On June 24, 1995, at Johannesburg’s Ellis Park Stadium, South Africa won the Rugby World Cup 15-12 over its arch-rival New Zealand. The match stands as a hugely symbolic moment in South African history. It marked the nation’s first major sporting event since the end of its segregationist apartheid regime in 1991. And in a masterful act of statecraft conducted squarely in the international spotlight, President Nelson Mandela orchestrated a show of unity in one of the world’s most bitterly divided nations, using the slogan “One Team, One Country.”
The reality of the moment proved far more complicated than image-making.
Apartheid’s gross human rights violations had long made South Africa an international pariah. In 1973, a UN resolution declared apartheid a “crime against humanity.” From 1964 to 1992, the country was banned from the Olympic Games, while its rugby team was kept out of the sport’s first two World Cups in ’87 and ’91. To Black South Africans, the historically white team—along with their green and gold colors and their Springbok mascot—had come to symbolize the nation’s oppressive minority white rule.
President Mandela saw rugby as a way to help lessen divisions between Black and white South Africans and foster a shared national pride. The sport had been a unifying force before, among the nation’s competing colonial forces. A 1906 Springbok tour of the British Isles proudly featured players from both sides in the bitter Boer War (1899-1902) between English and Afrikaners, including one player who had been imprisoned in a British concentration camp. To heal the wounds this time, Mandela—who had himself been jailed for 27 years for challenging the white minority-led apartheid system—had to first acknowledge and address the widespread pain and division apartheid had wrought.