Boks are an object lesson

There is an awe-inspiring stubbornness to Springbok rugby, a refusal to give up despite being the underdogs that resonates with our national soul.

The Springbok victory was to South Africa like cold, spring water to a parched throat. It was only when it arrived that we fully comprehended how desperately we had needed it. It’s beginning to feel like a pattern. Every 12 years, we win the World Cup, just in time to restore desperately depleted spirits.

Much has been made of the 1995 victory, the Madiba moment when Nelson Mandela donned a Springbok No 6 jersey and with a blue-eyed, white Afrikaner, lofted the trophy above his head. For a country that had been filled with trepidation and distrust, that had experienced decades of violence and death, and had for long been banned from world sport because of apartheid, it was a defining, healing moment.

But, being only human – short-memoried and bloody-minded – we, of course, soon enough reverted to our petty jealousies and dangerous squabbles. The 2007 victory was a welcome sporting triumph but hardly of any great political significance.

The glitter was already flaking from the rainbow. President Thabo Mbeki tried to cash out a rugby dividend, but his popularity was already approaching its nadir and less than a year later he had been fired by his party.

Fast forward to 2019. SA is ambulatory but crippled, pounded senseless by Apocalypse Zuma. We are only now fully realising how his administration eroded the basic tenets of our nationhood, encapsulated in the constitution’s preamble: “[We] believe South Africa belongs to all who live in it, united in our diversity.”

Morale is perhaps at its lowest point since the state of emergency years in the mid-1980s. President Cyril Ramaphosa’s honeyed promises of external investment bonanzas and internal moral regeneration have so far proven to be illusory.

Against this backdrop of disaster and disillusionment, the ecstatic response to RWC 2019 is hardly surprising. And, as with 1995, it is difficult to overstate the symbolic importance.

There is an awe-inspiring stubbornness to Springbok rugby, a refusal to give up despite being the underdogs that resonates with our national soul. Like the Springboks, we’ve been there before.

But more importantly, and less touchy-feely, is that the win by Siya Kolisi’s team gives a concrete measure of how far we’ve come. In a country where race remains the most important and volatile component to every problem, it provides a lesson to both white and black racists.

To the white naysayers, it should be evidence that we can both transform and be excellent. Change is not an either/or equation.

To black nationalists, it should be evidence that not only are we stronger together, it also shows that transformation in every field need not be a mechanistic exercise in blending exact demographic proportions.

Last week, I wrote that while our despair about SA may be excessive, it is dangerous to allow our hopes and dreams to delude us to the realities of our dilemmas. Coach Rassie Erasmus pulled it all beautifully together, during a post-match interview, when asked about the enormous pressure the no-hoper Springboks had been under.

In SA, he said, pressure is not having a job or having a close relative murdered. Hope, he said, is not about words but deeds.

“Rugby should be something that creates hope. We have the privilege of giving hope [by playing well]. It’s not a burden.”