leon Louw, spokesman for the Freedom Front, a right-wing political party dominated by Afrikaans-speaking whites, the traditional core of rugby enthusiasts since the British-born game’s introduction to South Africa in 1862.
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That rugby has become such a bitter point of contention between blacks and whites is a case study in opportunities lost.
Just three years ago, the game was among the most poignant symbols of reconciliation in South Africa. After years of blacks rooting for Springbok opponents--rugby fan Mandela, during his 27 years in prison, was among those cheering for foreigners--the country came together as never before when the team took the world championship in a 1995 match against New Zealand in Johannesburg.
Mandela, by then president, won the hearts of many South Africans when he donned the green-and-yellow jersey emblazoned with the springbok emblem, which for years was reserved exclusively for white players under apartheid regulations. (Blacks wore the leopard emblem and Coloreds the protea flower.) Before a worldwide television audience, the mostly white crowd responded with chants of “Nel-son! Nel-son! Nel-son!”
Mandela’s gesture, while of symbolic value, also had a practical component. His support for the rugby Springboks came at a price: Rugby officials vowed to turn the sport upside down and to integrate the national squad by the next Rugby World Cup, scheduled for 1999 in Wales.
The popular slogan of the time--one nation, one team--was supposed to become a reality on the field, with at least six players from “previously disadvantaged communities” to be included in the next World Cup team. But with a year to go, the national squad is all white and the top players considered likely to make the World Cup squad are also “lily white,” in the words of Sports Minister Steve Tshwete.
The lack of progress in integrating rugby has been an ongoing concern of Tshwete and the ANC-led government, which has been locked in a nasty court battle with the rugby union over the legality of a presidential-ordered inquiry into the organization’s finances and operations.
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Last month, Mandela was summoned before a Pretoria judge to justify his reasons for the inquiry. It was the first time in South African history that a president had been subpoenaed to appear in court, and, in the eyes of many blacks, it was the rugby union’s ultimate transgression--an intentional act of irreverence toward the country’s first black leader.
During his testimony, Mandela described the union’s case as “insensitive, ungrateful and disrespectful” and characterized Luyt as a “pitiless dictator.”
The legal showdown has begun to raise eyebrows where it could really count--in the boardrooms of big-name corporate sponsors. A spokeswoman for sportswear manufacturer Nike, which supplies the Springbok uniforms and contributes to the union’s development fund, said the company has urged the union to drop its legal action and cooperate with the presidential inquiry.
The company is eager to clear its name because it is believed that Nike’s sponsorship of the Springboks would be a key issue in the investigation, which has been suspended pending a court ruling. Luyt reportedly steered a hefty commission from the Nike deal to his son, and the union leader has been accused of other acts of nepotism, including replacing Griffiths, the fired chief executive officer, with Luyt’s son-in-law.
“We are very, very worried about the situation in rugby,” said Nunu Ntshingila, Nike’s advertising and public relations manager in South Africa. “We got involved in rugby because we saw it as one of those sports that would bring people together; that is what we bought into. And that is why we are seriously concerned about the situation as it stands today, because there haven’t been any black players coming into the fold.”
The national union has spent more than $11 million since 1992 on developing programs in black townships, a sum the union proudly disseminates as evidence of its good intentions. This year, about $2 million has been set aside for development, or about 15% of the rugby budget.
But critics say the integration pledge to Mandela in 1995 has never been made a priority by the people who really matter. Griffiths, the former chief executive, said he introduced quotas at the secondary school level during his tenure but was fought tooth and nail by the union’s top brass.
“In various pockets around the country, there are people who care very much about the game and have some understanding about rugby development, but by and large, 70% to 80% of rugby people are brought up to think that development is something you do as a political conscience tax,” Griffiths said. “There are very few whites who are sincere enough about the need for change to make sacrifices.”
Sas Bailey, the union’s general manager for development and one of its handful of nonwhite administrators, defends the sport’s record of creating and funding programs to nurture talent among blacks and people of mixed race and to integrate local and provincial teams.
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Since the union’s creation in 1992--it merged various segregated entities that existed under apartheid--it has funded the salaries of 43 development officers who do nothing but promote the game in so-called disadvantaged areas. Although change has been slow, Bailey acknowledges, it is unfair to equate the lack of diversity at the national level with a lack of trying at the local level, he said.
“One must immediately say there is still room for improvement, but we are making excellent progress in broadening and creating the opportunities for all of our people to play rugby,” Bailey said. “Part of my job was to break down the mind-set among many white rugby administrators that blacks do not want to play rugby. I can say we have disproved that myth . . . [and] I believe in the next two years we will be in the position to get black players through to the top.”
Lomax Tshardu, a development officer for the Gauteng Lions, a provincial team in the Johannesburg area, spends his days tending to a dozen youth programs in the province’s poorest neighborhoods, including the black townships of Soweto and Alexandra.
On a recent visit here in Zuurbekom, an agricultural area not far from Soweto, Tshardu was greeted like a celebrity by scores of black students hoping to learn something new about the game.
Tshardu, 52, has played rugby in black leagues since he was 9, and he helped establish the Soweto club. By contrast, none of the coaches at Zuurbekom had even held a rugby ball before a four-day crash course last year; four coaches are women because most male teachers are consumed by soccer.
Tshardu played drill sergeant with the Zuurbekom students, talked up the game and the school’s volunteer coaches, and made sure no one rested until he was desperately out of breath. But back in the car, Tshardu acknowledged that the dreams of kids like Sebatane will never be realized until rugby’s priorities are drastically overhauled--no matter how hard development officers in impoverished places try.
Tshardu said he didn’t even have the money to offer Sebatane the taxi fare to Soweto, where the teenager could practice on a field that has been mowed and among players with equal talents and promise.
“I grew up playing rugby and would love nothing more than to see blacks playing for South Africa,” Tshardu said. “But on the top we have white men who have their own agenda.”
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BACKGROUND
Rugby is a small town in central England where, according to sports legend, a schoolboy playing soccer in 1823 suddenly picked up the ball and ran downfield. It was a saucy act of rebellion but a perfectly fitting start for a sport that cherishes its unorthodox reputation as “a game to harden gentlemen.” A bruising team sport with 15 players on each side, the game sometimes looks like an American football game gone haywire. Teams score by moving the ball--slightly larger and more rounded than the American variety--downfield toward a goal. Attacking players can carry, kick and pass the ball--passing only backward or laterally--while defenders are free to tackle (but not block) their opponents. Crossing the goal line with the ball, known as a try, is worth five points, while kicking the ball through the uprights can be worth two or three points. The game has a comical-sounding lexicon, including the maul, or ruck (closing around the ballcarrier), the scrum (interlocking arms in tight formation and going head-to-head with the opposition at the start of play), the rip (aggressively wrestling the ball from an opponent) and the hooker (the player who snags the ball during the scrum and tosses it into play at the line-outs). Unlike in American football, participants wear minimal protective equipment; serious injuries are not uncommon.