“I was born in Africa and I also suffered from racism. In my early years in France, I couldn’t get away from it. Racism is like a rape that touches your soul and marks you all your life.” - Abdelatief Benazzi
Telford Vice / Cape Town
TWO words to freeze the blood of South Africans of a certain mindset: Abdelatief Benazzi. Twenty years on, those words still unsettle and disturb us.
Twenty years on, Benazzi, speaking exclusively to Rapport from New Zealand, where he was for France’s tour last month, remembers the pain of being denied what he believed was rightfully his.
“I cried in the dressingroom. We were so disappointed with the referee’s decision to refuse to award my try. But it’s useless to dwell on these things once the final whistle is blown. Fate wanted it to be South Africa.”
The aftermath of the 1995 rugby World Cup semifinal would not be the last time Benazzi and his teammates would shed tears in the tournament, but the next occasion would be different.
We’ve all seen the video. Not that we need to. We have the indelible memory, like a bad tattoo.
The Springboks and Les Bleus are playing rugby in a vlei called Kings Park. How no-one has drowned nobody knows. The Boks are 19-15 ahead. But the French have muscled a scrum into their 22.
Fabien Galthie watches the ball gently pinball between Marc Cecillon’s heels for an age as the steaming muddied mass oozes towards South Africa’s tryline.
Galthie finally picks up and shovels a blob of a pass to Christophe Deylaud, who punts a parabolic prayer into the air.
The ball is descending towards a spot maybe three metres from the tryline. It doesn’t hit the ground. Instead it hits André Joubert and bounces towards the onrushing French.
Benazzi looms out of the gloom, the No. 6 on his back somehow still white.
The clock reads 79 minutes and 51 seconds.
Benazzi has nine seconds to change history.
If he scores, the Boks are not in the 1995 World Cup final. Joel Stransky does not kick his Hail Mary dropgoal to seal a 15-12 win over the All Blacks. Nelson Mandela does not wear his No. 6 jersey and does not hand the William-Webb Ellis Cup to that other No. 6, Francois Pienaar, who does not correct David van der Sandt: “We didn’t have the support of 63,000 South Africans today, we had the support of 42-million South Africans.”
If Benazzi scores, one of modern South Africa’s most powerful founding stories is never told. The South Africa of today does not, in important ways, exist.
Benazzi scores.
All 1.97 metres of him crashes through the thicket of bodies like a runaway truck. He’s surely over the tryline and definitely down, ball in hand. French arms are aloft in triumph. Os du Randt’s hands are on his hips in resignation, his head bowed in surrender. There can be no doubt.
There isn’t. Not in the mind of Derek Bevan, who determines that James Small has smuggled his body under Benazzi and the ball.
No try.
When much the same thing happened in the first half, Bevan awarded Ruben Kruger what became the only try of the match. “Some South Africans told me, ‘Maybe your try was valid, maybe Kruger’s wasn’t because he didn’t ground the ball’,” Benazzi said.
Another age and several scrums later Stransky belts the ball into touch and it’s over.
The teams retreat to the dressingroom, where Benazzi lies to his teammates: “I told them I didn’t score.”
Why?
“I have always respected referees’ decisions, but this was an injustice. We were devastated. But we needed to stay focused for the third-place playoff against the English. France and England have an important rivalry, so it meant a lot for us to beat them.”
We all know that feeling. Happily, France beat England 19-9 at Loftus Versfeld two days before the final.
That might have been that for the French, but the agony wasn’t over. Their presence was required at Ellis Park for the final, where a revelation awaited them.
“I cried again. When we saw the symbolism of Mandela in the Springbok jersey — the jersey that we knew had until then belonged to the white community — we understood that it was more important than anything else that South Africa should win that tournament.”
The context of those tears went beyond even Mandela.
Benazzi had been part of the squad who toured South Africa two years earlier, when France drew the first Test at Kings Park and went down by a single point at Ellis Park.
“South Africa was not the same in 1993. People’s lives were so separated. We visited Soweto, and my heart hurt to see such poverty; to realise how big the gap was between the lives of the rich and the poor. And all because of race.”
Even that wasn’t where Benazzi’s understanding of racism began.
He is from Oujda, a north-eastern outpost in Morocco, where rugby is a significant game because of the country’s colonial past. But it is nowhere near what it is in France — where Benazzi moved in 1990 to further his career.
Before he played the first of his 78 Tests for France, 10 of them as captain, Benazzi earned a single cap for Morocco. Then he became a brown man in a country where Jean-Marie le Pen’s vicious far right National Front was on the rise.
“I was born in Africa and I also suffered from racism. In my early years in France, I couldn’t get away from it. Racism is like a rape that touches your soul and marks you all your life.”
But, as Benazzi said, “life evolves”. He is now president of the Six Nations Council, vice-president of the French Rugby Federation, and chair of World Rugby’s men’s high performance committee. And solidly allied with the South African Rugby Union.
Even so, some things don’t change: “The Springboks will always compete for titles, which isn’t good news for us. But I’m happy that sport and freedom gives young people the opportunity to find their future.”
And to score tries, even those that aren’t awarded.
Rapport
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