Remnants of verkramptes and rooineks resisting change

Lynch me. It don’t matter. My body bears scars of blows from the warlords

Back in 2007 this beloved country of ours was enveloped in euphoria.

The intense excitement was injected by the Springboks, who had become heroes for conquering the world in the oval-shaped-ball sport of rugby.

Upon the return of the glorious greenand-gold-clad gladiators, citizens were called upon to converge at OR Tambo International to give them a heroes’ welcome.

We were asked to line the streets of Johannesburg in our thousands as cheering crowds to greet the grabbers of the International Rugby Union’s Holy Grail as they snaked their way from Sandton to Soweto in an open bus parading the spoils of victory — the second time SA had claimed the most prized trophy.

In a column for the now-defunct The Times, I asked to be excused from the exultation as a form of one-man protest.

The irony was that on the day the team were to jet off to France, I stood shoulder to shoulder with then-Springboks coach Jake White in the men’s toilet of a Sandton Hotel.

As we emptied our kettles, I wished the man good luck and yelled a “bring it back home” encouragement.

So how could I switch and stick out like a sore thumb and refuse to embrace the warriors who brought back home the Webb Ellis trophy, you might ask? It wasn’t rocket science, really. My argument was that from the 1995 World Cup triumph on home turf to SA’s second conquest on French soil, there had been little movement to make the team reflect the demographics of the hues of all who call the republic home.

It was a classic case of the more things changed, the more they stay the same.

As the Springboks prepare for the 2019 World Cup in the land of the Samurai, a bunch of attention seekers called Solidarity have reared their ugly heads.

Black people are begging to be part of rugby. They are not forcing their way on a sport that they don’t understand. They belong. We all belong.

We just have to continue hammering home the point until the remnants of verkramptes and rooineks resisting change realise theirs is a pointless resistance.

Solidarity should not be allowed to stop this rugby train that is taking all correct-thinking and progressive South Africans to a picture-perfect place where one is all and all is one.

I’ve never heard Solidarity screaming from the rooftops to find out what the latest is on Saru CEO Jurie Roux’s case, with a R30m cloud hanging over his head owing to his time at Stellenbosch University.

Since they’ve got cash for jam, they can open up a bursary fund to help develop young exceptional talent from poor backgrounds.

That would not only be their contribution to transformation, it would also be a true test that they are for inclusion as opposed to exclusion.

This nonsense that politics must stay out of sport will only make sense to someone who is pretending not to be aware that it was apartheid, a political system based on exclusion and denigration, that brought about this rubbish we see in rugby today.

Where is Solidarity when drunken white supremacists attack a black woman at Ellis Park for coming to support a sport she loves? Where is Solidarity, the self-styled paragons of virtue, when white parents and their children bliksem black children in drunken brawls on rugby fields just because they won’t lose to kaffirs?

Lynch me for this. It doesn’t matter. My black behind survived being stomped on by the boots of apartheid troops. My body bears scars of blows from the warlords of the warmongering bantustan impis. Swear words from rooineks stuck in the stone age were received like roses on Valentine’s Day. The bottom line is by taking the department of sport to court over quotas, Solidarity is showing no solidarity with this country.

Twitter: @bbkunplugged99