For the first time since 1995, rugby euphoria is gripping South Africa. Signs point to the abandonment of a long-rumoured plan to ditch the coach (who, incidentally, really is called Jack White) and produce a racially representative team by brute-force political means. I imagine the response among English rugby fans will be simple: great news. Meritocracy is the ultimate winner. Politics should stay out of sport.

“Politics should stay out of sport” has become a bit of a cliché. It gets reeled out whenever the cricket team goes to Zimbabwe or Formula One goes to China. But it’s patently not the reality. Olympic bidding wars suck in world leaders, and, for one lucky country, hapless taxpayers get to foot the bill. Our government funded a new Wembley, all so that our heroic footballers don’t have to suffer the indignity of playing on a club ground. Across the world, governments know the power of sport to mobilise national pride.

So to South Africa. Apartheid is over. Tough representation laws chip away at old barriers. But rugby has been granted a reprieve. Why? Because politics is part of sport, and winning World Cups is good politics. No one complained when South Africa won in 1995 with one non-white player in the first team, and no one is complaining twelve years later, when they have two. In between, powerful forces in the ruling ANC party have demanded quicker progress, to no avail.

Is that good enough? No matter how much Thabo Mbeki jumps around hyping up the team’s achievements, it does not look to the outside world like a triumph for racial equality. You could argue it’s harmless multiculturalism. Let the whites play white sports and don’t interfere. But multiculturalism is a risky ideology even in Britain. In South Africa, it could be deadly. Whites and blacks must integrate, or watch racism and fear strengthen social divisions. If the ANC appears tolerant now, it surely will not be for long.

Solutions? There is a strong case against filling the national team with black players: there aren’t enough of them at club level. There are fewer than 30 in the squads of the five premier clubs. Jack White would have had to throw meritocracy out the window to get a “representative” number of black players (that is, 10 or more) into his XV.

Nonetheless, two seems perversely small. And if black South Africans don’t believe they can feasibly get into the national team, why bother with a career in rugby? Why start if the odds are stacked against you? Such pessimism, which squanders a huge opportunity for reconciliation between South Africa’s ethnic groups, is what all parties desperately want to eliminate. For this to happen, the team will need a new colour combination.

Filed under: jonathanbirch, racism, rugby, southafrica, sport on November 8th, 2007