Rugby, Julius Malema, and the battle over historical narratives

Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) commander-in-chief Julius Malema must be firm favourite to take the award for “Idiotic Quote of 2023”.

He asserted with a straight face – probably because he has convinced himself it’s true – that “rugby is not a white man’s sport…they found it here…” He followed that up with the remark that people were playing rugby in the Eastern Cape long before white colonists arrived in the country.

This will be a surprise to sports historians, convinced by the story that the game originated at Rugby School in Warwickshire, England, in 1823 when during a game of football, William Webb Ellis decided to pick up a ball and run with it.

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Malema clearly wanted to jump on the bandwagon of patriotic support for the Springboks after they won the Rugby World Cup… but his own general knowledge let him down a little.

He also had a go at the Boks themselves, saying the Springbok was a “symbol of apartheid” and that it “must fall”.

There is method behind this EFF rabble-rousing madness, though. Malema cannot abide anything which shows racial unity because that undermines his party’s narrative of racial and economic exploitation. The EFF needs the oxygen of racial enmity to survive.

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