Where do the black stars disappear to when the season winds down?

Another rugby season’s just about done, and just in time if you ask me.

I’ve taken an interest in the Virseker Cup playoff games up here n Gauteng for a change – I work for a rugby website now and I have to report on something – and I’m also keeping my eye on the big games that seem to be stacked up at the end of the season. It was the Paarl Derby a few weeks ago, Jeppe vs KES and Glenwood vs Grey the week before that and this weekend is the really big one, Grey College vs Paul Roos Gimnasium for the heavyweight crown of SA Schools rugby.

All of those were preceded, of course by the Craven Week. And at the Craven Week, roughly half of the players on display were black and in many of the games the best players on the field were black, and when in the discussions around who stood out were held the names of players of colour were right up there: Gumede, Manyike, Xamlashe, Vlitoor, Ncube – all among the stars of the show, just as in any other year.

As the season wound down however, the teams still in action began to take on a rather bleached look. Sure, the names mentioned above are in the SA Schools team, not playing for their schools, but you have to wonder where the other great black players who were in Paarl have disappeared to. Selborne, KES, Glenwood and Jeppe are exceptions, but in the games I’ve been to in the last three weeks, and the ones I’ve watched on TV, there have been 1 or 2 players of colour, tops, on the field and some of the teams have had none at all.

Now you have to wonder what the justification is for showing, on national TV, a rugby game between two all-white teams in 2018! Worse, you have to ask why the top rugby schools in the land seem to see transformation as not their responsibility, and why they are being allowed to get away with it.

I’m not talking in absolutes here. Of course the top-ranked schools have produced some fabulous players of colour over the years, well they have fielded them, anyway. And that may just be the point – the practice of bringing in black stars, usually from somewhere else, is not transformation. It meets the demands of the compulsory quota and I’ll concede that playing for a top school in their final year or two, against other top schools, plays an important part in turning them into the finished product, but it’s actually about winning games, not about developing human potential.

And if, as seems to be the case at the moment, there are no black stars about that can help them do that, then it seems they are quite happy to go shopping at the white market and field all-white teams.

And the English speaking boys schools are carrying the can. They don’t have enough good old-fashioned Afrikaner meat in their ranks, so they don’t rank right up there consistently, but they are doing fine with teams that are 50%, or more, black. And the provincial teams that those players are being selected for are doing OK at the Craven Week.

The professional teams, and the Springboks, are going to have to field more players of colour, it’s just not useful to argue about that anymore. The way things are going, it doesn’t look like those players are going to be coming from our rugby powerhouse schools, and no-one is doing anything about it. Is that not perhaps why we aren’t competitive at international level anymore?