When SA’s first apartheid prime minister, DF Malan, was preparing to watch SA’s cricket team in battle against England in the 1948-49 Test series, he asked a colleague what the score was before he left for Newlands cricket ground. Told the score, he is reported to have said: “Is dit hulle Engelse of onse Engelse?” (“Is that our English or their English?”) The point he was making was that the South African team, though nominally South African, was still largely English-speaking and, therefore, not quite the real thing, not Afrikaner enough to qualify as genuinely South African.
A colleague’s retelling of this tart little anecdote came to mind when reading some of the reactions to the Springboks’ stunning victory last weekend. (That is hulle Engelse, Dr Malan!)
The EFF’s resident ruffler of white sensitivities, Mbuyiseni Ndlozi, was first up with his tweet: “Congratulations to #SiyaKolisi … the rest go get your congratulations from Prince Harry.” Surely he didn’t envisage the Boks meeting the ginger royal clad in national-flag underpants, a design ideally suited to the Y-front style favoured by underpants makers. The point Ndlozi and others of similar sentiment were making was that despite the Bok victory, achieved by black and white united in common purpose, SA remains a nation divided by colonialism and apartheid. Or rather two nations, at the least.
Of course, for politicians, and especially the EFF, the spectre of racial division and enmity is the fuel that powers this red-clad hate machine. The slightest sign of racial co-operation is regarded as an affront to the “history” that sustains their poisonous crusade. No, harmony is just not part of the EFF gig, and any effort to bridge the divide in SA is regarded as selling out. Like Malan before him, for Ndlozi unity is anathema to the overriding narrative of bitterness and division, which they hope will be their ticket to power.
They even sat in parliament this week, studiously absenting themselves from the jubilation of other MPs and pleading that they wanted to ‘work’. The gall.
This party of “waiters and petrol attendants”, led by Gucci revolutionaries who have still to answer for their part in the theft of millions of rand from gogos’ accounts at VBS Mutual Bank, presumes to talk for the common man, who is imagined to be a hardline racist so captive to the past that he has little time to notice the obvious “normalisation” of society taking place in everyday life all about. And certainly no time for rugby.
So blinkered are they, so energised by resentment and driven by spite, that they cannot even bring themselves to acknowledge the towering success of a man such as Makazole Mapimpi, who rose from poverty to become a household name and hero across South African living rooms.
They even sat in parliament this week, studiously absenting themselves from the jubilation of other MPs and pleading that they wanted to “work”. The gall.
Not to be outdone in the bigotry department, the EFF’s counterpart on the right, the proto-nationalist crooner Steve Hofmeyr, couldn’t help himself either. His contribution went like this: “Laat die Siya inspuiting jou verlam sodat jy nie sal terugbaklei as ons jou grond onder jou gat kom uitgryp omdat jy blank is nie.” (“Let the Siya injection paralyse you so that you won’t fight back if we grab your land from under your nose because you are white.”) Hofmeyr was careful to add that he celebrated the Springbok victory, only not so much.
Politicians, being politicians, will always glean what advantage they can from emotional situations such as these.
Past of bigotry
No-one understood this quite as powerfully as did former president Nelson Mandela, whose donning of the No 6 shirt at the World Cup final at Ellis Park in 1995 did more than any other action to signal the end of apartheid and the start of a new journey to a nonracial SA. Mandela was not fool enough to think that merely wearing the green-and -gold, and his insistence on keeping the Springbok emblem, would be enough to close the book on our painful past. But it was a start — the rest was up to us.
Like Ndlozi and Hofmeyr, we all come from a past of bigotry and division. When I was growing up, we played soccer. Rugby was a game played by, well, the enemy.
The only Afrikaners I knew when I was a schoolboy were a bully down the road who used to beat me up for being a redhead, and our Afrikaans teacher, Mev Rosenblatt, a disciplinarian of note who lovingly wielded a wooden spoon to enforce the correct pronunciation of Afrikaans words and terms. I seem to remember we didn’t like Afrikaners much. Why, well, I don’t know really.
As a child I cheered for the British & Irish Lions on their triumphant tour in the 1970s, delighted at how they smashed these boer bullies.
When I was in the air force, in 1977, it was quite routine to be beaten up by a big boer (oddly enough, a redhead) from Brits, or some other rural place where they stayed. Such close and bruising contact inevitably drew us closer together.
So, as South Africans we’re all forced to look anew at our past. One thing seems certain, though, and that is if we insist on reliving our history, as a matter of policy and practice, there can be no hope for a prosperous and democratic SA.
The Springboks’ victory demonstrated what we can do when we are united. It hinted, and quite strongly, that Afrikaners can also be a positive force in this new experiment we are embarked upon.
Yes, we are a nation of “differences”, but they are more superficial than we imagine. Beneath our different-looking exteriors we should all be wearing Faf de Klerk-style underwear. With pride.
• Barney Mthombothi will be back next week.
• This article first appeared in the Sunday Times.
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