You can argue this till the Nguni cattle come home, but two things remain inarguable: 1. the cattle will eventually come home, and 2. Siya Kolisi is right: if you’re not a South African, you have no real idea what the Springboks’ 2023 World Cup victory means to South Africans.

It’s just a game, right? I think that’s the unspoken Fourth Wall with sport: don’t analyse it too hard, or you’ll discover it’s all games. Sport is meaningless in the grand scheme of things. It will not contribute a quark to humanity’s ability to survive in the universe. It does not solve any of humanity’s existential crises. Sport cannot answer humankind’s fundamental questions. It does not explain why life exists, or why humans are sentient. And yet, humans live by it, live through it, invest it with meaning out of all proportion, swear by it, die for it, breathe it, cheat for it, kill for it, explain themselves by it.

Rugby, as just one example of sport, is a game: two teams of humans do unseemly things with a banana-shaped ball, playing by rules more arcane than the Illuminati’s membership criteria, on a big green patch surrounded by enraptured spectators baying for either side’s victory. When it’s over, it’s over forever. Until the next game. It’s all a bit silly, really.

And yet, it isn’t silly. At all. Because sport means something to the people who watch it. And, by extension, to the people who play it on behalf of those who cannot. Sport is a gateway to glory, because there are winners and losers. Sport creates champions of effort. Sport is a door cracked open on immortality, however brief. Of course, not actual immortality, but as close as dammit. That’s why we throw everything we can at it: money, resources, time, will. Sport helps us care about being alive.

Humans are strange creatures. We are satisfied with the smallest things.

Another thing sport is: distraction. Being alive is challenging. Staying alive and enjoying the journey is difficult. It’s never been more difficult to extract existential meaning from being alive than it is right now. Ask yourself “what’s it all about?” too many times and you’ll enter a rabbit hole which very quickly becomes a black hole. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, then you’ve never stared into the yawning abyss of reality. Being alive is no joke. Understandably, instead of trying to deal with these difficulties, we distract ourselves from them. We entertain ourselves. We blow small things up into life-or-death things: politics, sex, food, fashion, power, money. And sport. Let’s be honest, it mostly works. Until it doesn’t. Let’s leave that for another time and think about rugby.

Rugby is a game of physical strength. We can talk about tactics and game plans and balls skills all day, but essentially it’s about brute strength. That’s why we love it. It’s a physical battle. It’s the toughest team sport on earth, aside from the Australian version. American football? Pads and helmets. Water polo? Well, water. Nothing compares to the sheer physicality of rugby. There’s something gladiatorial about it. For spectators, and maybe also for the players, it’s like participating in a slow motion car crash that lasts 80 minutes. It’s wrestling, sprinting, boxing and chess, all in one. It’s brutal, and it probably just skirts the borders of the inhumane. It’s also about bloodlust. It’s a lot of things. That’s why it’s incredibly exciting to watch.

This might explain why whole nations can get swept up in the thrill of what rugby ‘means’. An international competition of the world’s top rugby teams is bound to have a whiff of nationalism about it, and fair enough. But I’d argue that no nation on earth has imbued the game of rugby with more existential “who are we?”-ness than South Africa.

For various historical reasons, rugby, a game invented (like virtually all modern sports) in England, became in South Africa a quintessentially “Afrikaner” game during the dark decades of Apartheid. Of course, no sport ‘belongs’ essentially to one particular nation (apart from England’s tiddlywinks), but over time, certain sports become associated with certain countries: baseball for the USA, ice hockey for Canada, cricket (appallingly) for Australia. You could argue very strongly for rugby belonging to New Zealand. But the South Africans, particularly the Afrikaners, turned rugby very early on into a game of political identity. Perhaps it was a post-Boer War thing: the fierce but out-numbered Boers were finally defeated by the forces of Empire in 1902 and spent the next 100 years using rugby to get revenge. Of course that’s a facile view, but bear with me.

South African rugby’s stigma as “the game of the Boers”, of course, kept rugby from the vast majority of South Africa’s population during Apartheid’s insidious reign. After Nelson Mandela and the transformation of South African society that officially began in 1994, South African rugby, finally allowed back on the international stage, was in dire need of a makeover. And what a makeover it got: not only did South Africa get to host the Rugby World Cup the very next year (1995), but the SA team, the Springboks, actually won it. That victory, coupled with the strenuous efforts of SA Rugby’s marketing department and, more significantly, Nelson Mandela’s personal endorsement of the game, the team and the victory itself, turned rugby, finally, into South Africa’s one true national sport almost overnight.

Fast forward to 2023: on Saturday 28 October, the South African team beat the New Zealand team in the Rugby World Cup final in Paris. A big, glittering occasion, it kicked off hilariously with preening has-been Mika and was capped hours later with millions of Euro’s worth of fireworks that somehow did not set Notre Dame alight. By any account, a big, distracting, harmless game of sport on a night otherwise full of real existential threat in the Gaza strip, Ukraine, and countless other places in the world where humans are using guns to define themselves.

And yet. And yet. This particular game of rugby was not meaningless to the 62 million people all crowded together at the tip of the African continent. Not meaningless at all. For South Africans, this game was another brush with our eternal psychosis as a nation: “do we matter?” This game was about agency: “can we survive?” Big claims, but here’s why. South Africans, like so many peoples on the planet, are a beleaguered people: our political leaders are useless, our once-great post-1994 national pride in the dust, our economy wrecked, our social fabric in tatters. We feel deeply humiliated, once again, on a global scale. We are not what we once promised we would be. We have not lived up to our great potential. We are a would-be banana republic, yet another African failure. Life for South Africans is, once again, after all the years of Apartheid, tough. More than tough. Bloody hard. Most of us face poverty. A minority of us skim the cream and live large in Cape Town, one foot in International Departures. The vast majority scrape for minimum wage (if we’re lucky), avoid drug gangs in the townships, watch the police taking bribes, use candles and paraffin to light our cardboard-reinforced shacks, avoid swimming at the sewage-infested beaches, chuckle ruefully at our cartoonishly-obese politicians. 

That’s why South African rugby captain Siya Kolisi was right in his breathless post-game post-victory interview on Saturday night: if you’re not South African, you don’t know what it means to win the Rugby World Cup. You just don’t. Other nations would have been overjoyed and proud and exalted, all the normal responses for their national team becoming international champions at the sport they and their supporters are so passionate about. But somehow, in South Africa, rugby has come to be associated with some kind of national survival. Rugby, for South Africans, is existential.

Obviously, of course, it isn’t really. Deep down we know rugby won’t fix our economy, or our politics, or our water crises, or our municipal failures, or our national disgrace. Sport cannot fix us. But rugby victory makes us at least want to be fixed, to be better. How? It makes us believe again, somehow, that there’s something to this being ‘South African’ after all. What? What is it that’s so special about South African-ness? It’s something ineffable, something to do with survival, persistence, sheer bloody-minded victory over the forces of entropy. The Afrikaans saying “‘n Boer maak ‘n plan’” (“a Boer makes a plan”) sums it up: South Africans find a way. We find a way to survive. We’re exhausted: we want more than just to survive, we want to thrive. But for now, survival will do. After all, nothing has stopped us yet: European invasion, slavery, genocide, Empire, war, concentration camps, indenture, the Spanish influenza, more war, Apartheid, conflagration, international pariah status, the AWB, AIDS, Jacob Zuma, the Gupta brothers, floods, looting, drought: somehow we cling on at the edge of Africa, we work around the disasters and the politicians, we make a plan, “we” (however you define that word) are still here.

That’s what so many rugby commentators said of the Springboks after each of their last three World Cup games, each of which we won by a single heart-stopping point against formidable foes: we refuse to lose. We just refuse. We snatched three improbable victories, and as the referee’s whistle went to seal that third one, South Africa exploded in an outpouring of pent-up hope. Watch the various video clips of celebration all over South Africa on Saturday night as that final whistle blew: in shopping malls, in pubs, in shebeens, in suburban homes, in shacks, in mansions, almost every South African, for a brief few seconds, believed again: “we can make it”.

That’s what the Springbok victory means to South Africa. That’s what an 80-minute European ball game on a far-away European field means to the pressurized denizens clinging to each other at the bottom of Africa: hope. Hope that we as a country still somehow matter. Hope that that the promise of that blazing 1995 World Cup victory hasn’t faded away entirely. Hope that we still, deep down, believe in ourselves, and more importantly, in each other. That we want to be here, to live here, that we’re proud of each other, that we believe in each other’s ability to help each other. That we love each other, somehow. That through all the fear, suspicion, cruelty, hatred we show each other, we will somehow end up showing each other love.

Siya Kolisi knows that. He knows it in his bones. He’s survived a lot. So have most of the Springbok players. The team knew they were not really playing for a ceremonial cup, a medal on a lanyard, a photo op in front of a few tawdry fireworks. They weren’t playing for their careers or for industry awards. None of them were trying to be “Man of the Match”. Those things all matter in sport and that’s what solitary international Tests are for. The World Cup? The Springboks played to encourage ordinary South Africans to not give up. To keep making plans. To believe that “it”, however you define “it”, is still possible.

If you’re not South African, you won’t understand it.

You just won’t.