In April 1986, lured by NZ$100,000 (a lot in those days) for each player, thirty of New Zealand’s best rugby players known as the “Cavaliers” slipped out of their country and flew to apartheid South Africa to play in an “unofficial test series” against that country’s ‘national’ team.
South Africa was banned from international competition at the time because of its apartheid policies and the tour did not have the sanction of rugby’s international controlling board.
The Cavaliers “tour” took place five years after an “official” tour by the South Africans (with the exception of one coloured player, an all-white team) had been disrupted by a well organized anti-apartheid movement in New Zealand.
On the eve of the 2008 Rugby World Cup in France, The Observer Sports Monthly reminded its readers of the shameful part of rugby union’s history.
The main thrust of the piece while it is scathing of the “rebels,” is more interested in illustrating New Zealand grit during the inaugural Rugby World Cup twenty years ago: how that country’s players (including the rebels who had been reinstated into the team) and its fans came together to will the team on to win the final under new captain David Kirk (profiled at length in the piece).
Nevertheless, the piece makes for a good piece of history (the kind of stuff you rarely read in the South African media). The best characterization of the Cavaliers come from Frank van der Horst, the president of the black South African Council on Sport at the time, who correctly identified the players as ‘sporting prostitutes … they are not coming here to enhance sport, they are coming here to debase humanity.’
Van der Horst was not exaggerating as 1986 was quite a bad year for South Africa’s black majority.
The duplicity of New Zealand’ rugby authorities when it came to apartheid rugby and white rule is laid bare: the players were reinstated after one year bans and the coach of the Cavaliers, Colin Meads, took charge of the national team again.
Meads, one of that country great rugby players, ‘had never seen anything wrong with maintaining sporting links with South Africa, even during the worst excesses of the apartheid regime, and he had agreed to manage the rebel tour.’
Long after the Cavaliers still felt they were ‘victims.’ This was not uncommon as the rebel tours by cricketers from New Zealand, Sri Lanka, the West Indies, England and Australia to South Africa during the 1980s would also prove.
As to whether time has led to contrition on the part of the players who took part in that ‘tour,’ Mortimer writes:
‘Many of the rebels are still in denial about the tour. Only one, Hobbs, has expressed regret, saying in an interview in 1999 that ‘the black majority didn’t want us there and I think that should have been respected’. The rest of the players refuse to discuss their reasons for going, although one, fly-half Grant Fox, told a New Zealand newspaper last year that he was pleased he had gone. “I think it helped me immensely as a rugby player. I came back having learnt a great deal about the game.”‘
* The title of this post is taken from Jeremy Cronin’s epic poem ‘Even the Dead.’