Springbok rugby under Johan “Rassie” Erasmus and Siyamthanda “Siya” Kolisi is entering a surreal phase of supremacy.
“The best team ever in the 200-year history of the game” are the words being engraved in the canon of human athletic excellence right now.
“Rassie” and “Siya” have been the miners of this sports branding heart of gold.
Their captain-coach pairing, signed into rugby power in 2018, is also an extraordinary moment in SA and Eastern Cape history — an Afrikaner man from then-Uitenhage binding and bonding with a Xhosa man from Zwide, in then-Port Elizabeth.
Both areas are geographically close. Politically they were worlds apart — the Uitenhage massacre on March 21 1985, was apartheid’s vicious reaction to the rise of mass democratic anti-apartheid revolt in SA which had broken out in Zwide and surrounds.
In an instant of brilliance these two Eastern Cape people became the ball carriers of a second wave of transcendent socio-cultural, even spiritual, SA philosophy.
On June 24 1995, President Nelson Mandela kicked off the new SA Bok phenomenon in Ellis Park, Johannesburg, when he raised the Web Ellis Cup to celebrate Bok captain Francois Pienaar’s dramatic rugby world championship victory in a newly liberated SA.
Politically and economically, the new SA tanked. Mandela’s glorious legacy and hope for freedom crashed in a cesspit of intra-party corruption, power mongering and mass socioeconomic despair.
From this depressing abyss, the Siya-Rassie Boks have risen as a symbol of hope, beaming out values of unity, collaboration, selflessness and self-awareness and innovation.
This value set has been under global floodlights in the northern hemisphere recently after a year of wholesome campaigning in which the Boks won nine out of 11 games.
The 24-13 crushing of Ireland on Saturday had one blemish.
In a moment of vengeance for last year’s 25-24 loss in Durban, the Boks raked the Irish psyche with a relentless series of six bludgeoning scrums on the Irish tryline.
Erasmus chose punishment over points. Itwasagrotesque,humiliation, an unsporting act of domestic torture supported only by die-hards, and hopefully never to be repeated.
But onwards!
The Boks are living proof that together, stripped of our oppressive baggage of greed, violence, fear and blind hatred, we are an incredible people.
A loving nation.
