The 2023 Rugby World Cup victory by a Siya Kolisi-led South African team will go into history as an event that confirmed how non-racial unity can redefine the essence of being South African. Since the 1995 victory against the All Blacks, South Africanness has been spiralling towards a zero performance in race relations. In the last 30 years, our politics have succeeded in overwhelming our common humanity in almost all aspects of our livelihoods. How the Springboks summoned our national adrenalin through their three consecutive one-point wins against the fifth, fourth, and third-best rugby teams in the world has created one of the most emotional, stronger-together moments the nation so dearly needed.
Given the levels of social, political, and economic anxiety the country is facing, the World Cup Champion status of the country gave us heroes through which we can see leadership being displayed in our interest and for our posterity’s sake. The poverty of success and progress in what is of basic importance to all of us was, for a moment, forgotten at the sight of leadership to national victory by the entire team. Having taken our capacity to load shed joy and hopes to the All Blacks and others, we have forgotten how our capacity to engineer darkness for ourselves is a reality we will be celebrating our prowess within and notwithstanding. Having gone through 280 days of intermittently engineered darkness and energy insecurity, which has cost this economy about R30bn, the 29th October 2023 victory switched on a dimension of South Africanness few leaders that dominate our non-sport accountability can muster at the same level.
The built-up games and tormenting national squad race quota debates that characterised our view of the rugby national team, and leadership shenanigans in SARU may have blinded us to see the national reawakening that would accompany the approaching victory after the France 2023 Rugby World Cup kick-off day. Our preparations were punctuated, as though it was through some divine and supernatural design, by the gladiatorial success of Banyana Banyana as AFCON first-ever women champions, Mamelodi Sundowns Africa Women Club Champions, the progression to a first-ever qualification by a South African team to the knockout stages of a soccer world cup tournament, and the filling of Madison Square Gardens by Black Coffee in New York. The significance of the women's football victories is now a compulsory footnote in the history of South African sports and an announcement to the world that South Africa is not only a sport-ready but emotionally prepared nation to deal with its increasingly human-created torments.
It would not be a surprise if some of the welcoming 2023 World Cup team fans that went to OR Tambo Airport were last seen in that mood when other sports greats were welcome. The fans or the nation, and in the various ways they or it could, reconfirmed how the world should see and know us. It will also not be surprising to find out that some of the ‘black’ fans that graced the occasion were, at some point in their historic growth path, disapproving of what rugby represented for South Africa and are now pleased with what it is doing to provide an answer to the elusive national question. Notwithstanding, the World Cup win melted these experiences through the ululations, amapiano dances, sokie sokies, Shosholoza outbursts, and vuvuzela sound into an emphatic yes, we have the capability not only to win but to be hosts to our stronger together selves we became in France.
We almost behaved like we were refusing to allow our national self, represented in and by the team, to enter our toxic self beyond customs control at OR Tambo. We went to OR Tambo as fans to curate the best that we are to the world, away from curators of the nation that will be taking over the control of the joy, as they became true to form by denying the Captain’s hometown an opportunity to celebrate him in Qheberha. The invite that the world received from Siya Kolisi when he said, ‘Our country is a beautiful place,’ should always be understood to be first where he originates as a heritage-wielding person. Our front seat as the world’s once-was-model of reconciliation and rainbowism, even if our fundamental transformation issues, such as economic playing field levelling and complete obliteration of traces of Apartheid are still outstanding, was further entrenched.
As we welcomed RWC victors back to their country, we also welcomed each other as South Africans to the same country, for we knew on November 1, the MTBFS would likely liquidate our joyfulness, as the load-shedding announcements had already started. We might have been in an unusual before tears function of some sort. The embrace of the Webb Elis Trophy, crafted potentially with the Gold from our shores by craftsmen or women from far lands, reminded us of how our skillfulness can often be divorced from our natural resourcefulness, including human leadership and national visioning. The sounds of songs, vuvuzela, and ululations in the OR Tambo international arrivals welcoming lobby, created a melodious common space to show our emotional connection as a nation. We once again confirmed our national anthem’s ending line commands, ‘sounds the call to come together, and united we shall stand, let us live and strive for freedom, in South Africa our land’.
The cherry on this became what our national team did in the last three matches. How the boys played has shown the world that a nation with a will is a nation to be feared. Characteristic of being South African, the boys became men without choking the boy in them. The fact that, as a society, we are not progressing to other levels of being a nation, mainly because of polarisations caused by gross neglect of service delivery obligations by those who borrowed the public power to do so, should not be a dampener to our inherent winner character as a nation with the diversities we command. Our experience in the field of play should be an emphatic lesson to all South Africans that only when our singular prowess is put to the test can we show resilience with success as a given. This World Cup victory should be a message which we convey to the world that never again will we entrust national duty to anyone who does have the hunger for national duty as the Springboks have displayed in the field of play.
What is now remaining is for us to pause and ponder about the policy-making and policy-execution teams we will commission with our votes in the legislative and executive authority chambers and entities. The best practices of non-racial unity and multi-racial leadership displayed when the team was in action should be translated into a national formula for success in the many areas of difference, acutely the templates of economic dominance or equalisation. We should rewrite the service delivery landscape for those who will ultimately get the opportunity to be commissioned as our national government leaders and, indeed, us as citizens or the public, to learn and scale this performance through other challenging delivery areas. CUT!!!
Using rugby, which is not just a symbol of Afrikaner ethnonationalism but also a manifest of classsm in modern-day South Africa, as an example of resilience is a non-starter. In fact, this is a serious contradiction in terms, you wish for progress but clebrate non-progress. Whether it is 1995 or today, there are more than one South Africas... internal colonialism now laced with strong assimilation elements appears to be an acceptable order in a society that coninues to treat its underclasses with disdain and contempt by denying it dignity and justice. In brief, rugby was, is and will never a catalyst for change: serious effort must be put in creating a single South Africa.
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