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Professor of History and Kathlyn Cosper Dunagan Professor in the Humanities
Derek Charles Catsam is Professor of History and the Kathlyn Cosper Dunagan Professor in the Humanities at the University of Texas-Permian Basin and is Senior Research Associate at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa, where he spent 2016 as the Hugh Le May Fellow in the Humanities. He is the author of Flashpoint: How a Little-Known Sporting Event Fueled America’s Anti-Apartheid Movement (2021), Freedom’s Main Line: the Journey of Reconciliation and the Freedom Rides, (2009), Beyond the Pitch: The Spirit, Culture, and Politics of Brazil’s 2014 World Cup (2014) and Bleeding Red: A Red Sox Fan’s Diary of the 2004 Season (2005). He is currently working on books on bus boycotts in the United States and South Africa in the 1940s and 1950s and on American sports and politics since World War I.
Abstract
In 1995 South Africa’s Springboks famously won the World Cup, an event they hosted, and in so doing created a myth or rugby-as-agent-of-racial reconciliation that was as pernicious as it was enduring. Nelson Mandela’s savvy embrace of the Springboks revealed Madiba, the master of symbolic political moments, but also Madiba the perhaps naïve believer in the good faith of his political opposition. But as South African rugby entered a professional rugby era it had helped to birth. It has been 25 years since both the 1995 World Cup and the onset of the professional era. This paper will explore the last twenty-five years of South African rugby within the context of the country’s recent past and the deeply politicized nature of the sport in South Africa. [Please note that this might well make for a good roundtable topic.)
