The South Africa rugby coach, Heyneke Meyer, appears to have done enough to assuage the leading critic of his allegedly racist team selections, at least for now.
Meyer named eight black or “coloured” (of mixed race ancestry) players in his 31-man squad for the World Cup, which kicks off on 18 September.
The Congress of South African Trade Unions, which had cried foul over a lack of black Springboks and threatened to burn shirts in protest, welcomed it as a positive step.
“This is the most representative team that has ever been selected,” the federation’s branch in Western Cape province said. “Cosatu claims this as a victory for workers and a victory for transformation in rugby in South Africa.”
It also cautioned: “This is a move in the right direction, which needs to be increased urgently. It is sad that it takes pressure to get the SARU [South African Rugby Union] to do the right thing for the country in respect of the rugby team.”
This is only the start of a campaign by Cosatu – an ally of the governing African National Congress – to ensure racial transformation in rugby, it added. “We remain concerned about the white players who are in the team. Many of them are old and injured, others have not had meaningful game time this year, whilst the captain [Jean de Villiers] just returned from eight months off.
“The Boer mafia insists on putting their old crocks into the team, when there are clearly much better black and white players outside the team. We need objective measures to define the players for the national team, not the favourites of the coach.”
Boer is a reference to Afrikaners, the descendants of Dutch and German settlers, who still dominate the rugby establishment more than 21 years after the end of apartheid, a legalised form of racial discrimination. Debate over the demographic of the Springboks tends to flare up before every World Cup as white people, who make up less than one in 10 of the population, continue to fill most of the positions. The government has committed to have non-whites make up half of all domestic and national teams by 2019.
Announcing his selection last week, Meyer claimed that he had met the minimum selection quota of 30% non-white players in his squad. They are Bryan Habana, Zane Kirchner, Siya Kolisi, Tendai “Beast” Mtawarira, Lwazi Mvovo, Trevor Nyakane, Rudy Paige and JP Pietersen.
In response, Fikile Mbalula, the country’s sports minister, issued a statement “to remind all South Africans that we are delivering sport under conditions that were not chosen by ourselves”.
He also called on South Africans of all races to rally round the team. “We must don our green and gold jerseys from now on and throughout the World Cup as a demonstration of a united country that acknowledges its divided past but continues to strive for a nonracial, democratic and united South Africa,” he said.
Not everyone seems willing to get on board. A fringe party, the Agency for New Agenda, is seeking a court order that would prevent the players and officials from leaving for England on the grounds the government’s policy on transformation has not been met. The matter is scheduled for a hearing on Wednesday at the high court in Pretoria.
On Sunday Mondli Makhanya, a leading columnist and former editor, declared he would be supporting the Springboks’ opponents, much as black people often did during the days of white minority rule. “I will take in as much rugby as I can over the coming weeks, but I will do so as a fan of the sport rather than as a South African,” he wrote in the City Press newspaper. “And as I watch the passage of the Springboks, I will be openly cheering for whichever opponent they are facing and wishing them humiliation.
“As treacherous as this may sound, the team Jean de Villiers will be leading will not be my team. It will not be a South African team. Rather, it will be a team that represents the stubborn refusal by some sections of our society to change.”
Makhanya argued the team selection is a betrayal of Nelson Mandela, South Africa’s first black president, who famously wore the national colours at the 1995 World Cup final in a grand gesture of reconciliation.
“The almost snow-white team Heyneke Meyer and his coterie have chosen to take to England is a big F-you to the man who donned Francois Pienaar’s No6 jersey and the Springbok cap at Ellis Park in 1995. It is a spitting of thick phlegm at his nation-building efforts.” There was only one black player in that team, Chester Williams, and only two when South Africa lifted the World Cup again in 2007; that pair, Habana and Pietersen, are in the squad again.
This time the Springboks have had a troubled build-up including losses in three out of four Tests this year, among them a first defeat by Argentina.
Chris Thurman, an academic at Wits University in Johannesburg and author of Sport Versus Art, said: “It’s a pity that, if the current debate does result in more black players being picked more often for the Springboks, it coincides with a poor spate of performance – the unspoken logic is: ‘Well, it’s not like we’re doing well anyway, so we might as well put in some more black players … it can’t hurt.’ This is a deeply reactionary approach to transforming sport.
“Of course, there are lots of other factors. The ‘whiteness’ of stadium crowds and advertising images (and the implied consuming demographic), mirror but also indirectly feed into the ‘whiteness’ of the national team. Racist incidents receive scant attention from provincial unions and stadium management.”
Paige is the only uncapped player in the squad. The lock Victor Matfield and the flanker Schalk Burger will take part in their fourth World Cups but 16 of the squad have never played in rugby union’s showpiece. South Africa open their campaign against Japan in Brighton on 19 September and also face pool fixtures against Scotland, Samoa and the United States.
