With the recent announcement of the Springbok squad for the upcoming 2023 Rugby World Cup, rugby fever has hit the country and in my local watering hole in the north of Johannesburg, the lads have even opened a WhatsApp group specifically to discuss rugby issues, with intense, knowledgeable and very informative debates and discussions about the teams in the various groups of the Rugby World Cup - who are the favourites, squad selection, coaches, playing styles, combinations etc. being par for the course on a daily basis in that group.
Of course I am uber amped for the Rugby World Cup to start and for the Bokke to once again not only make the nation proud, but contribute positively to the “gees” within the country, but a question that has been nagging me consistently in all of this is the following: with a mediocre record of seventeen wins and ten losses in twenty seven test matches, would Springbok coach Jacques Nienaber have been taking the Boks to the World Cup, if he was not part of the Afrikaner rugby establishment?
Does anyone honestly think Nienaber would even have been picked as Bok coach to start with, if it were not for the fact that he is entrenched within this rugby “laager”? For all those who keep self-righteously and arrogantly telling us to focus on merit within South African society, was Jacques Nienaber even a merit-based selection as Bok coach? I posed these questions on my social media platforms a while back and someone accused me of asking rhetorical questions, hmmmm.
With such an uninspiring record as coach of a World Cup winning Bok team, why are Nienaber’s coaching credentials and pedigree not being questioned as much as say, former Bok coach Pieter De Villiers was, to the point of even denigrating poor old P Div? De Villiers, who also led the Boks to a series victory against the Lions in 2009, just like Nienaber did in 2021, led a Bok team who crucially dominated the All Blacks in the 2009 year, to the point that world rugby felt the need to change the rules in order to neutralise the Bok’s ruthless, forward-based power game, which was seen as too boring and predictable for a game which was trying to present itself as a spectacle in order to penetrate new markets and fans.
De Villiers was ridiculed as a mere “token” as Bok coach, as an affirmative action choice who had no right being there, yet Nienaber has received the opposite treatment, being defended by the likes of Swys de Bruin, who claims the Bok winning record under Nienaber is “subjective”, that many of the games the Boks have played under Nienaber were mere “trial matches”. Former Bok coach Nick Mallet even claimed that the Boks would have won more matches under Nienaber but for some poor refereeing decisions. Why the different treatment for Nienaber when juxtaposed with De Villiers, I have often wondered?
In seeking to answer this question, I was reminded of these words from the brilliant anthology, Privilege: A Reader, edited by Michael S. Kimmel and Abby L. Ferber, “To be white, or straight, or male, or middle class is to be simultaneously ubiquitous and invisible. You’re everywhere you look, you’re the standard against which everyone else is measured. You’re like water, like air. People will tell you they went to see a “woman doctor” or they will say they went to see “the doctor.” People will tell you they have a “gay colleague” or they’ll tell you about a colleague. A white person will be happy to tell you about a “Black friend,” but when that same person simply mentions a “friend,” everyone will assume the person is white. Any college course that doesn’t have the word “woman” or “gay” or “minority” in its title is a course about men, heterosexuals, and white people. But we call those courses “literature,” “history” or “political science.” This invisibility is political.”
At the risk of sounding like those “Woke” people who I completely loathe (in my view, “Woke” people are the new “moral police”, the “Puritans” of modern society, ala the character Malvolio in The Bard’s epic romantic comedy play Twelfth Night, and they totally irritate me), one has to say that the difference between the treatment of Pieter De Villiers and Jacques Nienaber as Bok coaches, is simply white privilege.
In South African society, with its Eurocentric “centre” to take from Ngugi Wa Thiong’os Moving the Centre: The Struggle for Cultural Freedoms, “whiteness” is still associated with competence, capacity, skill, incorruptibility, and ability , whilst “blackness” is reduced to ineptness, corruption, incompetence and being unskilled.
So, a white person in any position in SA society is assumed to be competent, a clean operator, deserving and skilled until they prove otherwise and even when they do, they are defended and excuses are found for them, whilst a black person in any position in SA society is assumed to be incompetent, corrupt, undeserving and unskilled until they prove otherwise, and even when they do, they are still seen as an object of suspicion and ridicule, subjected to what W.E.B Du Bois famously called “double consciousness” in his the Souls of Black Folk.
This is why you get the example of Andre de Ruyter, under whose watch Eskom’s performance nosedived and since he left performance has dramatically improved, yet “whiteness” in South Africa still sees fit to defend him and blame the “incompetent, inept, corrupt black cadres” for his failure to turn Eskom around. If he had been a black CEO, he would have just been dismissed as another incompetent black, so his failure would have been seen as no surprise whatsoever.
Most black professionals within the corporate world experience this “double consciousness” almost daily. This sense of constantly having to evaluate and view yourself from the perspective of the "other”, to prove yourself as competent and deserving to “whiteness”, which is the predominant “centre” in South African society, as we have not succeeded in moving the centre within the nation (as opposed to between nations) as Ngugi Wa Thiong’o enjoins us, despite the fact that we have changed the laws and rules of engagement externally with our highly celebrated Constitution and its Bill of Rights.
This is because putting in place such a progressive Constitution that guarantees rights and freedoms has not changed the fact that South African society remains a highly racialised society with a “Eurocentric/white centre” to paraphrase Ngugi and this racialised reality informs and structures a lot of our individual and group experiences, even when we are not necessarily conscious of it.
Just read the comments section of most online publications (including this one) if you doubt me okes! Human beings as individuals are constructs of a socialisation process that entails ongoing social interactions, with communication amongst individuals and groups as well as mutual recognition between individuals and groups playing a critical role, so where there is a dominant “centre i.e whiteness in this case” that “centre” tends to become the frame of reference or lens through which society gets its values and determines what is success and competence and what isn’t (as well as what is corrupt and what isn’t one might add, without being defensive of nonsense or degenerating to a logical fallacy).
Is this unnecessarily racist and provocative analysis? I will let you be the judge of that, but perhaps renowned Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie can have the last words in this instance, from her highly acclaimed novel, Americanah, “Race doesn't really exist for you because it has never been a barrier. Black folks don't have that choice.” Maybe it is because of this reality identified by Ngozi Adichie that others in South Africa see white privilege when others are empathically claiming that no such thing exists.
Mugabe Ratshikuni works for the Gauteng provincial government; he is an activist with a passion for social justice and transformation. He writes here in his personal capacity.
