Hacjivah Dayimani – Rugby wins out over a Cape gang

Born as a self-proclaimed “mistake” into an environment dominated by high school dropouts and gangsters, Hacjivah Dayimani never expected to find success on the rugby field.

“If you had asked me 10 years ago where I saw myself, I would’ve told you ‘on the streets, as a gangster’. I come from a family of dropouts,” the Lions ace, 22, told The Citizen this week.

“My older brothers dropped out of school in Grade 11, my older sister did the same in Grade 10 and I have six cousins, all of them dropouts.”

Expected to follow the same route, Dayimani opted instead to break the chain.

“I knew about my dad but didn’t have a personal relationship with him,” Dayimani says. “I had maybe spent a weekend or two with him, but then he remarried and I lost contact with him.”

In the absence of his father, at the age of 10, Dayimani started selling oranges near their home in Cape Town to help his mother pay rent. But it was not sufficient to help them get by.

“Unable to properly care for me, my mother sent me to live with my grandmother in the Eastern Cape, near the town of Cradock,” he says. “That meant I would’ve had to attend a Xhosa school in the township, and I couldn’t speak Xhosa. Then somehow my grandmother found a way to get me into the local primary school in Cradock.”

Until that point, soccer was the only sport he had played, but his new school didn’t offer soccer. Instead, they played rugby, so Dayimani joined the school team and played a variety of positions from wing to prop.

“What really started my love for rugby was watching the 2007 Rugby World Cup final and seeing Bryan Habana diving over the tryline when he scored,” he recalls. “I wanted to play a sport where I could dive just like that.”

However, with his grandmother, a domestic worker relying on handouts to ensure he had school uniform, his new life was not sustainable and he spent only one year at Cradock Primary.

“My grandmother was basically living off grant money and using that money to pay the loan sharks she was lending from,” Dayimani says. “We lived from debt to debt. It was a never-ending cycle and she couldn’t keep it up in terms of my schooling there.

“So when I had to leave Cradock Primary, my grandmother made contact with my father in Johannesburg. I think she knew there was no future for me there.”

At the age of 12, Dayimani left his grandmother and hiked to Johannesburg to begin the next stage of his life under his father’s roof.

“This was a difficult time because the only sport my father would allow me to do was boxing,” he says. “I hated it because, as a result of my size, I was always being forced to box in much older age categories. So I continued to play rugby in secret.”

While attending President High School, his determination paid off and he was offered a rugby scholarship at Jeppe, where he became a border.

No longer required to keep his passion a secret, his rugby career started to take off, and having made it into the school’s First XV, he was later selected for the South African Schools side.

After leaving high school he was picked up by the Lions, making his Vodacom Super Rugby debut in 2018, and he has since earned 29 caps in top-flight competition.

“My father said later he understood then why I had disobeyed him about rugby, and I’m really glad we resolved that before he died,” says Dayimani, who generally plays as a loose forward, but is also useful on the wing due to his blistering pace.

Though he had many opportunities to call it quits, Dayimani always found ways to keep fighting.

“While at President High School in Johannesburg I sold sweets and chips for bus money,” he says. “I worked [night shifts] at a petrol station to earn a living … and it was the worst job I ever had. To this day I have the utmost respect for petrol attendants.

“I’ve had to go and eat at soup kitchens to get a meal.”

Through all his troubles, Dayimani never gave up on himself.

“We’re all so different in life. We’re like popcorn. We all get put into the same pan with the same heat, but we don’t all pop at the same time,” he says.

“Everybody deals with difficult things in their life, and they do so in their own way, but overcoming is what brings us together.

“My life has been saved and I’m very grateful for where I am today.”

Dayimani hopes others will be motivated by his journey.

“I think the message from my life is that you can make excuses, but that doesn’t mean your problems will go away,” he says.

“If you give up, you just stay where you are, so I’ve always figured, what’s the point of that? You might as well just keep going.”

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