How South Africa's 1995 Rugby World Cup win united and ‘galvanised' a nation

New York Times

7 days ago

My wife hates sports films but I had to watch Invictus again as research for this piece so I fibbed and told her the Clint Eastwood-directed movie was all about Nelson Mandela, without mentioning the rugby.
'I don't like them either,' says former South Africa international Joel Stransky.
'But I've watched it twice and I love the story of Madiba (the Xhosa clan name that many South Africans use for Mandela as a mark of respect) — he's my absolute hero. A man who gave up so much for his beliefs, who was so forgiving and so wise in the way he used sport to bring a nation together at a time which could have been quite tumultuous if he hadn't.
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'The rugby was terrible, though.'
And Stransky should know because he is the guy played by Eastwood's son Scott in the film, the guy who kicked all 15 of South Africa's points, including an extra-time drop goal, in the Rugby World Cup final against New Zealand on 24 June, 1995. It was 30 years ago but he has been reminded of the match every other week since — and five times a day as we approach milestones like Tuesday's.
'A drop goal's a drop goal,' he says, modestly but with a big grin on his face. 'What can I say? It was a good day for us.'
By us, he means his teammates, who were not tipped to make the final at the start of the tournament and certainly were not favoured for the game against the All Blacks and their wrecking-ball winger Jonah Lomu. But, more importantly, Stransky also means all South Africans.
For those of you who did not watch the game or have not seen the film, read the book upon which it is based — John Carlin's Playing The Enemy — or caught the 30 for 30 documentary, The 16th Man, what I am about to write really did happen.
In 1990, Mandela, the world's most famous political prisoner, walked free. Then 71, he had served 27 years of a life sentence for trying to overthrow South Africa's apartheid regime, a set of laws designed to keep the White minority in power by racially segregating the country. It was a system so heinous the United Nations called it a crime against humanity.
The government released him because they knew the game was up. Political isolation, economic sanctions and sporting boycotts had made life miserable for the White minority, while the Black majority were in despair and ready to explode.
Four years later, South Africa held its first genuinely democratic elections and Mandela was elected president.
Many believed civil war was imminent and it was not just fear-mongering. A large segment of the Afrikaans-speaking White population were convinced majority rule meant the end of everything they held dear and perhaps, even worse, the precursor to violent revenge.
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One of the things they held most dear was South Africa's rugby team, the Springboks. To Afrikaners, in particular, rugby was on a par with the Dutch Reformed Church in the religion stakes.
To most of the non-White population, those aggressive, well-fed, green-shirted men were as symbolic of the old regime as the apartheid-era anthem, flag and politics. Indifferent to the sport, which the majority had never been allowed to play, many wanted to bury the Springboks' past, renaming the team the Proteas after South Africa's national flower.
Mandela not only put his reputation on the line by persuading his colleagues in the ruling party, the African National Congress (ANC), to leave the team's name and badge alone, but he spent a significant political capital by actively supporting the team as they prepared to host the 1995 Rugby World Cup.
The way the film tells it, Mandela got the idea while watching the Springboks lose at home to England in 1994. Having been ostracised by most countries for two decades, South Africa returned to the international rugby scene in 1992 and were understandably rusty. But what struck Morgan Freeman's uncanny interpretation of Mandela was the fact that the small number of non-Whites in the crowd were cheering for the away team, just as he and his fellow prisoners had done while their guards listened to Springbok matches.
As Carlin explains in his wonderful book, Mandela had already used rugby as means to find common ground with the establishment. By the mid-1980s, he had been moved from his tiny cell on Robben Island to a mainland prison called Pollsmoor so that government officials could meet him in secret.
Conditions were better but the boss of the maximum security unit, Major Fritz van Sittert, was still deeply suspicious of his celebrity guest. So when Mandela met him for the first time, he smiled, shook his hand and spoke in Afrikaans, launching into small talk about rugby. The major melted, so much so that when Mandela told him he was getting too much food at lunchtime but it was cold by the time he ate it in the evening, Van Sittert ordered the guards to put a hotplate in his cell.
What comes across in Carlin's account is that Mandela had an incredible capacity for finding warmth in people. He respected the best of Afrikaner culture and knew South Africa would have no future if it replaced one form of tyranny with another. He had been thinking of ways to prove to the White minority that majority rule would not obliterate them and the Springboks became the perfect vessel.
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Eastwood's film is largely and (fairly) faithfully based on the last quarter of Carlin's book. We are too far in for spoiler alerts but the Springboks start well, grow in confidence, survive an almighty scare against France in the semi-final and beat New Zealand 15-12 in a wrestling match.
If we are picking nits, we could point out that the Springboks were never complete outsiders, Mandela never fully grasped the game's intricacies and he also did not give Pienaar a copy of William Ernest Henley's poem Invictus to use as a pre-match team talk, so the film's recurring motif of Mandela and Pienaar being masters of their fates and captains of their souls is an example of Hollywood hyperbole.
For what it is worth, Mandela actually gave him the text of Theodore Roosevelt's 'Man in the Arena' speech, which is more about ignoring external noise and striving for greatness, regardless of the result.
But the rest? Yeah, Mandela really did surprise everyone by greeting the teams in Pienaar's spare No 6 jersey, a South African Airways 747 did buzz the field, twice, before kick-off with 'Good luck Bokke' (Afrikaans for Boks) written on its underside and Pienaar did deliver two lines no scriptwriter could improve.
Asked by a pitch-side reporter what it was like to play in front of a packed crowd in Johannesburg, Pienaar corrected him by saying: 'We didn't have 60,000 fans behind us — we had 43million South Africans.'
And then when Mandela handed him the trophy and said: 'Francois, thank you very much for what you have done for our country.' Pienaar replied: 'No, thank you, Mr President, for what you have done for our country.'
Like most of his compatriots, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the second most famous South African at that time, watched the game on TV and was as delighted as everyone else. But he knew what the real story was.
'The match did for us what speeches of politicians and archbishops could not do. It galvanised us, it made us realise that it was actually possible for us to be on the same side,' he told Carlin.
But what happened next? Did that triumph solve all of South Africa's ills? Did the Springboks immediately become an embodiment of Tutu's 'Rainbow Nation'? Did everyone live happily ever after?
Thinus Delport was 20 when South Africa won their first Rugby World Cup (they have won three since, including the last two in a row) and was playing rugby at Rand Afrikaans University (RAU), which has become the University of Johannesburg, and for the under-21 side at one of South Africa's best provincial teams.
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'Those moments and what Nelson Mandela did were a huge step in unifying us as a country,' the former Gloucester, Worcester and South Africa star tells The Athletic.
'Suddenly, everyone was cheering for Amabokoboko (the fact that the Springboks now had a Xhosa/Zulu nickname said it all) — it was great. Certainly everyone in my sphere, whatever their background, was celebrating.
'The guys on that squad were a massive inspiration to my generation of players. We'd see those guys at uni or on the circuit and say, 'Look, there's so-and-so'. They were heroes to us. It was an incredible time for the country but also for rugby, as the game was just about to go professional — the first contracts were handed out in 1996.
'There was this sudden realisation that this thing we loved could also be a career. We all wanted to be Springboks but now there was extra motivation.'
South African democracy was not the only fledgling entity with growing pains. Rugby union, traditionally an amateur sport, was becoming professional and Pienaar & Co were hot property. If the South African Rugby Union (SARU) was not ready to pay them, Australian media mogul Kerry Packer and his breakaway World Rugby Corporation was. The union folded but did so begrudgingly.
'I remember people just driving about tooting their horns and shouting 'Viva South Africa' out of the window,' explains James Adams, who was still at high school in 1995 but would follow Delport to RAU and now runs South Africa's top agency for rugby players.
'It certainly inspired me to think I could have a career in sport — it was an incredibly exciting time.'
But, as well as rows about the rush to professionalism, the old rifts over race reopened, with some senior figures in the game reluctant to see the Springboks go the same way as the rest of the country.
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Edward Griffiths, a former journalist who had been appointed SARU chief executive shortly before the tournament, says 1995 'provided an image of a unified South Africa winning.'
'It became a powerful symbol for lots of people, White and Black, that the transition to democracy, despite all the fears and anger, could actually work. Every South African will be aware of the picture of our first Black president handing the trophy to the white captain. Both of them wearing Springbok jerseys.
'The mood in the country was very fragile and tense. It was only a year after the first democratic elections and a lot of White people were still very concerned about what would happen to them.
'But a lot of the progress made during the World Cup was undone in the immediate aftermath. Within 15 months, four of the key people involved in the tournament — myself, coach Kitch Christie, team manager Morne du Plessis and Pienaar himself — were gone.'
Griffiths, who came up with the 'one team, one country' slogan that grabbed the nation's attention, points out it was only three years after that iconic picture that the game's bosses forced Mandela to testify in court as part of their legal action to block a government commission he had introduced to investigate claims of racism in rugby.
'There were still a lot of people at the top of the game who thought the rest of the country might have been taken from them but rugby would not,' says Griffiths, who was forced out of the job in 1996, soon after he suggested using 40 per cent of the RWC's profits on building 40 new grassroots facilities in non-White areas.
His other controversial idea was to introduce the first quotas for boosting non-White representation at the annual Craven Week tournament, the pinnacle of South Africa's hugely competitive school rugby system.
'For all the undeniable feel-good factor of 1995, there was a reaction from white Afrikaners,' says Griffiths, who would later move to England and serve stints as CEO at Saracens and chairman at Bath.
The policy of quotas, in particular, would become the dominant topic of debate for the next decade or so. The 1995 team had only one non-White player, Chester Williams, but the 2007 RWC-winning team had six in the squad and two in the starting line-up, including Bryan Habana who was at the 1995 final as a 12-year-old fan. For some, that rate of change was not fast enough for a country where White people make up just over seven per cent of the population, according to a 2022 census.
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But real, non-contrived change was coming. And a new generation of World Cup-winning heroes would supercharge that shift.
'The teams these days are chosen on merit,' says Delport. 'There will always be a few politicians who will talk about the demographics but the guys coming through now have been exposed to good rugby, good nutrition and good coaching from a young age. Everyone is on a level playing field.
'This started in the late 90s and early noughties with the schools becoming more mixed. You'll have certain areas where the racial make-up just means the schools will be more White, more Black, more Coloured, but the top rugby schools are very diverse.'
Adams agrees.
'The big political push to make the team integrated came after 1995 and it took time,' he says. 'But I would say every player who has been picked for the Springboks in the last 10-plus years has been there on merit. We've transitioned in the right way.'
For Stransky, both the secret of South Africa's success as a rugby nation and the Springboks' transition to a team that truly represents South Africa are those schools.
'I don't think you can talk about White schools anymore,' he says. 'White schools don't exist, they're fully integrated. OK, some of them will be language-based, so you'll find some Afrikaans schools where there won't be many Black kids. And then there will be African-language schools with no White kids.
'But if you look at the schools that are driving schoolboy rugby in this country, they're all completely multiracial.'
Siya Kolisi, the Springboks' first Black captain and the man who has lifted the last two World Cups, had a tough start in life in a township near Port Elizabeth but earned a sports scholarship to Grey High. He is now arguably the most popular man in South Africa.
'In every way you would think he's iconic, he is really is iconic,' says Stransky. 'He's just this normal guy who exudes leadership skills and love and warmth and wisdom — everything that Madiba stood for.'
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Adams and Delport believe that rugby now rivals football for popularity across the country, a turn of events no doubt helped by South Africa's victories in the former and frustrations in the latter (although Bafana Bafana, as the football team are known, are also on the up).
According to the SARU, male participation in the country grew, year on year, by 16 per cent in 2024, bucking a downward trend in many other traditional rugby-playing nations.
'It's big and getting bigger,' says Delport, who is involved with Kolisi in Project Zulu, a charity that is bringing the sport to South Africa's largest ethnic group.
'Nobody is talking about quotas anymore. South African rugby has become fully integrated, it just took a little longer than many hoped after 1995,' says Griffiths.
'What 1995 provided was an image — a very powerful image — but the transition took longer.'
And it is not just rugby. Earlier this month, Temba Bavuma, the first Black captain of South Africa's cricket team, lifted the World Test Championship trophy at Lord's, the home of cricket. After years of near-misses in the big games, the Proteas beat Australia to land only their second International Cricket Council title.
Sport is not everything, though, and no South African would claim that all of Mandela's successors have shared his integrity, wisdom and work ethic. The country remains a work in progress.
'We're a proud nation,' says Stransky. 'We need these little pinnacles of excellence because some parts of our society are broken.
'Every political system is a little bit corrupt in some way. If you go back in time, the National Party (the party that governed during the apartheid era) was corrupt in their own way but the extent of today's corruption would upset Mandela.
'But there are other things that would make him incredibly proud. He wanted a democratic country that stood for what it believed in. As disappointed as he'd be in the ANC's performance, he'd be delighted that there's a government of national unity now doing what they believe is right.
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'And he'd be the happiest man in the world to see Temba Bavuma captaining the cricket side. He'd be the proudest man in the world to see Kiya Solisi captaining the Springboks.'
With leaders like that, South Africa is still the master of its own fate, captain of its own soul. Mandela, ever the optimist, would take that.