BACKGROUND TO RACE IN MODERN SOUTH AFRICAN SPORTS:
Greetings Dramatards 
Sport in South Africa has always been very weird, and for the past 30 years was difficult to describe to foreigners. What I mean by this, is that just like the entire society of modern democratic South Africa, race and racism has played a profound effect upon how peeps here view and interact with the 
Big 3 Sports - namely the most popular sports by far in South Africa, and Southern Africa in general.
The Big Three, in order of significant popularity, are Soccer, Rugby and Cricket. Yet all three have displayed very weird interactions with race and racism in South Africa, especially when compared to Burgerland 
whom could be argued is amongst RSA and Brasilia, the most racially diverse countries on earth, and perhaps even in recorded history so far.
In Burgerland, even in their version of Segregation, black peeps especially would suffer similar discriminations as their South African counterparts in sports, yet Apartheid as a system, compared to Amerikan Segregation was a far far more extreme version of systemic society wide racial segregation. In Burgerland black athletes would be allowed to compete in amerikan sports like NBA and yank Baseball.
From as much as 100 years ago, from between 1920s to 1960s, black yanks would gradually and systemically be included, and play progressively more and more prominent roles as athletes, as yank society dramatically liberalized within the span of just a century. And more significantly, compared to south africa, they would gradually integrate and play with their white peers and fellow white athletes as comrades in sports, for yanks the notion of meritocracy and glory within arena of National Sports would literally overrule their racism lol 
But that is not how things were done during the rule of the Union of South Africa, the arbiters of Apartheid. For whatever autism took hold of their senses, the Afrikaners and Bongs in charge of Southern Africa would develop the culture of not just segregating races into different arenas and sections based on race, but to ACTUALLY SEGREGATE RACES INTO ENTIRELY DIFFERENT SPORTS! 
So wtf do I mean by that. During the period of High Apartheid, between 1950-1993, the premier sports for the most powerful ethnic faction (Boers) would come to be Rugby and Cricket, with Rugby taking the crown, in terms of the most glorious sport for the highest level of athlete to participate in - much in the same way in which American Football is the dominant sport in which Burgerland's top tier athletes seek to find prestige in,
which is ironic 
because america basically syphons of its top cream athletes to play in sports like NBA and Yank-Football, which ONLY americans care about! Instead of Rugby or Cricket, which are very similar sports, and soak up similarly skilled and body-typed athletes into their ranks, and are internationally and globally the most popular sports. So the poor yank leftover athletes who do actually compete in International Cricket/Rugby tournaments, while they certainly aren't terrible athletes, they are also not International Top Tier mega sports stars and get thrashed usually, while all burgerland's mega athletes are soaked up in crappy discount rugby and discount cricket 
(What a fokken waste yanks, but that's another story)
Now what happened in SA was that because of the Boer obsession with Rugby and Cricket, and in conjunction with their increasingly draconian race-segregations laws (starting in 1950s, depending on which Verwoerd would enact the 1st Apartheid laws), the Sports like Rugby and Soccer would become almost entirely racially segregated - both in law and in custom and culture over the 5 decades in which the NP dominated the Union of South Africa.
What I mean by this, is that because Boers/Afrikaners/SA-Bongs mostly cared about Rugby and Cricket, they would basically discount Soccer as a lesser sport, a sport for Bleks. Over time, Rugby became to be associated with whites, and Soccer with Blacks. Many black peeps did desire to play Rugby, both casually and competitively, but was obviously barred from playing so in Town Clubs, or Provincial/National teams, in a similar vein as Blanke/White Only beaches where black and coloured people were barred from. The same with Cricket.
https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/early-history-rugby-south-africa
The long story short was that over time, black athletes who desired to excel in anything they wanted to put their minds and bodies to, had only Soccer available as an outlet for athletic excellence. And as the years passed into decades, Soccer would become culturally more african than european by the eyes of both black and white south africans. As black peeps had neither the capacity to compete in National Rugby, or even spectate in their matches.
This is all the more tragic, in that during the early half of the century of 1900-1950s, showcased that many South Africans had great reverence to the sport of Rugby, and even back then wished to be part of the Union of South Africa, as equal citizens and fellow teammates to their white counterparts, yet the extremism of Afrikaners would spurn this affection by the time the 1950s arrived.
https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/early-history-rugby-south-africa
=====(from article)
In 1906-1907 South Africa fielded its first national rugby team on a tour of the British Isles. The all-White team was composed of Afrikaners and British colonial South Africans. The tour helped erase ill-will that had existed between the two groups since the bloody Anglo-Boer war of 1899-1902. The English media referred to the team as the Springboks - an anglicized version of the team's self entitled Afrikaans nickname, the Springbokken.
Participation in rugby was not limited to White South Africans for long. By the late nineteenth century some Blacks had adopted rugby as an element of their identity. In 1896 a celebration was held in honour of H.C. Msikinya for his acceptance into Wilberforce University. At the party Msikinya listed his membership in the Rovers Rugby Football club amongst his various social accomplishments.
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Oh yes, the grand tragedy is that Boers in the 1900s were ironically MORE tolerant of their black peers and countrymen, than what would follow in the wave of reactionary extremism in the period of the late 1940s -1993, in a collective action of self-actualization which self destructed into a notion of racial supremacy and domination in Southern Africa 
A complete inverse of the rapid liberalization of the Western Democracies, which changed from colonial cultural chauvinism to liberal collective freedom.
=====(from article)
Soon after White South Africans formed rugby's first official governing bodies Black South Africans followed suit. In 1889 the Whites-only South African Rugby Board was founded. Eight years later the South African Coloured Rugby Football Board was founded to organize and oversee club matches between Black South Africans at the regional level.
Rugby played an important role in weakening the divisions between various Black religious groups in the Cape. Matches drew women, men and children from different religious backgrounds as spectators. Community members collaborated with one another and raised money for their respective clubs through activities such as dances. Matches also engendered a sense of mutual respect amongst players for the toughness and bravery of their opponents, even though club membership was strictly divided along religious lines. 
From the outset rugby brought South Africans together. Just half a decade after the British had thrown Afrikaners into concentration camps - during the Anglo-Boer War - the two groups played alongside one another under the Springbok banner. The sport also facilitated social interaction amongst the various religious groups of the country's Black inhabitants. Early on rugby demonstrated a capacity to heal wounds and establish commonalities amongst South Africans. 
=====(end quote)
1976 REFORMS:
Even as early as the 1970s, South Africa had become a Pariah state and was facing international pressure from overseas to cease Apartheid rule. The New Zealand rugby team, the All Blacks faced pressure from citizens to not tour and play in SA that year. And though no actual impactful sanctions against SA had begone in this time, a lot of International groups decried South Africa, and would denounce the Springbok Rugby team, from barring Black people from participating in National and International tournaments.
Remarkably the NP regime had caved into international pressure at this time, in order to not have the South African Rugby team banned from International competition! That was how important Rugby was to Boers! 
They were willing to suspend some of their segregation laws, in order to appease international Liberal pressures, not out of the goodness of their hearts, but simply so that the International Rugby Union would not bar them from competing internationally!!! 
Of course, by this time the damage had been done, the culture of sport slitting apart had been entrenched for over 25 years, and black peeps had associated soccer with their culture, and Rugby as a white man's sport. This is not to say that there were NO black athletes taking advantage of the 1976 reforms to take part into Rugby, now that segregation laws in competing had been lifted, many black peeps enjoyed rugby,
But they were negligible in number, and the tide of culture made even trying to integrate with their white peers, whom were often obviously racist, a monumental cultural barrier 
Even worse, was that there were few facilities available for training to become proficient Rugby players as black athletes in the 1st place
"However at times rugby's unifying capacity was ignored and South Africans chose instead to use the sport as an instrument of oppression. During much of the twentieth century rugby in South Africa was hi-jacked and the sport's healing powers were forgotten. Racist ideology and legislation prevented White and Black South Africans from playing the game together until 1976, when the apartheid regime took its reluctant first steps toward sporting reform. Even after the reforms of 1976 Black South Africans faced unofficial barriers to sporting equality such as limited access to training facilities and inadequate nutrition."
SPRINKBOKS AND RUGBY BECAME WHITE:
Similar to Hitler and his buddies in the 1936 Olympics, Rugby and the Springboks became this weird symbol of Boer racial dominance and a demonstration that Afrikaners were the premier race who deserved rulership and had the God-given right to dominate all peoples of Southern Africa, in a weird paternal racism, they believed they had to "take care" of black peeps in SA because they were to unevolved to govern themselves.
I'm not joking this was the dominant ideology for both Afrikaner politicians and laymen. And weirdly enough! They justified this as their holy duty and believed they were endorsed by God, after all if God didn't disapprove, then he certainly made no holy miracle actions to stop Apartheid, and thus the Boers were morally correct. Not joking.
END OF SEPARATION AND 1995 RUGBY WORLD CUP VICTORY:
I go on this long tangent to make dramatards and foreigners comprehend just how systemically and culturally the sports of Cricket, and especially Soccer and Rugby had been separated over half a century.
In 1995 Madiba Mandela would make perhaps his most infamously praised publicity stunt, which would garner him great respect, love and adoration from many whites in SA. He understood the neurodivergent reverence which SA mayos placed upon the sport of Rugby, and knew he could win the favor of many of them, by placing equal respect as a none-white onto "their" sport in SA.
1995 was considered the most powerful Springbok team by Rugby-autismos, and if you even gave half a shit about the sport, then 1995 was a great time to be a Safrican rugby fan. The crowning moment of the glorious victory in the finals saw Mandela personally presenting his fellow white countrymen with the victory cup, which at the time was a powerful symbol for liberals and reconciliation, especially as many black peeps, whom were now the top dog ethnicity, disregarded Rugby as purely a mayo sport and only venerated Soccer. But since mandela was charismatic and very public-image savvy he took the opportunity to empower his message of reconciliation for the divided nation, and some other sappy shit
And at that moment in time, was thought to be a very hopeful moment in South Africa's history, which of course we in hindsight tragically know would be pissed on by the corruption following the Mandela admin afterwards
POST-1993 RACIAL INTEGRATION:
Now with this history in mind, it needs to be understood that, in the following 30 years there would be perpetual 
between black and white south africans regarding the status of racial integration in Sports like Soccer and rugby.
For Soccer, South Africans would already be screwed, and many 
and 9Gag starggots and Stromfront fools would continue to compare the astonishing difference between the performance of the white dominated South African Rugby team, the Springboks 
, the SA Cricket team, the Proteas 
, and the national Soccer team, Bafana 
Bafana (which translates as slang for "The Boys" in zulu).
To put things simply, the Bafana Bafana team fricking sucks. Their performance locally and internationally has been up and down, but ultimately have graduated to fricking standards lower than shark 
shit 
shade at the bottom of the sea abyss. Many safrican racistoids point 
to this as proof of the racial inferiority of black peeps in terms of governance and athleticism. Many ANC and Bafana Bafana wingcucks sneed and cope 
that the national team isn't a garbage pile, and thus no internal reflection is ever imported to the management of this floundering national team.
https://www.news24.com/sport/bafana-bafana-the-squandered-2010-inheritance-20200611
Including Safrica 
getting r*ped on home turf back in the 2010 Soccer World Cup.
"Bafana have not been part of a FIFA World Cup tournament since 2010." 
It's important to not that this is not due to a lack of individual talent of black peeps in south africa in general, often the irony is clear when local soccer clubs outperform the poor performance of Bafana Bafana. The reason is corruption to the same magnitude and type of which the ANC had infested the rest of the country's public infrastructures.
Nepotism and r-sluration often play a great deal in which black players get positions within the Bafana Bafana team, and subsequently, despite having a population talent pool outnumbering their white counterparts by a factor of 10:1 the national team has over 3 decades FAILED to fricking put the best South Africans into the positions they deserved, not even the best BLACK 
soccer athletes in the fricking country would obtain their spots, and this was compounded by the fact that the top trainers and instructors were equally nepostistically inept and moronic compared to their cricket and rugby counterparts.
Many black soccer athletes literally frick off overseas and earn money in foreign countries when they are never picked in top spots!!
The worst part is that this is not an unfixable problem, and is in magnitude a much lesser challenge that the corruption of the country by the ANC, just one cycle could purge all the morons and deadbeats, and make an excellent black South African national soccer team !! 
The issue for black safricans is an inability to galvanize in mass numbers an purge the entire corrupt institution of SAFA (South African Football Association) which is as corrupt to the core as the rest of ANC related public enterprises, with the often political overlap of ANC pollitcal power bases fighting for control of this popular institution and its monopoly of handling soccer related affairs on a national and provincial level in the country - and I've made enough autismo longposts for you Dramatards to have a general idea as to the corruption and incompetency which that entails.
DIFFERENCES BETWEEN WHITE AND BLACK SPORT ORGANIZATION SUPPORT:
But the most significant reason for this discrepancy between between the these "white" and "black" sports of soccer and Rugby is precisely BECAUSE they are seen as traditionally as white and black sports culturally. And that has influenced pretty much all of SAFA's development from its foundation since 1991, with it being substantially 
younger than its Rugby/Cricket equivalents.
Because basically the National Rugby Union of SA had existed for pretty much a century longer than SAFA, they have had a pretty substantial unequal time to develop intergenerational knowledge and expertise on how to run Sporting events, and how to support the training of Rugby youths replacements from the smallest local school coaching program, to the highest levels of provincial and international training regimes and coaching strategizing 
Combined with the fact that during the Apartheid years from 1950s to 1993, black peeps were unable to organize soccer events or governing-bodies to the same level as their white peers, because BOSS (those scary Saffer version of CIA douchebags) kept shutting down national black organizations out of paranoia, even benign non-political organizations such for shit like sport/soccer, black peeps did in fact start with a major disadvantage compared to their white countrymen, with regards to accumulating the greatest talentpool for soccer athletes from schools to clubs, even if they in ethnic population numbers outnumbered their white peers by a factor of 5-10.
Additionally, it must be acknowledged that the sporting facilities, like even the basic foundational infrastructure, like HighSchool playing fields or gym, or locker room facilities between teh average black and white schools could be pretty vast, with prestigious traditionally white schools (even if by modern day 2024 they can even be populationwise less than 15% white pupils) still fricking dominate in the local safrican Highschool Rugby scene. Notice how many afrikaneroid names they haz
https://saschoolsports.co.za/school-rugby-rankings-5/
In Burgerland you have Soccer-moms/parents, and in safrica we have Rugby-parents with slapfights erupting between r-slurred parents who take the child sport of School-rugby MORE seriously than that of their under-10 year olds, and get into frequent fricking fights with the local ref lmoa.
So you guys can see how there is valid reason for "black" sports like soccer in SA to have had a traditional disadvantage compared to Mayo sports, and how irritated black peeps can be when the this dismal comparison in performance is underlined between Soccer and Rugby by noooooticers 
and even regular safrican countrymen who lament this shit performance of Bafana Bafana, compared to the Springboks, even when black south africans are the ones to make note of this utterly dismal comparison.
https://lovetovisitsouthafrica.com/south-african-sports-culture-springbok-vs-bafana/
Even fricking Trevor Noah comparedd the shittiness of Banana Banana with Springboks in one of his stand up specials. (recommended actually very funni 
)
He makes a joke that it's a national catastrophe when Springboks play dismally 
Whereas if Banana Bafana plays like butt/eish and drops the ball lower than shark shit shade at the bottom of the oceanic abyss, nobody cares, not even fricking black soccer fans 
So it's not just racist chuds making these dismal comparisons.
HOWEVER, only racial wingcucks and fools have so far been willing to excuse the dismal performance of Bafana Bafana over the past 3 decades, especially since it has been 3 decades, a whole generation! With all of the governmental affirmative action of an entire nation backing the system, the excuses of historic discrimination begins to feel hollow to non-biased peeps witnessing these depraved poor performances by our national soccer athletes.
Especially since many soccer fans are of the opinion, that Bafana Bafana is actually fricking WORSE in 2024, than in even 2010 (during the SA world cup hosting), and many give the argument that fricking modern Bafana Bafana, and even provincial Soccer sport exceptionalism is worse than the 1991-2000 period!!! 
what the fok
The argument is that just like ANC-tier corruption, in the earliest stages of the fledgling democracy of SA, the initial SAFA (South African Football Association) was more meritocratic and uncorrupt, whereas LateStageCorruption has thoroughly hollowed out the fricking organization's capacity to deliver progress and results, especially compared to it's Rugby counterpart which has produced global rugby champions as recently as fricking last year in 2023. 
And now amount of sleazy and pathetic BEE astroturfing by the ANC dominated gov has been able to enable the grassroots supports which the Springboks has enjoyed by all of the races in SA lol
And whooooo boi is the calling out of that Mental Problem in national soccer leadership a massive controversial nuke 
in SA society and a massive spicy minefield 
for South Africa race relations!!! 
You see there is something I must explain to you guys about Safrican black peeps 
BLACK SOUTH AFRICAN VERSION OF BALKANS "INAT":
There is a specific mentality found within many many many many Safrican black peeps which are absurdly unique in its negative ramifications for society and worse for blacks peeps themselves than for white peeps - it is the ultimate expression of cutting your nose to spite your face that you will ever encounter in any demographic you can name on this earth, especially since other black peeps of Sub-Saharen africa or Southern-Africa in general DO NOT exhibit this form of insanity. Not Namibians, or Nigerians or congolese or zimbabweans.
I simply do not know how the frick to describe this mentality for foreigners without sounding like a massive massive MASSIVE racist, or you guys know, like an even more of a chudlord racist which I have become to be known here as the premier mayo safrican racist (against micks 
) on this Godforsaken site. I had no frame or reference or example to make outlanders understand what the frick I was talking about. 
That was until I watched a Youtube video from LivingIronicallyInEurope a few weeks, a Serboid 
Balkanoid, who's content I think is very similar in style to the Longposting crap I spam on rDrama.net, in that he talks frankly about the shortcomings of his host nation and the Balkans in general with sincerity.
The specific video this strag talked about, was "what constituted the Balkans", or which countries counts as being part of the Balkans, a historically famously unstable region fraught with conflict. He makes the thesis that the Balkans are more a coherent cultural description than a geographic one, especially since after so many heated online debates on which countries in the regions exactly belongs to to the Balkans.
He makes the case that what unifies the consensus of which countries belongs to the historic Balkans are the shared suffering which the Europeans living there had, subjugated underneath the powerful Ottoman Turks for hundreds of years. The poor frickers in the Balkans are pretty much the only Eurocucks fully colonized by a non-native, non-white race and culture, and it's clear how this has affected their cultural psyche and intergenerational "Samelewing" or societal cohesive glue, and how much this makes Balkanoids differ from Western eurocucks
As a way to screw over their Turkic overlords, the Balkanoids would develop the cultural practice of "Inat" which can maybe be translated as "stubborn-spitefulness" or petty efforts of resistance. The most striking example of Inat was when the Balkanoids would deliberately cause littering and pollution upon their very own streets, to spite and screw over their Ottoman overlords, as the Ottomans were responsible for the administration of their new conquered Balkan backwaters, and consequently the upkeep and cleaning of public streets. Thus literally forcing the Turkroach administrators to clean after them.
This was not too dissimilar to Black south africans deliberately causing pollution and littering in places like Soweto during Apartheid as a form of protest, forcing the NP regime to come clean this shit up afterwards 
A very successful form of cucking your oppressors
HOWEVER, the issue is that that this initially protesting form of behaviour has since formed as part of a since runaway culture, a culture long since having forgotten the origin of the reason for pollution to begin with, and now this fricking culture cancer has been normalized. This stands for both Balkanoids and many black safricans I think
BLACK SAFRICAN CONTRARIANISM WHEN MAYOS OFFER HELP WITH BAFANA BAFANA INEPTITUDE:
Many times mayo ex-directors or leaders of Rugby Unions or coaches of Rugby and Cricket teams of SA would attempt to offer their administrative experience or advice for SAFA, only to be spurned and hackled by the peeps running this flaming wreck. And like usual for safrican drama, there's a racial undertone to this rejection.
Sometimes actual individual Bafana players themselves even try to make contact with Rugby Union leadership, only to receive backlash from their own black fanbase.
Other times they receive support for actually voicing and acknowledging that there' a structural problem with national sport in SA soccer.
Other times yet still, it is considered a direct attack on black people who govern Bafana Bafana, when white coaches pretty directly insinuates (regardless if it's true lol) that they think the soccer team is trash in comparison to their Rugby peers.
https://www.idiskitimes.co.za/africa-cup-of-nations/broos-bafana-squad-must-learn-from-springboks/
If you just read these sanitized, political correct articles, you would as a foreigner come to the conclusion that these exchanges on media are done with civility and reciprocated respect, when in reality it is nothing of the sort lmoa
=================
What ends up happening is that when some filthy mayo coach has the balls to offer advice or even his administrative services free of charge to transform the SAFA organization back into shape, they are immediately met with vitriol and resistance, and flaming on black safrican twitter.
Even star players like Percy Tau would suffer rebuke from his own racially wingcucked fans, for daring to suggest to emulate the "white" run sport of the Rugby Unions, and in order to regain public favor from their black peers sometimes have to fricking go as far as to utterly reject anything suggested by the historically oppressive Boers, EVEN if it would be detrimental to do so for themselves! EVEN if they themselves had the idea or notion to steer in that direction in the 1st place. To be contrarian to the white oppressors had become such manner of Inat or spiteful-stubbornness that it overwhelmes the original problem of SAFA's corruption to begin with. 
And thus the corruption of SAFA goes unaddressed.
A similar example is when many Free State province white Chemical-Engineers would retire in almost every municipality in the country, and offer their black replacements in the period 0f 2005-2010, to personally train them and show them the ropes, and tell them important shit like the chemical compositions which Sewage Refinaries had to have with regards to chlorophyll to volume rations, because just throwing chlorophyll into the fricking sewage in conjunction with other chemical compounds would decisively not held in processing the sewage back into drinking water. 
AND THEY WERE ALWAYS REJECTED
All because it had come from white men. And it wasn't always just purely altruistic either, you drink the same tapwater regardless of your race, so there was logical reason for offfering your expertise.
And thus every EVERY single Free State municipality does not have potable water, when 30 years ago all of them did.
And I get it, to spite douchebags who fricked you over, and now seems to demean you must be humiliating, but this level of Inat is the ultimate expression of cutting off your nose to spite your face.
Also @Aevann plz pin otherwise i will be anally r*ped by a rampaging horde of marauding Micks
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Glad to have you back!
I suspect that basketball is actually more popular than rugby but I would classify rugby, cricket, basketball, and baseball as regionally popular rather than globally popular.
Do South Africans call Rugby βfootballβ, or soccer βfootballβ, or does it vary by ethnicity?
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True except for Basketball. Most places with decent avg height all have leagues, even the fookin chinese.
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Basketball is kinda weird, in that so much of its popularity worldwide comes from east Asia (particularly China). Since the game is only somewhat popular in the West outside of the US and Canada, and the West doesn't really pay that much attention to sport in east Asia, the perception of its popularity gets skewed.
Baseball is similar, as well. It's quite popular in east Asia, and is second only to soccer in most of Latin America, but its basically ignored everywhere else.
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