‘Mandela was a moment, Kolisi is a movement’
After many years of division, there is a racial revolution in South African rugby and, in his mission to bring the game to the townships, Corkman Barry O’Mahony is at the heart of it...
‘IT’S WELL DOCUMENTED - 1995 WAS AN OPPORTUNITY SQUANDERED’
CAPE TOWN is a place that needs to be seen to be believed. The stunning waterfront city which is framed by the glorious Table Mountain is an Instagrammer’s dream. Delve a little deeper, however, and you will discover a far more complex environment.
The taxi ride from the airport offers the perfect introduction to the city. The Cape Flats, the townships which house almost a million people living below the poverty line, is the first thing that strikes you on the commute. A reminder of the apartheid regime which blighted this land for more than 40 years: a generation of black and mixed-race communities purged from Cape Town and dumped on the outskirts of the city. Gang violence is a major issue here.
Within 10 minutes of the drive into town you are suddenly greeted by the sight of Nelson Mandela Boulevard, the wealthy enclave laced with plush mansions and palm trees. It feels more like Bel Air than the Western Cape.
Ít’s a snapshot of the social and economic issues that still exist in this country.
‘It’s an extraordinary, complex place,’ says Barry O’Mahony, the Corkman who has called Cape Town home for the past 27 years.
Before O’Mahony landed in South Africa he was a hugely promising No8 with PBC, UCC and then Munster.
An Ireland ‘A’ cap in 1992 was seemingly just the beginning for a player being tipped for bigger and better things.
A year in Oxford would prove life-changing, however. During an Oxbridge tour of South Africa in 1993, O’Mahony fell in love with the country and opted to stay. His university coach, Alan Solomons – who had a three-year spell at Ulster – set him up with some local contacts. He retired at 28 due to work commitments before a short coaching stint at the University of Cape Town (UCT), but O’Mahony’s true calling came when he decided to bring rugby into the Cape Flats. GIVING BACK ‘I helped set up a rugby league which was called Vuka Rugby and that was trying to get people in the townships to play rugby and create critical mass within the townships so they could just walk to their local field,’ he explains.
‘So you took away transport because if they went into the normal Western Province set-up, they would have to be travelling and who’s going to organise the bus? Who’s going to go with them? How are they going to get permission to go back into a township late at night? It’s dangerous for everyone concerned.’
‘So we tried to build something around that, which is still going.’
In 2010, he helped establish CoolPlay, a not-for-profit organisation which sought to get rugby into schools across the Cape Flats. Springbok legend Morne du Plessis and the Laureus Sport for Good Foundation were some of its earlier supporters.
Former Connacht coach Steph Nel has played a pivotal role as well.
The after-school programme combines rugby training with real life skills. CoolPlay is preparing these kids to cope with the many challenges in their lives, as well as learning how to pass and tackle.
There is also a netball programme and the uptake and reaction has been seismic.
‘We probably have around 2,000 kids playing either rugby or netball and in primary schools and secondary schools,’ says O’Mahony.
‘That’s what’s taking up all my time at the moment.’
Like the inner-city boxing gyms across Ireland, which give teenagers the structure and discipline to thrive in areas where there are many dark paths, CoolPlay is helping a generation of youngsters realise their potential in a place where hope is in short supply.
‘The gangs rule there,’ O’Mahony explains.
‘It’s funny, rugby is a gang because once you put on your gear, you’ve got your uniform, you’ve got your identity, you’ve got all these codes that you talk in, you’ve got moves which you do and it’s all about the winning and camaraderie that goes around it so you try and use the sport to help them along.’
A ‘success story’, as O’Mahony (right) puts it, is not about excelling at rugby but more about the social strides that they can make.
‘The success stories are the guys who have found themselves in medicine and kicked on that way.’ ‘I know some of the guys a couple of years ago have ended up in the (Natal) Sharks academy so they’ve started to get in. I’m not aware of anyone who’s broken all the way through yet though.
‘But it’s there. Sport is a numbers game. You’re eventually going to get it.
‘You’re hitting a broad base of people now who are hearing messages for the first time in their lives from people who they can respect. So we spend a lot of time and money teaching our coaches, but we call them champions. We teach them how to interact with the kids. It’d kind of psychological training in a way so that they can actually deal with situations when they come about.’
A financial planner with Veritas Wealth by day, O’Mahony’s outlook on life has been all about giving back.
‘When you get off a plane in an Oxford blazer when you walk into South Africa, you tend to go into the top echelons of society quite quickly and your skin colour means you go into the top echelon of society anyway.
‘I’ve always just felt that you need to give back in whatever society you are in.
‘Then to do something around what you’re interested in or what you’re passionate about.
‘For me, it was always going to be around sport and encouraging people.
‘We have learnt so much through sport and it’s a great vehicle because you’re getting people off the street, you’re getting them using physical activity, to deal with some of their frustrations – rugby is a perfect game for that in particular where they can burn off some of their frustrations in a controlled manner and learning a controlled manner is also a very important thing.
‘I’m a capitalist. I’m a wealth manager. I’ve got my own business in wealth management, but I think in a society like this you’ve got to give back and if you’re not going
to give back, well it’s going to come and get you.’
PROGRESS
The Black Lives Matter movement has shone a light on racial inequality across the globe in recent months, but that issue has never been far from the surface in South Africa – a country still healing from the caustic era of apartheid.
In 2015, a statue of British colonist Cecil Rhodes was removed from the campus of UCT following student protests. It was seen as a huge victory for black South Africans who had grown weary with the lack of progress since apartheid had been abolished.
That regime had only ended a few years before O’Mahony arrived in 1993. Less than 12 months later, Nelson Mandela was elected as the first black president of South Africa. A year after that, Mandela, wearing the Springbok jersey, presented Francois Pienaar with the World Cup trophy following South Africa’s victory over the All Blacks at Ellis Park in Johannesburg.
It is now 25 years since that iconic moment (Clint Eastwood even made a movie about it), but there is still plenty of work to be done.
‘It’s well documented that 1995 was a lost opportunity,’ O’Mahony observes.
‘It was lucky in the sense that it was Mandela driving the thing and showed amazing leadership in what he was actually doing but it was maybe a bit early and people just needed to move forward.
‘You’ll see it yourself in Ireland now when Black Live Matter kicks off but you kind of get a bit of a jolt when you’re carrying on with your life and you think, “ok, we’ve done that now, let’s just move on”, but you’re not getting anywhere until you get social reform.
‘South Africa, it’s quite an exciting place to live. I’ve just got a thing from our school now to say there’s social cohesion meetings soon.’
O’Mahony’s son attends Rondebosch Boys High School and the sea change in attitudes at institutions like that has been staggering in recent years.
‘The principal is completely flabbergasted that students that have only left in the last two years have said, no, they think that there’s inherent racism, but every school has got the same feedback so now they’re actually trying to reflect again so you’re constantly resetting and going again at it.
‘I’ve been involved in many discussions up at UCT rugby club around transformation over the years and the problem was/is for black guys in a rugby set-up is that it was a white environment, especially in South Africa, it was an Afrikaans environment which definitely was not taking a black guy into account. Remember there are different levels: there’s a coloured guy who speaks Afrikaans and then there is a black guy, well, to be fair, he can probably speak three languages and fairly fluently.
‘What happened in the last year or so is that businesses actually pulled money from rugby. They pulled the bank – it was called ABSA which was owned by Barclays at the time, it’s not anymore. Then the politicians started pushing and said these teams are too white and we need to see more. What happened then was the numbers, they started moving more and more on the quotas and whatever else.’
There has been some progress here. The issue of transformation is a sensitive one in South African rugby. Achieving that balance of reflecting the diversity of the Rainbow Nation (the country’s national anthem, Nkosi sikelel’ iAfrika, features five of the 11 languages spoken in South Africa; namely Xhosa, Zulu, Sesotho, Afrikaans and English), while ensuring that players are picked on merit.
The 31-man World Cup squad which secured the Webb Ellis trophy in Japan had 11 players of colour in their ranks – 10 per cent shy of South African rugby’s target of 45 per cent for black participation. It was progress nonetheless.
For some historical context, Chester Williams was the only player of colour in South Africa’s World Cup-winning class of 1995. There were just two (JP Pietersen and Bryan Habana) in the matchday squad which defeated England in the 2007 World Cup final in Paris.
But when Rassie Erasmus appointed Siya Kolisi as the first black Springbok captain in 2017, it felt like a huge moment for the sport and the country as a whole.
Both hailed from Port Elizabeth, but from very different sides of the tracks. Erasmus was the white Afrikaaner with every option available to him while Kolisi was the kid from the Zwide township who battled for everything he got. Their partnership would deliver a third World Cup title in Japan. Many of the kids in the Cape Flats would have been watching on as Kolisi lifted the title on an unforgettable night in Tokyo.
‘It was just magic,’ O’Mahony recalls. ‘It was actually a better moment that Kolisi was captain when they won the World Cup. It meant so much more to everybody in South Africa than the Mandela and Francois Pienaar (moment).
‘It was actually bigger, in the real sense of it. It wasn’t as spectacular as Nelson Mandela. That was pure showmanship and it was brilliant, but the genuine meaning and the shift that has now taken place is very real.’ A few days after our chat, O’Mahony followed up with an email: ‘I was just telling my wife Lisa about our conversation and she said: “Mandela was a moment, Kolisi is a movement”.’
HOPE FOR THE FUTURE
Nothing is certain in these times but Warren Gatland’s Lions are set to take on the Springboks in the opening Test of that eagerly-anticipated series in FNB Stadium or ‘Soccer City’ as it was known during the 2010 World Cup in South Africa. The stunning 88,000-capacity stadium overlooks Soweto, the largest township in the country.
The image of Kolisi shaking hands with Maro Itoje – a black Londoner of Nigerian heritage and one of the favourites to captain the tourist next year – would be a powerful one.
Slowly but surely, things are changing in South Africa and people like O’Mahony have certainly played their part.
‘This is now a global thing so these are the sons and daughters of the baby boomers and they want change and they’re not hanging around waiting and waiting,’ he concludes.
’We need to push on here. I think the world does. We do need to wake up a bit. We’ve got blindspots. We’ll always have blindspots but these guys are shining the torch back in our faces now.’