Rugby and Nelson Mandela

Rugby and Nelson Mandela

 

The death of Mandela in the last few days, and the controversy in the media about a worthy delegation from New Zealand attending his funeral celebrations in the Republic, has reminded me of my thinking about the anti-Apartheid struggle all over again.

 

In the days when demonstrations against New Zealand’s involvement in rugby series with apartheid South Africa were happening, I was more involved in the anti-war movement.

 

And my opinions about both had been formed against the background of life in India, and in particular of reading letters to the editor in English language daily papers published in Calcutta, expressing opinions from educated and knowledgeable Indian people.

 

New Zealand and white South Africa were quite unique: the only communities in the world where rugby was the popular game. So contests between the two were special to us and them, and we were coming to resent the RSA imposing its rules on who we could and could not send to play against them. So we resisted when the NZRFU gave in to the demand from South Africa not to send Maori players with the All Blacks.

 

To us it was a question of equality, and our right to decide who was a citizen of our country.

 

But, as I understood from my Indian letter-writing neighbours, to most of the rest of the world Soccer was the popular, democratic game, and rugby was a symbol of the English schools where it was invented and first played, those same schools where they trained the autocratic, racist, jackbooted administrators who ran the colonial empire.

 

In fact, from their point of view, rugby was the method the British employed to train those oppressors to keep the “native races” in submission, and the parallel with apartheid South Africa was as plain as the nose on your face. They had no knowledge of popular feeling in New Zealand; the country was little more than a name to most of them.

 

In fact, had they had the true state of popular New Zealand feeling explained to them, they might well have suggested that rugby had done its job only too well here: the Maori being well subjugated and oppressed to the extent of joining in the lessons of rugby willingly! Rugby from that perspective was, with religion, “the opiate of the people”, as Marx described the latter, keeping everyone half-stoned while the conquerors took all the best land and control of the country.

 

In my opinion it is only because the rest of the world cares so much more about Soccer than it does about Rugby that no-one really took our concerns too seriously, and left us alone to have our private spat with the South Africans and our own patsies in Rugby Union and right-wing governments.

 

I don’t expect my arguments (here expressed in somewhat black-and-white form) to be accepted by others, but there they are for you to think about.