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Johannes A. Smit
There was a seminal moment in my life connected to this school [a
previously white school]. On Saturdays and Sundays, we had
nowhere to go—there were no playgrounds. So we would go back to
the school, even though it was in a white area, and kick a ball
around. One Saturday afternoon, as we were kicking a ball around, it
bounced out of the school yard, into one of the gardens of one of the
white, middle-class houses around there. The husband and the wife
and everybody else were sitting on the stoop in the sunny, warm
Saturday afternoon, listening to a radio broadcast of a rugby match
between South Africa and New Zealand, the two great rugby rivals.
As the ball bounced in the garden, I went and got the ball.
And the man says to his wife ‘Ah, future Springboks’—
meaning future members of the South African rugby team. But he’s
saying it cynically because no non-white ever gets onto the team! I’m
not sure, but his wife says to him, ‘You know, sarcasm is the lowest
form of wit’. So I’m maybe twelve or thirteen, listening to this. And
it strikes me, this guy’s saying that coloreds—blacks—won’t ever
get onto the team. I think it stuck with me, until years later, when I
began to challenge the whole barrier—questioning why blacks can’t
be on the team. I remember both the cynicism with which the
possibility was dismissed, and the woman alerting this man to the
fact that maybe he’s not as smart as he thinks he is (Brutus
2006a:25).
Taking Brutus’s age into consideration, this event dates from around
1936/ 1937 and could refer to the 1937 springbok rugby team’s touring of
New Zealand in that year 13
. The significance of this observation is that
13 Immediately prior to this date, there was only the 1928 New Zealand rugby
tour to South Africa and following the springboks’ tour of New Zeeland in
1937, the New Zealand tour to South Africa of 1939 (cf.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_rugby_union_matches_between_Ne
w_Zealand_and_South_Africa). It appears correct to surmise that the event
in question that had such a profound impact on the twelve year-old Brutus,
was the 1937 tour of the springboks to New Zealand. There were obviously
no tours during the war period.
22