by Dan Roodt
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The recent remarks by South African sports minister Fikile Mbalula were typically contradictory: on the one hand he will not impose quotas on sports like rugby and cricket, but on the other he will set “targets” for racial transformation.
A “target” and a “quota” may be synonyms in certain contexts. But semantics aside, no other political party has rejected the very notion that the participants in sport should be socially engineered to reflect certain “demographics”, that loaded word within a South African context.
If racial representation in sports teams really is some kind of moral value in South Africa, how can we stomach playing teams from other countries that are all but homogeneous? For example, I had a look at both the Swedish and the German soccer teams and they looked pretty much Caucasian, despite significant racial minorities in both countries.
Will Mr. Fikile Mbalula announce a sports boycott of Sweden and Germany unless they also meet his “transformation targets”? And what about a rugby team from Argentina that might lack players of colour? Could the Springboks play against an all-white team of Pumas without making a mockery of sporting transformation?
Stalin spoke of “socialism in one country”. Unless the ANC is imposing transformation in one country only, it will have to assert its racial philosophy in relation to international teams too. Or perhaps foreign teams could be subjected to fines like our provincial rugby squads for not having at least a certain number of quota players on the field during a match? This could be a form of indulgence or penance for their sins and one may well imagine how ANC-appointed sports administrators will queue up to cash in on such fines to white teams from abroad.
If it is consistent in its quest for racially representative teams, South Africa should also refuse to contest the USA’s athletics team wherein the African-American minority is completely overrepresented. Why are there no members of the white majority in the 4 x 100 relay team, for example? How can 12% of the population produce 100% of the sprinters? No wonder the USA’s millions of white nationalists complain so bitterly about anti-white discrimination in their country.
Anathema too, would be a cricket team from India consisting entirely of, well, Indians!
However, the fastest way to real transformation in SA sport would be to have several national teams, as they do in the United Kingdom where Scotland, Wales and England compete under their own colours. As South Africa copies everything which has “made in the UK” stamped on it, we should all support ethnically separate national teams. Palestine too, has been a member of the International Olympic Committee since 1995, even though it has no state of its own.
Afrikaners will jump at the chance to have their own Olympic and rugby teams. Without white spoilsports, South Africa could field all-black teams in every discipline, including swimming where Chad Guy Bertrand le Clos would compete for the French, given his very Gallic names.