ABSTRACT
By the late 1800s the African continent had become a major political game for colonial ‘masters’ where European powers amalgamated some 10,000 African polities into forty European colonies and protectorates by treaty and/or conquest (Meredith 2006). The modern states of Africa are thus largely a result of European political negotiations, where boundaries were created along geometric lines enclosing diverse populations to establish colonial territories for France, Germany, Belgium, Portugal and the British Empire. In South Africa, the British Empire subjected the two independent Boer republics and sowed the bitter seed of Afrikaner nationalism that would flourish after the formation of the Union of South Africa, which received independence in 1910 under white minority rule (Allen 2003). The Afrikaner sporting culture became predominantly associated with rugby, when in 1908 a national team competed under the emblem of the springbok (Nauright 1992, 1997). The politics of race, ethnicity and sport was thus tied in the very nexus of rugby symbolism.
