The Māori men who missed out
Some of the greatest All Blacks were banned from touring South Africa, and the NZ government failed to back them, writes Tony Smith.
Aprominent Ma¯ ori rugby historian says Ma¯ ori exclusion from South Africa tours is the ‘‘biggest skeleton in New Zealand rugby’s closet’’ and it still irks that the New Zealand government has not apologised for its role.
The South African government and South African and New Zealand rugby unions made formal apologies in 2010 for the banning of Ma¯ ori from tours in 1928, 1949 and 1960.
‘‘The sad aspect was the New Zealand government was never part of that apology,’’ says Massey University researcher Malcolm
Mulholland, author of Beneath the Maori Moon, An Illustrated History of
Ma¯ ori Rugby. ‘‘Three out of four parties have apologised, but not the New Zealand government.’’
Mulholland believes the government could have pressured the New Zealand Rugby Union (NZRU) to spurn tour invitations to South Africa unless Ma¯ ori were welcomed.
He wonders why they still have not apologised, and whether ‘‘they see historic apologies being made to Ma¯ ori as only being related to financial settlements’’.
‘‘I think there’s some shame in that. An admission of guilt doesn’t need to lead to compensation. The cynic in me wonders if they worry it would open up a pandora’s box.’’
Sport and Recreation Minister Grant Robertson said in a statement to Stuff that, ‘‘the New Zealand government at the time was supportive of the decision in 2010 by the South African and New Zealand rugby unions to apologise to Ma¯ ori players for their exclusion’’.
Robertson said ‘‘the matter was between the rugby unions as two private organisations. It is not the role of the government to apologise for the actions of the NZRU’’.
The NZRU’s complicit acceptance of the racist South African regime’s unwillingness to accept Ma¯ ori in All Blacks touring parties cost three generations of Ma¯ ori players the chance to fulfil a career ambition.
The ‘‘no-Ma¯ ori’’ edict denied star All Blacks such as George Nepia, Jimmy Mill, Johnny Smith, Ben Riwai-Couch, Vince Bevan, Stan (Tiny) Hill and Pat Walsh the chance to reach their pinnacle due solely to their Ma¯ ori heritage.
Their absence was keenly felt by native South African rugby fans.
The late Makhenkesi Arnold Stofile – the South African sports minister who issued the apology in
2010 – said then: ‘‘George Nepia, Jimmy Mill and other Ma¯ ori rugby stars who became victims of racism were our heroes. They inspired and gave impetus to our drive for a nonracial dispensation in sport and in society.’’
NZRU chiefs insisted before the
1949 and 1960 tours that they did not want to subject Ma¯ ori players to vilification in South Africa, hence it would be better for them not to go.
However, the South African snub still stung.
Mulholland spoke to Patricia Mill, daughter of 1920s star halfback Jimmy Mill, while researching his
2009 book. ‘‘She said it grated with her father till the day he died that he wasn’t good enough in the eyes of his Pa¯ keha¯ brethren to play rugby in South Africa.
‘‘Apparently, it was a hot topic of conversation between him and Nepia. They were good friends.’’
The issue was a festering sore in New Zealand rugby for more than 50 years, since the Springboks’ divisive
1921 tour here.
The South Africans, visiting New Zealand for the first time, beat New Zealand Ma¯ ori 9-8 at Napier’s McLean Park.
But controversy flared when the Daily Telegraph in Napier published the contents of an inflammatory telegram by South African reporter Charles Blackett, who wrote: ‘‘Most unfortunate match ever played . . .
‘‘Bad enough having to play team officially designated New Zealand natives, but spectacle thousands [of] Europeans frantically cheering on [a] band of coloured men to defeat members of their own race was too much for the South Africans [who were] frankly disgusted.’’
Those sentiments sparked fierce rebukes from Ma¯ ori, including Dr Te Rangi Hiroa (Dr Peter Buck), who decried the ‘‘unmitigated insult. Why should the Ma¯ ori race, with its proud recording extending from olden times right down to the great European war, have the colour-line thrown at them in their country by a team of uninformed footballers?’’
Seven years after the Napier telegram, the NZRU further angered Ma¯ ori by blocking Ma¯ ori players from the All Blacks’ 1928 tour to South Africa. NZRU chairman Stan Dean (who had once worked and played rugby in Johannesburg) claimed the backing of its Ma¯ ori Advisory Board.
Te Akarana Ma¯ ori Association deplored the ‘‘slur on the dignity and manhood of the Ma¯ ori’’.
Nepia disclosed his disappointment in his 1963 biography, I, George
Nepia, written with rugby journalist T P McLean.
‘‘Mill and I, you may be sure, did not cry ourselves to sleep over this decision,’’ he said, while claiming the exclusion of Ma¯ ori was ‘‘a deliberate and conciliatory act by the NZRU’’. ‘‘Most of all, we were saddened, disappointed and humiliated by the NZRU . . . which sidestepped its obligations to us.’’
By 1937, when the Springboks next toured here, the Arawa and Akarana Ma¯ ori associations urged the NZRU to ask ‘‘that no Ma¯ ori player be asked to play against the Springboks owing to the humiliations suffered on the previous visit [in 1921]’’.
World War II prevented the All Blacks from touring South Africa until 1949. Again, the NZRU decided not to select Ma¯ ori players, claiming it did not want to subject them to possible reprisals.
Major-General Sir Howard Kippenberger, a war hero who had commanded the Ma¯ ori Battalion in the western desert, caused a stir when he made his views known on the discriminatory selection policy in a talk to the Christchurch RSA in September 1948.
As New Zealand Returned Servicemen’s Association president, the former lawyer said: ‘‘I had
Ma¯ oris under my command for two years, and in that time they had 1500 casualties. I am not going to acquiesce to any damned Afrikanders saying they cannot go. To hell with them.’’
Kippenberger later apologised for his comments, but his outburst may have emboldened The Press.
It asserted in an editorial headlined ‘‘Maoris and Rugby’’, that the union’s decision ‘‘can be represented, and is being represented, as a subtraction from the full and equal citizenship which the Maoris have as a right’’ and alleged it ‘‘also opens the possibility, to be avoided at all costs, of injuring the relations between New Zealand’s two races’’.
New Zealand ‘‘would be wise to send no team at all until a fully representative team can be received’’ and assured ‘‘courteous treatment’’.
The exclusion clearly rankled with Ma¯ ori. Te Rangi Hiroa told the Auckland Savage Club that not sending Ma¯ ori would be ‘‘kowtowing to the ignorant bigotry of the South Africans’’.
Forty-niners denied
Johnny Smith, Vince Bevan and Ben Couch would have been certainties
for the 1949 tour, with Smith’s brother, Peter, Brownie Cherrington and Ron Bryers also strong contenders.
Indeed, Kiwi Blake (a forward who played for the Ma¯ ori All Blacks despite being of African American heritage) told Mulholland that he, Bevan and Smith played in a final trial, and ‘‘one of the selectors called us out afterwards and said: ‘If you had been eligible, you would have all gone.’ ’’
Mulholland wrote that All Blacks captain Fred Allen ‘‘later mourned the loss of Smith and, in particular, Bevan . . . as one of the main reasons for the All Blacks’ four-nil series drubbing’’.
Ben Couch never bore a grudge about his exclusion and simply got on with his life, raising a family in south Wairarapa before becoming an MP and, later, police minister in Rob Muldoon’s National government at the time of the divisive 1981 Springboks tour.
Jared Riwai-Couch grew up working alongside his grandfather on their local marae, and said Ben
Couch ‘‘never really talked about [being prevented from] touring South Africa’’.
Ben had learned to kick off both feet when his Uncle Jack ‘‘cracked a bullwhip left or right to indicate which side from’’ after milking on the farm at Pirinoa.
Still, the family felt a circle had been completed when Jared’s son, Brigham Riwai-Couch (now a senior rugby player with the Sydenham club in Christchurch), performed a haka in his great-grandfather’s memory while playing in a World Schools tournament in South Africa in 2018 – 69 years after Ben Couch was excluded from the 1949 tour.
Ben Couch’s family feel he would have approved of the official apologies in 2010. ‘‘He would have appreciated the acknowledgement [that excluding Ma¯ ori was wrong],’’ said Jared Riwai-Couch. ‘‘He would have felt ‘don’t labour in the past’.
‘‘But it was a terrible thing to withhold people’s love and passion for a sport because of their ethnicity.’’
Growing protest
By the time of the 1960 tour, the public had had enough of teams touring without Ma¯ ori.
The Citizens’ All Black Tour Association, launched a ‘‘No Maoris – No Tour’’ protest movement, led by Wellington surgeon Rolland O’Regan (father of current Nga¯ i Tahu kaumatua Ta¯ Tipene O’Regan).
A petition signed by around 160,000 New Zealanders called on the government to stop the tour. A delegation including George Nepia and Vince Bevan presented it to prime minister Walter Nash, who refused to order the NZRU to include Ma¯ ori or cancel the tour.
Mulholland told Stuff the NZRU’s obeisance to South Africa in 1960 ‘‘was out of step with the population at large’’, and the union was ‘‘gutless’’ in agreeing to tour without Ma¯ ori players. ‘‘They could have drawn a line in the sand and said, ‘we will only select a truly representative team’.’’
Mulholland believes the depth of opposition in 1960 was a pivotal time in ‘‘the history of race relations’’ in Aotearoa. ‘‘It was one of the more visible times when Pa¯ keha¯ galvanised against Ma¯ ori being discriminated against.
‘‘They rose up to tell the New Zealand Rugby Union, and the government, ‘this is wrong, you are judging Ma¯ ori on the basis of the colour of their skin’.’’
He considers the 1960 backlash created a wave that reached its peak in the widespread protests against the 1981 tour.
The national mood had changed by 1967 when prime minister Keith Holyoake forced the NZRU to refuse a South Africa tour invitation if Ma¯ ori were excluded.
In 1970, three Ma¯ ori All Blacks were able to travel to South Africa as ‘‘honorary whites’’, and protest energy in New Zealand switched to a general, anti-apartheid focus.
It took 50 years from the last racially selected All Blacks tour to South Africa for rugby bodies to apologise to Ma¯ ori.
The issue came to a head in 2010, the centennial year for Ma¯ ori rugby. At the start of the year, the NZRU and its Ma¯ ori Rugby Board both said they saw no point in an apology.
That angered then Ma¯ ori Party MP Dr Pita Sharples, who said that the refusal to apologise ‘‘demonstrates the gross arrogance of the rugby union towards the Ma¯ ori people’’.
The Ma¯ ori Rugby Board twice advised the NZRU that it would be wrong to criticise historic decisions and that focusing on the South African tours issue would detract from the celebrations of 100 years of Ma¯ ori rugby.
However, in May 2010, the South African government became the first to offer a formal apology through sports minister Stofile.
In a letter to New Zealand media, Stofile said: ‘‘I do believe that both the NZRU and SARU should apologise for the folly of those who came before them. We cannot be expected to simply forget where we come from and the pain it caused many people.’’
Within a week of Stofile’s statement, the New Zealand and South African rugby unions issued simultaneous apologies.
NZRU chief executive Steve Tew and chairman Mike Eagle said: ‘‘It was a period in which the respect of New Zealand Ma¯ ori rugby was not upheld and that is deeply regretted.’’
South African Rugby Union president Oregan Hoskins described Ma¯ ori as ‘‘innocent victims of the racist ideology of our former government’’.
Mulholland says the families of the banned Ma¯ ori All Blacks were ‘‘very grateful and accepting’’ of the apology. ‘‘It brought closure to them.
‘‘Prior to the apologies, some older players and their families were of the view, ‘don’t worry about it’, leave it in the past, don’t cause a scene’.’’
Once the South African government and the two rugby unions apologised, the sentiment among the families changed to ‘‘we’ve lanced that boil now. We can move on’’, he says.