Black Economic Empowerment: Rugby Success vs. Economic Failure
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The Springboks: A Case Study in South African Transformation
Table of Contents
The Unifying Power of rugby
The one thing that unites South Africans of all colours is the Springboks rugby team. Such is their dominance of the sport – last month in Cardiff they trounced Wales 73-0 – that South Africans say their reserve squad could beat moast international sides.
From White-Only Sport to Multiracial Endeavour
Many fans put success down to rugby’s evolution from a white-only sport to a genuinely multiracial endeavour. South African rugby has been so “transformed” – a word the African National Congress uses to mean overcoming the grim legacy of apartheid – that affirmative action is no longer necessary. A squad, picked purely on merit, is automatically multiracial.
Celebrating Diversity within the Team
The Springboks’ most celebrated players include Siya Kolisi, the inspirational captain, who is Black and from an impoverished township in the Eastern Cape. Sacha Feinberg-Mngomezulu, the brilliant fly-half, has a Zulu mother and a father of Jewish heritage. The 50-plus member squad named this year by Johan “Rassie” Erasmus, the Afrikaner head coach who has led the team to successive World Cup victories, contains players from south Africa’s Black, white and so-called coloured communities.
black Empowerment in Action
The springboks are a case study of what triumphant Black empowerment looks like.Where once players were selected from among 4.5mn white people, today they are drawn from the entirety of South Africa’s 65mn population.
Mandela’s Vision and the 1995 World Cup
“It’s almost an idealised image of the South africa that Nelson Mandela dreamt of, which in all other respects has fallen catastrophically short,” John Carlin, author of the book Playing the Enemy that became the film Invictus about the 1995 World Cup victory, told me.
Carlin relates the story of how Mandela got South Africa’s Black majority behind a team that had once epitomised white privilege. Rather of shunning the Springboks – many in the ANC wanted to change their name to the Proteas after the King Protea, a national flower – he embraced them, pulling on the green jersey in an inspired act of nation building.
Comparing Rugby’s Success to Broader Societal Challenges
What have the Springboks got right that South Africa has got wrong? One way of answering this question is to look through the prism of Black Economic empowerment, a set of policies instituted by the ANC to try to right the wrongs of apartheid by expanding access to jobs, skills and buisness ownership.