Bring back the boycott

South Africa’s problems are all South Africans’ problems. Not one of us is innocent. All of us are guilty. We need to own that guilt.

TELFORD VICE in London

HANDS up if you remember the long summers and winters of empty ache while, far away across the world, seasons runneth over with international sport played by people who were not us.

The way white people spat the words “Peter” and then “Hain”, the shameless lying in the press and on air that the dross dished up on rebel tours was Test cricket and rugby, the Springboks shamefully allowed to keep touring and playing long after the extent of the evil was known, the denial writ large on the blank faces of the delusionists pretending all was normal …

I remember. I was there. I lived through it. South Africa’s forced exclusion from world sport was the white noise of my growing up. I could hear the black noise of anger on the street. At least, I could before it dissipated into the smell of fear as state oppression mounted.

The Olympics? Test rugby and cricket? International football? They were for other, supposedly better people. Not for us.

I knew that was as it should have been. That until all South Africans had the same chances in life — not only in sport — the least the rest of the world could do was not allow the apartheid government to, as we say these days, sportwash the murderous truth away.

Politics was sport. Sport was politics. Is, was, always will be. Anyone who believes differently is, at best, stupid, at worst, on the high road to fascism. That offends you? Noted.

I cheered like mad during the 1981 Bok tour to New Zealand — for the protestors. I grew taller with pride every time my father, someone I was irreparably distanced from in all sorts of ways, defiantly and in the face of vicious opposition loudly supported the man he always called “Clay”.

He did so not because Muhammad Ali was a wonderful boxer. He did so because Ali invariably said and did the Right Thing. That my father was an ardent student of the art and craft of smacking someone in the face for a living but knew that Ali’s political bravery was exponentially more important than anything he would do in the ring has shaped me in ways I’m still, at 53, trying to understand.

And here we are, all these years later, and not nearly enough has changed. We still don’t have democracy. What we have is a pretence of democracy for the five minutes it takes to put a cross on a ballot paper every five years.

That’s for those of us who still bother to vote. The rest of us know that’s a waste of time. Whether we vote or not, the government will run on corruption and stink of ineptitude. Just like it did when it was white — when none of the legally available alternatives were noticeably less corrupt and inept, just as they are now.

Too many of us believed the bullshit of the 1995 rugby World Cup. That wasn’t unity. That was marketing. Nelson Mandela was dangerously wrong: sport does not have the power to change the world. Not, at least, for any longer than it takes the cheesy fakery of a beer commercial to shamble across our television screens. That’s even less than the five minutes we fool ourselves, every five years, that we’re a democracy.

The Springbok is the swastika of sport, the symbol of what white supremacy used to do on Saturday afternoons. Yet there the filthy thing still is, leaping on the left sleeve of the jerseys of the team who will, so they have been sold to us, represent South Africa at the men’s World Cup.

Why has the Springbok survived? Because it is a valuable brand. Because it makes money. That it is also a significant part of the story of the depths human depravity has sunk to matters less, apparently. How does that make you feel? How does it make me feel? Sick.

I would feel better if international rugby’s suits, having been reminded this week of how abnormal South African society still is and will be for too many decades hence, threw the Boks out of the World Cup.

Or if India — important figures in South Africa’s expulsion and readmission to international cricket — uninvited the Proteas to their tour there later this month.

At least Zambia have had the balls to tell Bafana Bafana not to turn up in Lusaka for their friendly on Saturday. The South African Football Association’s response has not been to reflect on why that has happened and to empathise with the Zambians, but to try and find replacement opposition. How completely disgusting.

Worse, Banyana Banyana played Botswana in the CAF Olympic qualifiers on Wednesday. It is an outrage that the match went ahead — could the players and the crowd at Orlando Stadium smell the hate drifting in on the smoke from the fires set by the xenophobes they consider compatriots?

How do you talk sense into the heads of people swept up in the irrationality that those who have come from far worse realities than theirs to make lives no-one wants to live are stealing “their” jobs and “their” women? Black South Africans, you are a disgrace.

But you have a way to go to join white South Africans at the bottom of the barrel. There is no reconciling with people who, having done everything wrong for hundreds of years, think they have the right to be treated as equals despite retaining all of their privileges.

The latter calamity has, of course, led to the former. How could it not? And how did we think the main victims of centuries of systemic, institutional racial violence — black men, without whom colonialism and apartheid could not have existed — would manifest their dysfunction if not against women?

All that’s more pathetic than women calling for the death penalty for perpetrators of gender-based violence is men seeking to distance themselves from those perpetrators by issuing confections of affront at their actions.

Some women seem to think you should go to jail if you kill a man and be executed if you kill a woman. But only if you’re a man. Nevermind that the death penalty doesn’t work, or that men are far more likely to be victims of male violence than women.

As for the shrieks of protest by men about other men, if you had lived their lives would you be that different? Or are you trying to say that being born black and male means being born bad?

Much of the noise made by these men and women rises from that swamp of affluence we call the middle class. How dare we lump these fine citizens with those other, dirtier, poorer South Africans? How could we possibly equate swinging a panga in anger with the lethal buzz of an electric fence securing ill-gotten gains?

South Africa’s problems are all South Africans’ problems. Not one of us is innocent. All of us are guilty. We need to own that guilt if we are to have any hope of rehabilitating ourselves.

It will take a lot more than sport to heal South Africa. But reviving the boycott would be a start. It is the least sport could do. Bring back the boycott now and bring it back properly, and to hell with how much money would be lost and whose careers would be cut short.

Hands up if you’re quietly aghast to be South African but will make noise in support of the Springboks at the World Cup?

Shame on you.

Dad? Thanks.

First published by Times SELECT.