Invictus - Carlin [32]
Arnold Stofile called rugby “the opium of the Boer.” A black man who, like Bekebeke, had not allowed the indignities of apartheid to thwart his powerful personality, he was raised on a farm, joined an ANC front organization in the early sixties, became a theology lecturer at the University of Fort Hare (where Mandela had studied), was ordained a Presbyterian minister, and played rugby, a phenomenon less uncommon among black men from his native Eastern Cape than elsewhere in South Africa. But he did not let his personal passion for the game cloud his view of the bigger political picture. He became one of the most militant organizers of the international sports boycotts. “We always defined sport as apartheid in tracksuits,” Stofile said. “It was a very important element in the foreign affairs of this country, sports icons being de facto ambassadors for South Africa, a key part of the effort to make apartheid less unacceptable. And as far as internal policy was concerned, it was the barrier that kept white youngsters secluded from blacks and so had big support from government, and big business got big tax rebates from supporting sport. So it was the opium that kept whites in happy ignorance; the opium that numbed white South Africa.”
Denying white South Africa the happy drug, and the government its “ambassadors,” was the mission to which Stofile dedicated nearly twenty years of his life. “A workers’ strike, even a bomb, would affect a small group,” he explained. “This affected all of them, every white male, every household in a sports-mad country whose main source of pride regarding the rest of the world was its sports prowess.”
Niël Barnard, on the receiving end of Stofile’s offensive, did not disagree. “The ANC’s policy of international sports isolation, especially rugby isolation, was very painful to us Afrikaners. Psychologically it was a cruel blow, because rugby was one terrain where we felt as a small nation that we could hold our heads high. Preventing us from playing rugby with the rest of the world turned out to be a hugely successful lever of political influence.”
Stofile’s most spectacular success came in 1985, the watershed year in which practically everything seemed to happen in South Africa. He sneaked illegally out of the country and made it, with the help of a former All Black who was his country’s high commissioner in Zimbabwe, into New Zealand. There he lent his weight in a decisive manner to a campaign to stop the All Blacks from mounting a planned tour of South Africa.
New Zealand was so divided and angry that the whole culture of rugby, the country’s pride and passion, was under threat. Parents were refusing to allow their children to play the game at school, and threatening to stop them from ever playing it again, such was the strength of feeling of the antitour camp. Stofile recalled with relish how he went on a propaganda offensive, addressing large crowds, appearing on radio and TV, elevating the national argument beyond abstract notions of black and white, giving the cause a face and a name. When he arrived in New Zealand, support for the sports boycott stood at 40 percent. Three weeks later the figure had climbed to 75 percent. Still, the New Zealand rugby board decided to go ahead with the tour, but then players themselves stepped in, a group of them taking the issue to court. Stofile’s appearance as a witness in the case proved decisive. A chunky fellow who loved rugby as much as the average New Zealander, he argued that there was a higher cause at stake here, and then proceded to give an eloquent firsthand account of the crasser injustices black people endured, making special emphasis on