INVICTUS: SOUTH AFRICA AND RUGBY

Rugby

Rugby is perhaps the most famous sport of the British Isles and many of its former colonies. Among the ten strongest national teams in the world are England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, Fiji and South Africa. Today the title of world champion belongs to South Africa’s “Springboks”, after having long been held by their rivals, New Zealand’s “All Blacks”.

The birth of the Springboks

In South Africa, rugby symbolizes some of the country’s deepest social, political and economic transformations. The national team, founded in 1889, adopted the name “Springbok” (the leaping antelope) in 1896, when the South African Rugby Union toured the British Isles with a team composed only of Afrikaners and settlers, in an attempt to overcome the conflicts inherited from the Anglo-Boer War.

Rugby and apartheid

The attempt was unsuccessful. Instead, it strengthened the divisions between the white and black populations, the latter seeing the South African national rugby team — composed exclusively of white players — as a symbol of oppression.

For much of the twentieth century the Springboks were closely associated with Afrikaner nationalism. Many players belonged to the Broederbond, which supported the National Party’s victory in the 1948 elections. Shortly afterwards the party approved the Group Area Act, forcing Black people to live in segregated and underdeveloped areas. Black citizens were also forbidden from using rugby fields, and in the 1960s Maori players from New Zealand’s national team, the All Blacks, were even banned from entering South Africa — a ban repeated in the 1980s.

South Africa’s international isolation

Following these events, the International Rugby Board suspended the Springboks from international competitions from 1984 to 1992. Only in 1992 was the South Africa Rugby Football Union (SAFRU) created, a unified and non-racial governing body for rugby.

Nelson Mandela and rugby as a tool for reconciliation

A turning point came in 1994 with the election of Nelson Mandela as President of South Africa. Although he was a passionate football fan, Mandela understood that rugby could become a powerful instrument of national unity in a deeply divided country facing a severe economic crisis.

In preparation for the 1995 Rugby World Cup, awarded to South Africa as a symbol of reconciliation, Mandela visited the poorest township teams together with the Springboks — who at that time had only one Black player. Alongside captain Francois Pienaar, he worked to convince both white and Black South Africans to accept peaceful coexistence and to support a team that many had previously despised.

The 1995 final: the triumph of unity

The final of the 1995 Rugby World Cup, played in Johannesburg between the Springboks and the All Blacks, was famously portrayed in Clint Eastwood’s film Invictus. The Springboks won in a packed stadium where the old orange-white-blue flags had been replaced by the rainbow flag of Mandela’s South Africa.

Sixty thousand white and Black supporters sat side by side in the stands of Ellis Park. It was the triumph of Mandela’s political vision and of sport, which — as Mandela himself said — “has the power to change the world and create hope where there was once only despair.”

Today South Africa’s rugby team is the strongest in the world. It has won four Rugby World Cups, and in the last two the trophy has been lifted by a Black captain — a powerful symbol of a country that has profoundly changed.