On June 24, 1995, at the Ellis Park Stadium in Johannesburg, South Africa won the Rugby World Cup 15-12 against its big rival New Zealand. The match is an extremely symbolic moment in South African history. It was the country’s first major sporting event since the end of its apartheid, segregationist regime in 1991. And in a masterful act of political art carried out under international spotlight, President Nelson Mandela orchestrated a show of unity in one of the most bitterly divided countries in the world. , using the slogan “One team, one country”.
The reality of the moment turned out to be much more complicated than the fabrication of the image.
The blatant violations of human rights by apartheid have long made South Africa an international pariah. In 1973, a UN resolution declared apartheid a “crime against humanity”. From 1964 to 1992, the country was banned from the Olympics, while its rugby team was kept out of the sport’s first two World Cups in 87 and 91. For black South Africans, the The historically white team, with its green and gold colors and its mascot Springbok, had become the symbol of the oppressive minority white domination of the nation.
President Mandela saw rugby as a way to lessen divisions between black and white South Africans and foster shared national pride. Sport had been a unifying force before, among the competing colonial forces of the nation. A Springbok tour of the British Isles in 1906 proudly featured players from both sides of the bitter Boer War (1899-1902) between the English and the Afrikaners, including a player who had been imprisoned in a British concentration camp. To heal the wounds this time around, Mandela – who had himself been jailed for 27 years for challenging the white minority-led apartheid system – had to first recognize and deal with the widespread pain and division that the apartheid had provoked.
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The historic link between rugby and apartheid
While racial segregation had long been practiced in South Africa, the official apartheid system emerged in 1948, following the political rise of the Afrikaner National Party. The Afrikaners, descendants of Dutch, German and French settlers who saw themselves as a chosen people, worked to fashion a government that favored the white minority. Under apartheid, the majority black population was displaced to isolated townships in conditions of brutal poverty, excluded from any role in national policy and deprived of jobs other than those involving unskilled labor. In 1953, the Separate Facilities Reservation Act was passed, officially separating all public spaces in South Africa, including the rugby pitch.
The Afrikaner National Party had strong ties to the rugby team, which had lined up an all-white list during its first 90 years. The party adopted the team’s success as its own, and players sometimes used the team as a springboard to party positions.
“The National Party considered the Springbok symbol [a native antelope] as a representation of the values and characteristics of the Afrikaner people, ”wrote Simon Pinsky in an essay published in History of South Africa Online. “In their minds, allowing black players to don the sacred jersey was a step towards the erosion of those values. The Springbok had come to symbolize more than the excellence of rugby for the hard-core Afrikaner, it was. come to symbolize racial superiority. “
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Truth, reconciliation and rugby
In 1995, five years after being released from prison and a year after being elected the country’s first black president, Mandela formed the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to investigate apartheid-related crimes. The hope of the commission was that full disclosure of the truth about the atrocities of the day would lead to healing in the racially divided nation.
Black South Africans wanted to destroy all symbols of the apartheid regime. At the top of the list: the Springbok, which had been the mascot of the rugby team and the sporting emblem of the National Apartheid Party since 1906. After the first free elections in 1994, all South African national teams had adopted a protea, the country’s national flower. , as an emblem, with the exception of the rugby team. In a country where rugby was the great national pastime, the Springbok emblem with its green and gold colors was not something many white South Africans were willing to give up.
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Mandela pursues a larger goal
Understanding this resistance to change, Mandela sought out a conciliatory strategy that would allow the Afrikaners to retain their precious emblem as a means to an end: bringing the nation together.
“As early as the 1960s, Mandela began to study Afrikaans, the language of the white South Africans who created apartheid,” wrote Richard Stengel in Time magazine on the occasion of Mandela’s 90th birthday in 2008. «His ANC comrades [African National Congress] teased him about it, but he wanted to understand the Afrikaner’s worldview; he knew that one day he would fight them or negotiate with them, and his fate was tied to theirs anyway. In his inaugural address in 1994, he expressed his vision of a “rainbow nation at peace with itself”.
So, at the start of his first term, he invited François Pienaar, the team captain, to meet with him to discuss how the Springboks could help negotiate peace between black and white populations. Pienaar had grown up in an Afrikaner community, where Mandela’s name was associated with “terrorist” and “villain”. To a black crowd, Mandela said, “I ask you to stay beside [these boys] because they are of our species.
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Black groups criticize Mandela
Mandela’s conciliatory gestures towards a harshly racist apartheid regime have not gone well with black South Africans who still deal with that regime’s legacy of oppression and violence. In the Soweto uprisings of 1976 alone, police killed hundreds of black citizens and injured thousands.
After his election in 1994, Mandela was criticized by black militant groups who believed his ruling party, the African National Congress, was too conciliatory with the former apartheid regime. One of his harshest critics was his ex-wife, Winnie Mandela, who believed he was focusing more on appeasing whites than securing the rights of black South Africans. As Mandela and the ANC listened to these criticisms, they continued to focus on reassuring the white minority that they wanted to establish a strong working relationship. His appeals to black South Africans were often framed through the prism of what their support might mean for his broader goals for the country.
“We adopted these young men as our boys, as our own children, as our own stars,” he said on a visit to Springbok training camp shortly before the start of the World Cup. “The country is completely behind them. I have never been so proud of our boys as I am today and I hope this pride we all share.
The 1995 Rugby World Cup Final
Prior to the start of the 1995 World Cup finals against New Zealand, a predominantly white audience of 63,000 in Ellis Park sang as the Springboks led a new national anthem. It combined lyrics from “Die Stem” (the apartheid-era anthem, which had been the subject of earlier protests) and “Nkosi Sikelel ‘iAfrika”, an old pan-African liberation hymn from the anti-African movement. -apartheid. When Mandela appeared in the stadium dressed in Springbok green, the mostly Afrikaner crowd shouted, “Nelson, Nelson, Nelson!
The match showcased Mandela’s work in the weeks leading up to the matches, setting the stage for a historic – and largely symbolic – spectacle of national unity through races for the whole world. In the match, the two teams finished regulation time tied 9-9 in a fiery game against their rivals. With seven minutes remaining in extra time, the South African team won with a drop goal from Joel Stransky to secure a 15-12 victory.
“The whole of South Africa burst into joy, blacks as happy as whites,” Martin Meredith wrote in his biography, Mandela. “Never before have blacks had reason to show such pride in the efforts of their white compatriots. It was a moment of national fusion that Mandela had done a lot to inspire.
A moment of symbolic unity, with a complicated heritage
“When the final whistle blew, this country changed forever,” said team captain Pienaar years later on Mandela’s death. While this may have been a gross exaggeration for most black South Africans who continued to suffer at the lower end of society in the post-apartheid world, it reflected a skillful effort by Mandela to use rugby for heal the wounds of the nation.
For many black South Africans, the Springboks continue to represent a brutal apartheid regime. The team had only one black player in 1995 games and only had six in 2019 when they won the World Cup against England with their first black captain, Siya Kolisi. “Just as Mandela’s move in 1995 was hailed as a metaphor for racial reconciliation in the nation, rugby’s failure to transform is seen as a metaphor for disillusionment among blacks who have gained political freedom but not economic, “wrote journalist David Smith in a 2015 Guardian column.
Yet Mandela’s efforts to use rugby to bring together a new nation struggling to heal old wounds became one of his landmark achievements as president of South Africa – and a sign of what could be done. for good thanks to the power of sport. In 2000, at the Laureus World Sports Awards, Mandela said: “Sport has the power to change the world. Sport can create hope where there was only despair.