It turns out that rugby politics, run by certain rugby clubs (almost like college booster groups), is strong and perhaps more interesting than SA government politics.
Apparently SA’s young national teams (like Under 21 team) routinely win the world championship, and their makeup mostly reflects the SA population. However, the teams in the top SA rugby league (Premier, I think, but I’m still sorting the different leagues out) are strongly white. The national team is drawn from these top clubs, and thus is also predominately white. My colleague bluntly stated that the entrenched powers don’t want blacks.
Also, the entrenched powers usually came through several schools known as rugby powerhouses – and that are predominately white. The top teams end up recruiting from these schools – imagine if powerful Miami Dolphins supporters were mostly grads of Ole Miss and Auburn and pushed them to take as lots of people from those schools. (Most of the black rugby players that make it to the top also went to these schools.)
To counter this, the league has explicit quotas on the number of black players a team must field. (Do a search for “race” and “quota” on google.co.za and half of the top returns are about rugby and cricket quotas.)
In addition, there is a proposal to merge the two worst teams in the league of 12 and add a new team in a predominately black area. This has been vigorously opposed by the rugby establishment, though one could argue for financial reasons as well as just race.
Another explanation (not discussed) is that these few schools give rugby players the edge they need to be the best, and that because of academics or some other factor they naturally accept mostly whites, and thus these schools are heavily recruited/the top league is white.
2 comments:
I watched the movie Invictus the other night, which prompted me to read up some more on SA history -- both political and sports-related. Interesting stuff.
I asked a couple of people about Invictus and it got mixed reviews. General comments were that it did a good job portraying how the country unified around the Springboks, but that it didn't lead to the utopia that the movie sort of implies... and that Morgan Freeman's accent was terrible and led to some laughter in the SA theaters.
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