I first found out I was colour blind when at a medical during my gap year in the SA Defence Force. National service they called it. It was neither national nor did I provide service of any worth during my time in uniform. It was a white, racist waste of a year.
That was 1991. A year before, on a TV in our digs at 8 Milner Street in what was then called Grahamstown, I had watched Nelson Mandela being released after 27 years in prison. It was my last year at Rhodes, studying journalism, playing football and drinking beer. The world felt like it had self-corrected. A cloud had passed, democracy was surely around the corner.
But, nope. A year later and national service would go on. There were four options for me: Study further — I am not the academic kind and a masters seemed an unnecessary step too far. Move overseas — I didn’t have the money nor did I want to be a barman with an honours degree in London.
Become a conscientious objector — I supported the End Conscription Campaign and knew some brave men who were prosecuted for refusing to heed their call-up. I was not that brave. I wish I had been, but, then again... Arrive for military service the simplest option. The path of least resistance option. The chicken-shit option. I went full simple, least resistant chicken shit.
There I was in the “weather force”, as we used to call the “weer mag”. Still in my civvies, still with a full head of hair, going through the medical. I’d coughed and spluttered, peed and opened my mouth like I was about to be sold into slavery. Then, a nurse showed me a card and asked me to tell her what number was on it.
Surely, I thought, she was taking the Mickey. There was no number. My mate Ralph, in the line behind me, whispered to me that it was 42. As Douglas Adams wrote that was the answer to the “ultimate question of life, the universe and everything”, I said “42”.
It wasn’t.
The nurse gave me another go. I also got that wrong. WTF. There were no numbers on it. She said there were. She wrote on my card that I was red-green colour blind. Would this get me out of my barely national disservice? Nope.
I called my mother later that evening from the payphone beside the bar managed by Uli Schmidt’s dad, who was the officer in charge and hated a drink or five. I told my mum I was colour blind red and green. She told me she had known since I was five. She never told me. She thought I would know or thought I really didn’t need to know. It is the most common form of colour-blindness.
I felt a little wronged by my mum, but I could still tell what traffic lights worked in my favour, frolic in the green-brown-beige-whatever fields like a lamb and wear the red of Liverpool. I got on with my life.
And then, bored with their day jobs of running rugby, making sure it makes money and that people care about it, World Rugby this week made official their policy of “accommodating people who suffer from colour vision deficiency (CVD), more commonly known as colour-blindness”, reported my old mate Craig Ray in the Daily Maverick. “That means when the Boks and All Blacks meet after 2025, and possibly as early as RWC 2023, they will — according to the decree by World Rugby — never play in their ‘home’ kit,” wrote Craig.
Because, good people, black and green are dark colours and colour blind people might not be able to tell the teams apart is the logic from World Rugby. Matches between Wales and Ireland will tear the eye sockets out of rugby fans such as I, and not for the sheer woefulness of Wales on a field.
It will have to be black or white, a distinction World Rugby has never been able to truly make in their recent decisions. Think concussion, tackle heights, TMO buffoonery, scrum guessing, the development of women’s rugby, a corrupt French official, the nonsense of the 2023 World Cup pool draws, and World Rugby should have its little hands full right now.
But they don’t. Now they want to rip the soul from rugby. To take away the colours I adore, even if I haven’t been able to see some of them properly all my life. I know what they are. I know what and whom they represent. I also know that the answer to the question of life, the universe and everything is. It is 42. World Rugby will deny that, coloured in red and green, at their peril.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.