Responding to the tag of “populist” during the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) Gauteng Provincial Ground Forces Forum, party leader Julius Malema invoked the memory of the #RhodesMust Fall university protests as he denounced the Springboks as an “apartheid symbol”.

Malema’s point was to question how he could be a populist if he was willing to go against the apparent popular support for the Springboks following their recent back-to-back Rugby World Cup victories.

Without engaging in this debate, suffice to say that the issue of populism has to do with the extent to which the current democratic dispensation is experienced by citizens as being different from the previous colonial-apartheid one. I instead want to riff on Malema’s statement, “I will remain [with] Bafana Bafana until the team of South Africa is brought back into action,” because it speaks to the idea of sport having a bearing on national identity and its representation.

If The Guardian’s sports columnist Jonathan Liew is to be believed, many South Africans were projecting their vision of the country on to the Springboks’ victory, then can it be said that they associate the successive failures in the soccer arena with the country’s political challenges and hence the declining support for the national soccer teams?

We should remember that the period leading up to the 2023 Rugby World Cup saw the announcement of a #BokFriday campaign to garner national support for the Springboks. Yet we did not see a similar kind of initiative a couple of months ago when Banyana Banyana were competing in the Fifa Women’s World Cup.

It would be easy to blame this on the reported governance and financial problems facing the South African Football Association. However, bearing in mind the relationship between sport and national identity, one cannot help but wonder if this discrepancy has anything to do with the degraded social position occupied by black women (who make up the majority of female soccer players) in relation to the hegemonic white masculinity represented by the well-endowed world of elite rugby (notwithstanding the slight improvement in terms of racial composition, currently at 12 out of 33 players).

The point of the comparison is not to compare apples to pears, but rather it is to highlight the gap between the world of elite rugby and the unprofessional environment of (women’s) soccer, which I argue is indicative of the gap between the “two nations” that have been said to exist side by side in South Africa.

This argument comes off the back of the Mapungubwe Institute for Strategic Reflection’s (Mistra) 2012 research report on football in South Africa, whose section on the sociology of women’s soccer located the root causes of the inequalities of sport in the inequalities prevailing in society.

The Mistra study found that most of the participants in the South African soccer system come from marginalised black communities. As a result, financial constraints are chief among the challenges facing young soccer players. The others are access to quality facilities and the lack of opportunities to participate at school due to the persistent problem of poorly equipped schools in their communities.

It is in this context that “the boys” teams seem to get preference, as all of the eight schools in this study had multiple boys’ soccer teams, but only one girls’ team (which rarely practised).

The situation above is a far cry from the plenitude of sporting resources found at most formerly whites-only schools, where all Springboks – with the exception of one, Makazole Mapimpi – attended. In recent years, however, it has emerged that the picturesque facilities do not only serve the function of physical education, but also an induction into what Bernard Cros describes as “the white man’s view of the world”. In this world, rugby is the pre-eminent sport with the ability of shaping men who will be leaders of their homes and the nation at large.

If this sounds problematic in today’s gender-conscious times, it’s because it is. According to John Nauright, white rugby is “tied to imperial culture for English-speaking whites, national identity for Afrikaners and English-speakers, and cultural superiority and masculinity for all white men”.

As representatives of the ideal type of white masculinity, the Springboks can never be allowed to sink below a particular level of professionalism – both on and off the field – because a crisis in the sporting arena of rugby is perceived as a crisis for the white nation.

Hence the governance and on-the-field performance crisis of the mid-2010s saw the mobilisation of financial and technical skills to return the Springboks to their glory. These challenges notwithstanding, professional rugby in South Africa remains a multimillion-rand business, with the added boost of a healthy appetite for private equity ownership from several corporate partners.

This is understandable, given that many of corporate South Africa’s shareholders and fund managers are products of the same schooling system that supplies elite rugby with its players, and thereby can be assumed to identify with the idea of masculinity and nationality represented by the Springboks.

Or at least aspire to it, since whiteness, according to Christi van der Westhuizen, is less about skin pigmentation and more about the meanings of value we attach to “pink-ish and white-ish skin”.

Meanwhile, in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, topflight soccer lost two sponsors (Absa and Telkom) and struggled to find the one it currently has (ie, its main broadcast partner, MultiChoice/DStv). This is indicative of an undiversified funding pool, which does not bode well for the future of the sport. If the situation in township schools is anything to go by, the gendered competition over limited resources pushes girls and young women away from soccer. As a result, this important space of black social life will remain under-developed. 

Bridging the gap identified above will require no less than a paradigm shift from the sexist anti-black framework inherited from the colonial past to one that treats black women as full human beings and not just tokens. A social compact, along with funding towards the professionalisation of women’s soccer is imperative, and we wait to see if MTN’s recently expressed interest in this regard will be as meaningful as its support for the Springboks. DM