It is a familiar scene at any Test match in South Africa: The teams have run onto the pitch and are lined up for the national anthems. The visiting team gets proceedings under way with their anthem, once concluded they receive a polite smattering of applause from the crowd. Now, it is the turn of South Africa. The first half of the anthem, begun by Nkosi Sikelel’iAfrika and introduced in 1994, is sung at barely discernable levels around the stadium. But, as soon as the old part of Die Stem arrives, all of a sudden the crowd have a voice with their words echoing in resonance making a thundering sound announcing to the visiting team that they have indeed come to South Africa to play some rugby.
Which South Africa might that be?
In this morning’s (Monday September 6) The Star, Kevin McCallum vents his disgust at those who did not sing the first half of the national anthem with nearly as much effort during the home leg of the Tri-Nations. He says that not singing the first half of the national anthem is incredibly disrespectful and intrinsically racist.
I cannot agree with him more. Ever since I started watching Test matches on TV, and had the privilege of watching two from the media box at Newlands, it has been a constant source of embarrassment to me to see a new country revert back to its old, apartheid self in the space of three minutes. Just imagine what the viewers overseas must think about our rugby public when they see such a blatant sign of disrespect. They probably think that, based on such evidence, that all those who watch rugby in this country, still very much a white man’s game, are a bunch of racist Neanderthals.
I wouldn’t blame them for thinking so, because in part they aren’t wrong are they? In 16 years of “new” Test match rugby, such behaviour has been a constant, disgusting and flagrant “fuck you’ to the sacrifices made by the uncountable who lost everything in making South Africa something better, with black South Africa’s blood especially staining our soil during the struggle for equality.
It is very saddening to see a section of South African society devalued through a sport that should represent the virtues of human competition. Instead, rugby is being used as a defiant vehicle for which white South Africa essentially can protest against the new South Africa and the “darkies” that run it.
Let it be seen very clearly: the South African economy is still controlled by mainly white men. Only 8% of the wealth registered on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange is in the hands of non-white South Africans. White South Africans are still better educated, live longer and have far easier lives to deal with then their non-white counterparts. Zapiro did a cartoon a while back headed “White South Africans Who Never Benefitted From Apartheid” The rest of the panel was empty.
If you read up on South Africa’s history between 1880 and 1910, apartheid aside, the slow and constant disenfranchisement of non-white South Africans was very much a political agenda for the likes of Jan Hofmeyr, Paul Kruger and the single most influential, evil and callous white person ever involved in South African politics — other than Hendrik Verwoerd — Cecil John Rhodes. These men didn’t give a shit about black rights. Though they spoke Afrikaans, English and Dutch, the oppression of non-white South Africans in favour of their own constituency was an issue that bound them together.
We already have enough douche bags in this country in the mould of Brandon Huntley, who was initially granted asylum in Canada on the basis of “racial persecution”, but was sanely denied eventually after the Canadians in their ignorance realised what a poor decision they had made.
Why do mainly white South Africans continue refuse to join the Great Society just to spite the government? If you read John Carlin’s Playing the Enemy (Invictus ), Nelson Mandela realised that rugby represented a means to communicate with a section of the population that until the point of his release — on February 11 1990 — thought he was a terrorist and a danger to “us” all. Without him, and other likeminded individuals in the ANC at the time, there would be no Springbok team today. Having interviewed Carlin personally, the picture he explained to me was that Mandela was a political fox and an utter pragmatist. He knew that rugby holds an important place in white South African culture, English and Afrikaans, so he knew that by bargaining with the public over their most supported pastime, he could change how “they” viewed him.
And now, this is how we repay Madiba: by mumbling and shutting our mouths, taking the celebration of Test match rugby for granted. In contrast, during the 2010 Soccer World Cup, the mainly black crowds at Soccer City, the Free State Stadium and Loftus Versfeld (ironic that?) didn’t miss a beat throughout the entire national anthem, beginning to end, because the World Cup was a time to show how proudly South African they are.
It is about time South Africa’s white rugby public wake up, lift their heads and join together with all other South Africans and reinforce this incredible journey we as a country undertake every day, every second of our lives on this soil.
If you can’t do that, then there is no hope for you. There are, however, numerous places such as Perth in Australia, and Wimbledon in London, where you can find other close-minded, racist individuals, and bemoan how “shit South Africa is now that the blacks run it”.
Such racial cancer has no place in today’s South African society. Are there problems? Of course. Does the government have problems? The strikes and the endemic corruption are evidence of that. However, if we all do our best to contribute towards a better tomorrow, that is more than doing nothing and moaning, a favoured tactic of the silent minority.
Change is gradual, and the game of rugby is one place we can affect this change for the betterment of tomorrow. It isn’t going to be easy, but we’ve come this far haven’t we? Let’s not ruin it through resentment and denialism.
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