Word: apartheid
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...South African rugby has another promise to keep, and victory alone won't do it. The Springboks were once among the most powerful symbols of the nation's apartheid regime and a prime target of the international sports boycott aimed at ending white rule. Then, in 1995, one year after Nelson Mandela's election as President inaugurated democratic majority rule, South Africa hosted the Rugby World Cup - and won. As tens of thousands of fans - almost all of them white - erupted in the stands, Mandela donned a Springbok jersey and went onto the field to hug the team's captain...
...years later, South Africa's team looks much like it did right after apartheid's collapse. In a country where black people make up 80% of the population, the 30-man rugby squad includes just six players of color - only one more than it took to the 2003 World Cup in Australia, in the build-up to which a white Springbok player notoriously refused to room with a black teammate. And only two blacks started the game against Samoa. Zola Yeye, who last year became the first black team manager in the Springboks' 101-year history, says the team...
That is a deeply uncomfortable legacy for South Africa, whose white population treats rugby with the reverence that Brazilians reserve for soccer. For years, the national rugby system was tightly interwoven with the institutions of apartheid; its players and administrators were nurtured in the same educational establishments from which the regime recruited its leaders. The Afrikaner Broederbond (Brotherhood), a secretive power élite that ran the country's key institutions, helped choose Springbok rugby captains just as they chose military commanders and Prime Ministers. "Rugby was always seen as apartheid at play," says Andy Colquhoun, a leading South African rugby...
...rise and rise of Richard Maponya is a lesson in how there is more than one way to fight a revolution. While the African National Congress (ANC) of Nelson Mandela and others confronted apartheid head on, Maponya undermined it from the inside. A 22-year-old teacher when apartheid first took hold in 1948, Maponya was offered a job as a stock taker in a clothes maker. He quickly proved a talented operator, winning a promotion for himself and the white manager, a Mr. Bolton, who took him on. A grateful Bolton began to sell offcuts and soiled cloth...
Maponya's relationship with the ANC was not always smooth, however. One of Maponya's few fellow black entrepreneurs was Ntatho Motlana, a doctor who began South Africa's first private black hospitals before branching into telecommunications and media. Motlana says that all through the apartheid years, the ANC was split on whether being involved in business supported apartheid and was a betrayal. "Some thought being involved in business meant not being involved in the struggle," adds Motlana, 82. "We were saying that if we were independent, if we made money for ourselves, that was part of the movement...