May the Boks’ spirit endure as the winds of division blow

Incredible. That’s the word that comes to mind when thinking about the past few weeks. My closest friends know my unease with the fashionable slogan apparently first popularised by Songezo Zibi’s Rise Mzansi: “2024 is our 1994.”

There can never be another 1994 because no matter how bad things may seem to be today, nothing can possibly be worse than what the majority of our society went through between 1948 and 1994.

But I digress, that is a subject for another day.

Back to the excitement of the past few weeks.

It swept me back to the euphoria of the mid-1990s when — due to our first nonracial general elections, the 1995 Rugby World Cup Springboks’ victory and Bafana Bafana winning the 1996 Africa Cup of Nations — it felt like we were on our way to conquering the world.

How wonderful it felt then to be part of the new nation, to turn our backs on a dark and painful past and to look forward to the promise of a better life ahead of us. Those of us who were still going through the education system when the transition period began read from all these milestones the message that the future was bright.

They signalled that the South Africa and Africa Pixley ka Seme had envisaged in his 1906 “The Regeneration of Africa” speech was attainable and that we were the generation to finally make that dream a reality. But the hard realities of building a united nation from the ashes of a divided and racialised past soon hit us.

Whereas in 1995 we had embraced names like Joel Stransky and Chester Williams with the same passion as our own, we now started fighting about “quotas”, which shade of black is an acceptable black and, therefore, who was more deserving than the other to wear national colours and represent us on national platforms.

At first all of this was not alarming, it was part of our growing pains. If a city as small as Rome wasn’t built in a day, who were we to think that a project as majestic as building a new and nonracial nation from the ruins of apartheid could take a decade or three?

But then the gulf seemed to widen further as the new political dispensation struggled to deliver on its promise of economic justice and equality. Soon political merchants were exploiting past divisions for electoral gain.

Exponents of discredited apartheid-era ideas such as “group rights” repackaged themselves as “civil rights” activists fighting for “minorities”.

On the other side of the political spectrum were political entrepreneurs who believed their fortunes lay in selling a faux nationalism that denies sections of society their full citizenship based on the past.

The nation appeared to be pulled and pushed to racial and ethnic corners again. Fortunately, the majority was not buying into what the divisive race merchants were selling. But national unity was showing worrying signs of being under strain. With the 30th anniversary of South Africa as a nonracial democracy edging closer, there seemed to be more that divides than unites us.

But then came the 2023 Rugby World Cup and the Springboks’ magnificent performance. The outpouring of love and support for the team has been raw, genuine and

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Perhaps it is in the manner in which they won their key games, clinching victory at the last minutes against formidable opponents when defeat seemed certain, that won them the hearts of the nation. Perhaps in those victories, given the hardships many are going through as a result of a struggling economy, we gained hope that we too can conquer our daily difficulties.

Perhaps the games came at a time when we were tired of all the negativity and defeats we have been through since 2019 – the lockdown; depressing testimonies at the state capture commission; a universally respected health minister being ousted on serious allegations of corruption; the July riots; rising unemployment, growing poverty levels and a permanently rudderless political elite that is taking the country nowhere.

We simply were looking for a victory, any win. And the Springboks delivered. But I suspect that it is far deeper than that. In Siya Kolisi’s team we saw glimpses of a dream we once cherished but now feared was permanently deferred. We had come to believe that what we thought we would be, when we came into existence in the mid-1990s, was never going to be realised, that we were destined to become a nation so paralysed by its past that its best would have to flee to foreign lands to realise their full potential.

But as they showed determination while crushing one rugby giant after another to grab the Webb Ellis Cup, the Springboks invoked in us that spirit of the mid-1990s, the belief that even if we are at the foot of this disenfranchised continent, we can hold our own against the best in the world.

May this spirit endure even against the winds of divisions that are going to accompany the upcoming election season where, unlike for Kolisi and his team, dividing people – rather than uniting them – is the name of the game.