The ghost of 1995: that Rugby World Cup final, 30 years on

The Spinoff

6 days ago

On the 30th anniversary of one of rugby's most memorable days, James Borrowdale reflects on what it all meant.
According to Rian Malan, the great South African journalist whose classic of memoir and reportage My Traitor's Heart meditated on the horror and stupidity of Apartheid while diagnosing the predicament of its Afrikaner overseers as the regime reached its bloody denouement, a generation of white South Africans speak about the events of this day the way Americans once spoke about the Kennedy assassination: 'Where were you, and what do you remember?'
That it was a game of rugby that places this day next to one on which a president was shot dead perhaps gives a clear indication of white South Africa's cultural priorities: 30 years ago, the All Blacks met the Springboks in the epic final of the 1995 Rugby World Cup, the New Zealanders taking the field against a South African side galvanised by the optimism of a nation – and by Nelson Mandela, the personification of that optimism – whose darkest days seemed to be behind it. The Rainbow Nation had bloomed from the ashes of Apartheid, and even Ellis Park, a traditional bastion of Afrikanerdom, was decorated in its colours.
I make only a much-qualified claim (or should that be an admission?) to being a white South African myself. Although my first ancestor to step foot on African soil did so as a Dutch clergyman in the 1740s and I was born in what was then known as Natal, by the time I turned 10 in 1995, I had spent 90 percent of my life in Aotearoa, my parents having taken us from South Africa during one of its most bloody years as, in its death throes, Apartheid sought to reestablish itself through increased repression. We settled in Christchurch, where Dad had accepted a job at the university, and hardly seemed to look back at the country that had formed us. There was one dimly-remembered family holiday in the year before I started school, but that was largely it. By the time Jonah Lomu was barrelling through that World Cup in the country of my birth, my parents' accents had softened and South Africa – and being South African – was merely a curiosity at the very outer edge of my identity.
Even so, I can readily answer the questions posed by Malan (though, of course, this could also be taken as an expression of how I had taken to life in this country, where rugby was equally treasured). Mum woke me in the middle of the night, and we buried ourselves under a pile of blankets in the lounge of her first post-divorce home, a lightly renovated Christchurch villa with a fantastic climbing tree looming over the front garden and an Anglican church across the road. We shared a block of Cadbury chocolate as the unbearable minutes ticked by, the small TV in the midnight dark shining with the hard clarity of Johannesburg's highveld air.
But no matter how hard I try, I can no longer parse the memory of watching the game live from the times I've seen it since. I can't recall know how I felt during the opening exchange of penalty goals, nor when the almost limitless possibilities of an early Lomu charge – the kind that had proved so decisive throughout the tournament – were snuffed out by a textbook tackle from the Springbok halfback Joost van der Westhuizen, so proving the All Blacks' talisman could be brought down. In hindsight, it was perhaps that moment when the South Africans, heavy underdogs before the game, truly came to believe they could win; when they did, after the protracted back-and-forth of drop goals – and Andrew Mehrtens' agonising miss late in normal time – I do remember a bitter disappointment following me back to my cold bed. If I had gone into that game with any question of divided loyalties, I ended it without. And only much later could I appreciate the game for what it really meant.
It is of course impossible to separate any sport organised along national lines from the historicopolitical context shaping those nations, something this country learned or re-learned during the 1981 Springbok tour, but the long shadow of Apartheid has always given South African sport an extra political edge. This is true of the present, just as it was of the past. My defining image of the 1995 final is not the sweetly struck Joel Stransky drop goal that won it, nor the ragged pile of green jerseys emerging from the rubble of the game's final collapsed scrum with the knowledge of victory: it is Mandela on the podium, arms aloft in a Springbok jersey, celebrating with what seemed unadulterated glee.
He had reason to be happy. Three years previously – before the country's democratic elections, when Mandela's African National Congress (ANC) and the old Afrikaner power structure of F.W. de Klerk's National Party were still hotly debating the constitutional shape of the South Africa to come – the Springboks had emerged from the isolation of Apartheid to meet the All Blacks in a game known as the Return Test, also at Ellis Park. Then, despite assurances to the contrary, the game became a rallying point for Afrikaners who felt their political power slipping from their grasp. The old anthem, 'Die Stem van Suid-Afrika', echoed through the stadium; hundreds of orange, white and blue flags – another hated symbol of oppression – flew over the stands. Even a moment of silence meant to honour the victims of Apartheid was filled instead with a chant of 'Fok die ANC!' You need not speak Afrikaans to understand the sentiment.
The canonisation of Mandela as a kind of secular saint sometimes does the great man a disservice, obscuring the canny of his political mind; to turn the disaster of '92 into the country-unifying triumph of 1995 took a special kind of diplomatic instinct that even many of his ANC comrades found hard to understand. In his embrace of the Springboks, an institution beloved of the Afrikaner masses but despised by the black majority, Malan writes, 'he seemed to be showing that he loved us, in spite of everything, and it suddenly seemed churlish not to respond in kind.' The '95 final, so far from providing an aggrieved minority with an outlet for discontent, instead 'reduced even the hardest Boers to uncontrollable weeping and cries of 'That's my president',' according to Malan.
Perhaps some of those same Afrikaners wept at the sight of the inspirational, and black, Springbok captain Siya Kolisi holding the same trophy aloft in 2023 in front of a team multiracial South Africans; maybe some even shed a tear when Temba Bavuma, black captain of the South African cricket team, led his team to World Test Championship victory just over a week ago. Equally, perhaps not: South Africa remains a deeply divided country, where Afrikaner-only settlements like Orania and Kleinfontein still exist, and where an incredibly high murder rate has been manufactured by some into evidence for the fictitious white genocide President Trump brought to the attention of the world when he ambushed Cyril Ramaphosa, South Africa's leader, with the allegation in that surreal Oval Office exchange.
In a time when the actual genocidal violence of Israel, challenged by South Africa in the International Court of Justice, grows ever more brazen, and now threatens to widen into world-shaking war, the ghost of '95 reminds that sport has a power to unite, even if momentarily. It happened 30 years ago, while also giving us a sporting spectacle for the ages – what wouldn't we give for another such miracle now?