South Africa Wins Rugby World Cup. Why Does it Give Me No Joy?
In a Rugby World Cup final in Japan, for which most pundits predicted an easy win for England, the South African rugby team won by 32-12 and became world champions for the third time. All over the country, in bars and on the streets, there were celebratory shouts and honking cars with green Springbok team flags flying from their windows.
I do not follow rugby, nor watch so-called Super Rugby on the pay-TV channels. Our bankrupt public TV corporation, the SABC, can no longer afford the rights to broadcast rugby. However, I discovered that I could stream the match in French on my computer. Boris Johnson and I therefore had something in common: We both seem to have followed it live in our respective studies.
If it had been any other opponent, such as New Zealand or Australia, I probably would not have bothered, but losing against England would have been especially bitter. England is the source of our misfortune, a country whose politicians and diplomats have largely destroyed Western civilization in this part of the world. Not only did the English media, rock stars, and even the royal family enthusiastically support the Afro-Marxist terrorist movement known as the ANC, but their Queen also bestowed a knighthood on Robert Mugabe, the dictator to our north. The now deceased Zimbabwean could be called the king of all anti-white blacks. Admittedly, the British did quietly retract the knighthood once the worst of Mugabe’s excesses became known, but still. How dare they? — as Greta Thunberg would say.
Prince Harry of Sussex, the first British royal to marry someone we in South Africa would call “Coloured,” visited the Springbok rugby team in the changing rooms at Yokohama International Stadium after their brilliant victory. Amazingly — or perhaps not — his brief address to the players was not about rugby at all.
“Congratulations,” the red-haired Prince said. “I generally think that rugby has the ability to unite everyone around the world. And I could not think of a nation who needs it more than you guys right now.” And raising a bottle of Heineken given to him by one of the Afrikaner players: “So on that, well done.” He then posed next to the lock (a player in the second row of the scrum) Eben Etzebeth, apparently saying, “F*ck, you’re tall.”
And that’s where rugby, politics, and race collide. For over a century, the Springboks have been very successful against teams from much larger Western countries because of our physical advantages. The torturous evolution we have gone through on the African savanna, being constantly attacked by wild animals, poisonous snakes, and above all, black tribes for whom killing sometimes seems like their form of rugby, seems to have bestowed gifts on us, one of which is size. We are a race of giants. At least you can get that impression from meeting rugby players, especially the tall locks who have to jump for the ball during line-outs.
During the semi-final game against Wales, the two French commentators were clearly biased against the Springboks, hoping the lumbering Welsh team with their heavy pack of forwards grinding toward the goal line would win. However, as it became obvious that the Springboks would carry the day, the two Frenchmen ascribed it to their niveau d’aggressivité (level of aggressiveness).
The Left in South Africa, especially the English Left, has long decried Afrikaner dominance in rugby, which they call a sport for “racist, white males.” Our universities and other leftists have already provided us with endless denunciations of the Afrikaner passion for rugby and its alleged celebration of whiteness, toxic masculinity, racism, and Afrikaner fascism. What the 1936 Olympic Games were to Nazism, we are told, rugby has always been to the Afrikaner.
Since we have been excluded from politics, the military, the police, academia, big business, and soon the church, the game of the egg-shaped ball is perhaps the last thing we are allowed to do. Or not. The relentless demands of affirmative action have seen to it that even rugby is no longer an all-white, all-Afrikaner game. Ever since the days of anti-apartheid protests and sports boycotts, the agile little gazelle that gives the Springboks their team name has been unpopular. Successive sports ministers of the ANC regime have tried to suppress the name, a quintessentially Afrikaans word that does not have an English translation.
South Africa is the only country in the world where there are racial quotas in sport — against whites. Such quotas are essentially aimed at rugby, as well as netball — a sport like basketball but for women — in which Afrikaner women excel. Various complicated rules have accumulated over the years of ANC rule or — more correctly — social engineering. At any given moment, a certain number of “players of colour” have to be on the field. Otherwise, teams are fined, coaches are fired, or sponsors withhold funds.
During the World Cup in Japan, for the first time ever, the Springbok captain was a black player. Siya Kolisi happens be married to a blonde wife with whom he has two children. Most of the media coverage focused on him, as a kind of “miracle man,” and not on the white players.
Inside South Africa, the black players — who are normally less than half of the team — get all the credit and are lauded as “rugby geniuses.” Outside the country, there are sometimes more objective views. One British columnist, Stuart Barnes, was candid enough to write in the London Times before the final game that Captain Kolisi would serve the team best by sitting on the bench:
"Strip the politics and emotion out of the equation and the rugby case for benching Kolisi is powerful. Pieter-Steph du Toit [a white player] has been far more influential in his lineout and counter-rucking than his fellow flanker. He has to start."
Indeed, shortly after the final game, the lamentably white Mr. du Toit was named World Rugby Player of the Year, and the equally white Afrikaner Rassie Erasmus was crowned World Rugby Coach of the Year.
Many commentators, both sports and political, compared this year’s victory and the “sense of unity” it supposedly engendered to the one in 1995 when we beat New Zealand’s All Blacks in the World Cup final in Johannesburg – with one black player on the team. Nelson Mandela ingratiated himself with whites, especially Afrikaners, by donning a number-6 Springbok shirt like the one worn by captain Francois Pienaar, and appearing at the stadium in front of the crowd and the cameras.
During their three decades as an international terrorist group, headquartered in London and supported financially by both the Soviet Union and Sweden, the ANC had always boycotted rugby. The very image of the Springbok was “racist,” and the ANC regime is still trying to have it removed or even banned, like our old South African flag and anthem.
At the time, Mandela’s gesture was called “reconciliation,” but in South Africa, that word means establishing black domination. Not long afterward, Mandela clashed with the rugby administration over affirmative action and racial quotas.
Nearly 30 years later, some are still unsatisfied. On the eve of the final game in Japan, liberal journalist Pieter du Toit wrote:
"Because of its place in history and the architecture of society – a team once rooted in chauvinistic nationalism and exclusion, now diverse, humble and welcoming – the Boks will always be controversial. Whilst many live and breathe the green-and-gold, there are still many for whom it remains symbolic of subjugation and segregation."
Nobody knows the inner feelings of blacks better than liberal white journalists, but in the wake of the Springbok triumph in Japan, “reconciliation,” “unity between the races,” and the slogan “stronger together” are being bandied about by both the media and politicians. Of course, despite the euphoria, we are not together.
In the run-up to the World Cup, the above-mentioned giant, Eben Etzebeth, was accused of assaulting a Coloured man in a bar and calling him the “H-word.” That was “hotnot” in Afrikaans, a shortened form of “Hottentot,” which was the original European word for the primitive hunter-gatherer tribes on the Cape coast, whom we now must call Khoikhoi. “Hottentot” is thought to have originated from the German hotteren-totteren or “stutter,” referring to the click-sound language of the tribes.
The list of taboo words in South Africa grows all the time. In 1996, shortly after the ANC came to power, a Springbok coach, André Markgraaff, was forced to resign after calling one of the new black sports administrators a “kaffir.” South Africa, like the USA, represents a semantic minefield.
As soon as Eben Etzebeth steps off the plane from Japan, he will face the wrath of the South African Human Rights Commission, which has little to do with human rights but more with race-baiting and the persecution of whites who stray from the code of subservience. The head of legal services at the Human Rights Commission has promised that Mr. Etzebeth will be charged with attempted murder.
Rugby, like the Afrikaans language or the very presence of the white minority in South Africa, is a relic of the hated past, but that past, despite all the propaganda efforts to the contrary, is looking increasingly like a lost golden age. It was a time when South Africa was not only winning on the rugby field but also in education, health, construction, industrialization, honest government, municipal services, electricity generation, water treatment, administration, etc. Needless to say, the ANC regime is failing in all these areas and many others. We have blackouts or so-called “load shedding,” and many rural towns do not have potable water.
Even Prince Harry’s “unity” comments echo an awareness of South Africa’s increasing status as a failed state. Rugby is therefore the lone swallow that does not a summer make. The team’s meticulous Afrikaner coach, Rassie Erasmus, who has brought strategy and daring to their game, is a man of yesterday, an anachronism from a time before black sports ministers and the so-called Human Rights Commission.
It gave me a few moments of satisfaction that we had, once more, beaten our arch-rival England, but that soon gave way to a sense of tragedy. Our players, from the gargantuan Eben Etzebeth to the diminutive scrumhalf Faf de Klerk, are gladiators in green-and-gold. Like most gladiators, they are doomed to die in the arena. Instead of their undoubted talent and prowess counting toward the esteem of our Afrikaner nation, they are glorifying the ANC’s zombie nation, as well as the giant corporations whose brands they bear and who are contributing to the demise of whites.
Under apartheid, we had military, economic, energy and financial boycotts against us. In Amsterdam, they threw Afrikaans books in the canal next to South Africa House; elsewhere they spat on our diplomats. But the worst, it seems, was the sports boycott. In a sunny country dedicated to outdoor pursuits, it prevented us from showing off our athletes and our rugby players on the international stage.
Patti Waldmeir, a correspondent for the Financial Times in South Africa during the early ’90s, wrote in her book, Anatomy of a Miracle, that “the Afrikaners swapped apartheid for rugby, and thought they had made a good deal.”
Hence the Faustian Pact that our hapless leaders made with the ANC’s communist politicians: If only we handed them our country, we could play rugby against the All Blacks again — the same New Zealanders who held up placards saying, “Boks go home,” and who spread broken glass on the field in their country where we were supposed to practice.
Like every Faustian Pact, this one was bound to go bad. We have already paid a staggering price, with trillions of rand looted from the state and state-owned companies by corrupt ANC politicians and their cronies. Our infrastructure has been gutted, our environment polluted, our language and culture suppressed.
Rugby is not worth it. Seeing two Afrikaans high-school teams playing each other should satisfy our need for rugby. Why play against other nations from the British imperial system who hate us? It might help if we could have our own team, free of racial quotas and affirmative action. It would be an Afrikaner team, just as there are three national teams in the United Kingdom: Scotland, Wales, and England.
We would fly our orange, white and blue flag, the one which has been officially declared “hate speech” by a South African court. We would play our national anthem, “Die Stem,” at international matches.
This is all unthinkable. Probably the Springbok will be replaced by some ANC symbol soon, just as our street names have been changed. Then the so-called “transformation” of the team will be complete. A few Afrikaner gladiators will still be allowed to play.
Our triumph over England in Japan is a Pyrrhic victory. We have won a game but we have lost a nation, our nation, the real one, not the meretricious, multicultural hodgepodge that the media and the beer advertisements with their gleeful images of blacks and whites “happy together” promote.
I have nothing to celebrate.
