SA TAKES TO THE WORLD STAGE
Over 30 years, South Africa has produced Olympic medallists, world champions, Nobel laureates and Oscar and Grammy Award winners. It speaks to a country punching above its weight when it comes to sports, arts and culture
If part of a nation’s culture includes performance art, there’s no reason to exclude sport. Or the difficult act of writing. Or the hard work of science. Or keeping the peace.
In those last three categories, South Africa has produced four Nobel prize winners. Archbishop Desmond Tutu won the peace prize in 1984, almost a decade before Nelson Mandela and FW de Klerk shared it in 1993. JM Coetzee, embraced as South African even in far-off Australia, won it for literature. Not so well known are Sydney Brenner and Michael Levitt.
Brenner, the son of a cobbler from Lithuania and a mother from Latvia, died in 2019 aged 92. He was born in Germiston and graduated from Wits University, which he’d entered as a 15-year-old. In his second year, Wits considered him too young to qualify as a medical doctor but awarded him a BSc in anatomy and physiology. After a stint at Oxford University, he eventually received his bachelor of medicine, bachelor of surgery (MBBCh) in 1951, having at first failed medicine and almost failing surgery but getting first-class passes in obstetrics and gynaecology. In 2002, having worked at Cambridge and Berkeley, he shared the Nobel prize in physiology or medicine for his work on the genetic code.
Another son of Jewish immigrants, Levitt was one of the first to warn about the damaging effects of Covid lockdowns. Still the holder of South African citizenship, Levitt, 76, has worked at Stanford University in California since 1987 where he received the 2013
Nobel prize for chemistry that he shared with two other scientists.
While some of those Nobel winners did much of their work in the privacy of a study or the seclusion of a laboratory, a few other cultural achievers did it in the full glare of TV: three Oscars and 12 Grammys.
Charlize Theron won the Oscar for her role in
Monster, a grim crime drama that took her as far from her glamorous persona as it’s possible to go. Others, for best foreign language film and for best documentary, would follow.
My Octopus Teacher, a story with underwater charm, won worldwide attention after the 2021
Oscars. Craig Foster, exhausted from his day job, began to free-dive in the sea close to his Cape Town home and came across an octopus living in the kelp forest. With the help of director-writers Pippa Ehrlich and James Reed, he put the story together for Netflix.
Tsotsi, which won an Oscar in 2006, had the foundation of a good script, adapted from an Athol Fugard novel by director Gavin Hood, and owed much to its lead star, Presley Chweneyagae, in the title role.
Among South Africa’s many achievements in music, it is hard to beat Ladysmith Black Mambazo (Grammys in 1988, 2005, 2009, 2014 and 2018). The Soweto Gospel Choir won three Grammys, in 2007, 2008 and 2019, while other winners were Black Coffee, Wouter Kellerman and Ricky Kej, Kellerman with Zakes Bantwini and Nomcebo Zikode, and most recently, Tyla.
So far, so smooth. It was in sport where the rifts and controversies of the “new South Africa” began to emerge.
Even before apartheid had been sent to the sin bin, South Africans were being allowed back into international sport the banning from which had played a big part in undermining whites-only rule.
South African cricket teams, almost all white, visited India, then Australia and New Zealand for the 1992 World Cup. Disputes over race raged about selections for the team for the Barcelona Olympics in the same year. There were strong suspicions, voiced loudly by nonracial sports organisations that had opposed apartheid, often with dire consequences, that white sports officials did not fully grasp the new dynamic and regarded the reopening to be business as usual.
A reaction to that were young radicals in the ANC who wanted the springbok emblem scrapped. Cricket quickly buckled, as did most other sports. Rugby resisted, and was regarded as an apartheid holdout. Sane voices pleaded for the Bok and, with Mandela backing them, the Bok prevailed.
In the early years of democracy, rugby was viewed with distrust, and with some justification. The men who ran it at Springbok level and they were always men were still captives of old prejudices; the Broederbond had been a powerful influence. Black players were often ignored or given token team places.
One who was not a token was
Chester Williams, a wing who was a shoo-in for any Springbok team. But when the Springboks needed him most in the 1995 Rugby World Cup in South Africa Williams was injured. It was only by good and bad fortune that he made a return in time for the final, when South Africa beat New Zealand. The good luck was Williams’s recovery, the bad was taking the place of Pieter Hendriks, who had been suspended. At least it allowed the Springboks one black player in the final.
For a while, Williams was a straw to be grasped by Springbok selectors. It would take a long time for black players to be fully recognised. When that did happen, it came from a visionary of the Free State, one of apartheid South
Africa’s most conservative regions.
Rassie Erasmus was the most unlikely person to finally break down the selection wall that black players faced. His vision produced a flood of black players
from the front-row “Beast”, Tendai Mtawarira, to the dazzling Makazole Mapimpi on the wing, and many in between whose talent and ability could not be questioned by even the most diehard rugby bigot.
Then there was his greatest inspiration: Siya Kolisi, a captain promoted out of the ranks to lead the team to World Cup victories in 2019 and 2023. Springbok rugby was no longer the last redoubt of apartheid; it was embraced far and wide as the victory parades across the country proved. The Springbok was no longer a reminder of bad old days, but one of the most successful brands that South Africa had produced. And it had four Rugby World Cups to show for it.
Whether rugby inspired other sports is hard to tell, but there was unprecedented celebration after that winter afternoon in 1995 when Springbok captain Francois Pienaar declared the win over the All Blacks to be for all 43-million South Africans (a few more million since), when Mandela handed over the cup and when Sowetan editor Aggrey Klaaste decided the Monday morning page one headline, in Second Coming type, would be “Amabokoboko!”. Exclamation mark and all.
After the euphoria rugby’s struggles would continue, however. A new Springbok coach, Andre Markgraaff, had to resign in disgrace over racist remarks, national rugby boss Louis Luyt dragged Mandela to court over a piffling matter that was embarrassing for many, and blinkered selections would carry on for a while. But the game’s foundations were strong. World Cup victories followed in 2007, 2019 and 2023.
Those triumphs remain pivotal in South African sport, but there were others. Bafana Bafana, a team now often derided, won the Africa Cup of Nations in 1996 still its only major achievement.
South Africa produced a plethora of world boxing champions, some of true class, others only because of the diffused world of the sport. A few stand out: Sugar Boy Malinga, Baby Jake Matlala, Moruti Mthalane, South Africa’s most successful world champion who held three world titles over 12 years, and Corrie Sanders, who won the pinnacle of boxing, the heavyweight title, when he knocked out Wladimir Klitschko in 2003, one of the biggest upsets in the sport’s history.
From testing the Olympic waters in 1992, South Africans won gold in the Games of 1996, 2004, 2012, 2016 and 2020. Three golds were won in Atlanta (1996), by Josiah Thugwane in the marathon and two by Penny Heyns in the pool. After the disappointments of 2000 in Sydney, swimmers Roland Schoeman, Ryk Neethling, Lyndon Ferns and Darian Townsend won a relay gold in Athens 2004, a venue that had been contested in vain by Cape Town.
At the 2012 London Olympics, another foursome prevailed in the rowing. Sizwe Ndlovu, Matthew Brittain, John Smith and James Thompson won the men’s lightweight fours. Swimmers Cameron van der Burgh and Chad Le Clos won gold and Caster Semenya too, in the women’s 800m on the track, sparking a sex-testing controversy that has yet to settle.
The greatest South African Olympic achievement came in Rio during the 2016 Olympics when Wayde van Niekerk not only won gold in the 400m, but did so in 43.03sec, breaking Michael Johnson’s world record of 43.18sec, which had stood for 17 years and which pundits predicted would never be broken. At the same Games, Semenya repeated her London 800m victory and in 2021 in Tokyo, swimmer Tatjana Schoenmaker won the 200m breaststroke, rounding off 11 gold medals in Olympics since South Africa’s return to international sport.