Celebrate, the beloved country. You’ve earned the right to feel better than you have since Thabo Mbeki fell off the bus. But don’t waste this triumph.
TELFORD VICE in Cape Town
ONLY once has the points margin in a rugby World Cup final loomed larger than it did in Yokohama on Saturday.
But never before have a team won the World Cup after losing a pool game.
Never have the Springboks scored more points in a final.
Never have they lost a final, a distinction only they enjoy among the five finalists.
Never had they scored a try in a final.
Never, still, has a try been scored against them in a final.
Never have a team won more World Cups.
Never have a side won the southern hemisphere championship and the World Cup in the same year.
Never have …
Bugger all that.
Nevermind the objective facts of the matter.
Never have a team looked more determined to win than Siya Kolisi’s unstoppable band of blood brothers.
Never have their opponents looked more devastated at that determination than England.
Never did anyone, least of all England, imagine the previously dour, methodical, predictable, defensive South Africans would throw it all in the air like they just didn’t care and play the kind of joyous rugby they did when they were barefoot and 10 years old with no-one watching.
Never, from the opening confrontation until the final gong, was the result in even a smidgen of doubt.
Never have more happy, happy, happy tears been shed by South Africans in the cause of mere sport.
Never did South Africans expect to see so many of those tears flowing from the hard, unflinching, shard-shaped eyes of Daniel Johannes Vermeulen.
Duane Vermeulen, the Boks’ matchwinning No. 8, stood there — the sweat he had won from the contest shining like a medal on the vast slab of his forehead gleaming some 1.93 metres in the sky, his mighty arms attached to meaty hands now clasped behind a massive, hairy, bearded head — and sobbed. Openly and proudly and fok julle almal.
Vermeulen’s tears disappeared into his muddied, bloodied jersey. And into the hearts of all who shared his passion, where they will stay forever.
You could tell this story just as well in short, sharp exclamations as in long and winding sentences: 32-bloody-12! Two tries to none! A scrum that was an irrisistable force and an immovable object all in one! Makazole Mapimpi’s bulletproof confidence! Cheslin Kolbe’s otherworldly brilliance! Handré Pollard’s pulseless precision! Kolisi’s serene selflessness! Rassie Erasmus’ sangoma sensibilities! Jérôme Garcès hitherto unseen competence!
But why wouldn’t you want to linger on this triumph as long as you could, and then a little longer? Celebrate, the beloved country. You’ve earned the right to feel better than you have since Thabo Mbeki fell off the bus, and you’ve earned it the hard way.
You can’t eat the World Cup or live in it or wear it or have it pay you a living wage.
Winning it won’t bring back the people we murder every few years because they have come from somewhere else in Africa, nor resurrect the women we murder every day for daring to think how they live their lives shouldn’t be controlled by men, nor stop us from preying on children for reasons too sick to get into.
Rugby won’t rid us of the wilfully, brazenly useless government we elected — yes, that’s our fault — nor spare us a shamelessly illiberal opposition that stands for nothing except whatever it is the government is against — thanks, the middle class, for nothing — nor stop the only vaguelly left-wing party from becoming an ever unfunnier joke — it’s hard to laugh at seething hate.
The World Cup won’t make Eskom do their jobs, nor will it convince the people we need to convince of the bleeding obvious — that we need a better plan for making sure we have enough water than simply praying for rain.
The privileged will still be privileged. The poor will still be poor. The zombie that is apartheid, dead only for the time it takes people to bother to vote, the rest of the time rudely alive in every real sense, will still be out there.
For all that, what happened in Yokohama on Saturday could change things. It kindles a small flame of hope that, just maybe, South Africa isn’t doomed to be remembered as the country that betrayed itself.
What chance this will make the homed see the homeless as the fellow human beings they are and not, as too many of them do currently, as filth to be swept into someone else’s streets?
Or that those who have too much will understand why they are despised, and do something about it?
Or that the powerful will become accountable to those who lend them — not give them — that power?
Like we said, that flame of hope is small. But, for now, it lives.
In 1995, when we lived in some kind of Disney movie, and in 2007, when we still thought everything would be OK, winning the World Cup wasn’t what it is now.
It’s already a cliché that the champions of 2019 are significantly more black than their predecessors, that they look a lot more like the nation the marketing people say they represent.
Fair enough. But we’re in real trouble if we still need to make the point that South Africa does not have a future if that future is not, mostly, black. Let’s hear all those arguments against affirmative action selection now. And let’s see if anyone has the balls to admit that quotas work, that without them what happened in Yokohama on Saturday would never have happened, that all Kolisi needed to be what he is was the genuine opportunity to be it.
Moments like this don’t come often. For some, they don’t come at all.
You must be blessed indeed, Mzansi, for this is your third chance to get this right.
Never, surely, will you have it again.
This time, don’t waste it.
First published by Times SELECT.
Bulletproof Truth 