BIG READ: Squaring history — Siya Kolisi and a long rugby lineage

So there we are, all tangled up together, the old barriers breaking down and the new ones not yet established, a time of transition, always and inescapably turbulent. In the inevitable integration into a national community sport will play a great role — CLR James.  

In 2019, SA and the world were captivated as Siya Kolisi, the Springbok rugby captain, lifted the Webb Ellis Cup in Japan. Kolisi, as the headlines ran, was the first black man to lift the prestigious cup as leader of his national team. In the weeks that followed, his life story, from the poverty-ridden township streets of Port Elizabeth to the pinnacle of world rugby, was splashed across the front pages. Almost by the way, this remarkable narrative touched upon a particular province of SA: the Eastern Cape, from which Kolisi hailed.

It is a province that is both the crucible and cathedral of black rugby.

The scorer of a breathtaking try in the 2019 final, Makazole Mapimpi (the first by the Springboks in a World Cup final) also hails from this region, as does Lukhanyo Am, who flicked the final pass with the nonchalance of someone playing in a pickup game. An article celebrating Mapimpi noted that he “grew up in Tsholomnqa, a rural village in the Eastern Cape far removed from SA’s traditional rugby breeding grounds”. Mapimpi remembers that one of his friends told him “you can make it man”. He was sceptical, replying, “No, bro, no-one is watching me. We are too far from the system.”

This statement is at once true and false. While it is true that rugby has been progressively eroded in rural areas as the game has professionalised, it is inaccurate to say that the rural Eastern Cape is “far from SA’s traditional rugby breeding grounds”. Mapimpi might have been far from the system, but it turns out he was close to the heart of rugby for people of his hue. From the closing decades of the 19th century, black people took to the game in the Eastern Cape with a zealousness that matched and then outpaced the Christian missionaries saving them from “heathenism”.

This province of rugged landscapes, from the arid Karoo to the snowy Drakensberg mountains, from the Tsitsikamma forests to the Wild Coast, as Zakes Mda writes, “are storage places of memory. Embedded in the nooks and crannies of these rocks, these dongas, these trees, these hills, these rivers, these monuments, these cities, these cairns ... are generations of narratives that continue to haunt the present”.

As we were to find in telling the story of the history of black rugby in Makhanda, there are links between past generations and the present that allowed us to knit an incredible history.

For over 100 years the Kolisis have been involved in rugby in Makhanda and the Eastern Cape. One of the founders of Eastern, a legendary Makhanda club, established in 1905, was Nkebeza Kolisi. And then we read of a Kolisi converting an Eastern Province try against Transvaal in 1937. Into the 1970s and early 1980s Vuyani Kolisi was an outstanding No 6 for Eastern, captaining the provincial team, South Eastern Districts Union. 

Siya was not the first.

He comes from a line stretching back more than a century, deep in Makhanda’s rugby history. A lineage that bares no mention in his biography. But what these clues do is to provide the material to thread fragments into a narrative of a history that so far remains largely invisible in the public domain. 

It is no wonder that when speaking to rugby legends of Makhanda they felt that when Kolisi lifted the Webb Ellis Cup in 2019, the moment felt organic, pulling at the heartstrings in deeper, more fundamental and abiding ways than previous victories. CLR James, who was involved in the struggle to ensure that Frank Worrell became the first black man to captain an entire cricket series for the West Indies in the 1950s, noted that, on the tour to Australia, "[A]ll I found myself hoping for was that we would give a good account of ourselves, and that we would shed much ancient baggage to lighten ourselves for a long climb”. James tells us that Worrell, through his leadership and post-match speeches, did much more broadening the “conception of West Indian personality”.

Kolisi, too, enlarges the idea of what it is to be a South African. With the same no-nonsense approach with which he approaches a ruck, Kolisi evokes the nonracialism of the 1970s. Consciously or unconsciously, he forces us to recognise class privilege and systemic racism, highlighting his own growing up hungry and the chance of going to a “white” school opening a way to the pinnacle of world rugby. His message, while challenging race essentialism and binaries, beckons not just to a national but to a universal solidarity, while focusing us upon the widening divide between the haves and have-nots. There are visions here of the poet and writer HIE Dhlomo’s vision articulated in the 1940s of “social order where every South African will be free to express ...  personality fully, live and breathe freely, and have a part in shaping the destiny of [the] country; a social order in which race, colour and creed will be a badge neither of privilege nor of discrimination”.

The moment felt organic, pulling at the heartstrings in deeper, more fundamental and abiding ways than previous victories

In many ways, when in amazing scenes of jubilation Siya Kolisi brought the Webb Ellis Cup to Makhanda on March 12 2020, the oval ball was squaring history. For those who played the game in the shadow of colonialism’s vengeful legacies and apartheid’s madness — the sacrifices, the invisibility in the history books — there is a need, finally, in the winter of their lives to believe that they leave behind a better sports field than the one they ploughed.

The World Cup victory of 2019, with its deep roots in the Eastern Cape, gives them this sense. When Kolisi mounted the stage in Makhanda it was a profound moment in which rugby players who had lived through states of emergency and harsh racial exclusions got to rub shoulders with those who had conquered the world: defeating in the final the old enemy, England, with its emblem of the red rose. Given the bloody history of British colonialism in this neck of the woods, the Wars of the Roses are still being waged, the wars without end.

Phumzile Adam, bearing his long history of playing and growing in Makhanda, epitomises the way that some who were sceptical have embraced the gains that rugby has made: “In the beginning of unity, I did not support the Springboks because to me nothing had changed. When people asked me, ‘Why are you supporting New Zealand?’ I would tell them, ‘I am supporting the opposition because we want the Springboks to lose.’ Those racially selected apartheid Springboks were not acceptable. We wanted them to lose because they were not the team of the country. I said I will support the team when the team starts becoming a South African team ... I changed in 2016. To me there are signs of change and transformation. At least the team is more reflective of South African society. And the players are selected on merit.

“I never supported quotas. I argued a lot about that with Mr Stofile [Makhenkesi Stofile, former minister of sport & recreation] — once during an entire trip from Port Elizabeth to Cape Town. He said it was done out of frustration. I told him you can’t select a boy because he is black. I cannot support that. A player must get there by merit, that is all, even if the team is white. Now I support the national team because I am really satisfied, because for the first time, there are good black players in the Springbok team. When one looks at Super Rugby, there are lots of good players. Cheslin Kolbe is a genius. All there by merit. You can see it when they are playing against each other during the provincial fixtures”.

Another former player of the 1970s, Swallows legend Rommel Douglas, too has a glow: “When Siya Kolisi lifted the cup, it was lifted everywhere in the country. When we brought Allister Coetzee here, it was euphoria. People can identify with him because he is from here. The same with Siya. He is a homeboy from the Eastern Cape. We learnt that there is no vindication without suffering”.

As you pore over the photographs that are the core of this book, they will bring home the power of these men who took to rugby fields in the closing decades of the 19th century and those who kept playing through the brutal years of segregation and apartheid.

The Xhosa expression for a sidestep is umbethe ngo ngxi: to “hit him with a sidestep”. It is a perceptive idea, because eluding an opponent is as much an effective act in rugby as trying to barge through. Ralph Ellison in Invisible Man sees this as “bearers of something precious ... living outside the realm of history ... they were outside... running and dodging the forces of history”, making history.

This is a story about a place that was meant to be a landscape of exclusion, of the defeated, which was turned into fields of deep attachments and belonging, where racial boundaries were confronted, and new nonracial bonds created.

And, as much as the story looks at weighty issues of race and class, and the possibilities and pitfalls of the transition to democracy, it is above all about how beautifully the game was played on those stony fields that prophet Makana and Khoi chief David Stuurman once walked.

• Ashwin Desai is professor of Sociology at the University of Johannesburg and Ashwell Adriaan was curator of the Apartheid and Cell Stories exhibition at Robben Island. Both authors were imprisoned in the 1980s, in part, for their role in organising nonracial sport in Makhanda. ‘Line Breakers: The Rugby-playing Sons of Makana and Stuurman’ is published by Shuter & Shooter.