‘Why I won’t go to South Africa’

Press, 1 May 1981, Page 13

‘Why I won’t go to South Africa’

While New Zealanders are bitterly involved in the argument over a Springbok tour of this country, the Irish are equally at odds about the visit to be made by their rugby team to South Africa. As in New Zealand, the Irish Government has condemned the tour and players have refused selection. One of these is the British Lion, Tony Ward, who talked to Tom McKurk of the “Sunday Tribune,” Dublin, about his experiences with the Lions in South Africa last year which compelled him on moral grounds not to go back there this year with the Irish team.

On Thursday, May 24,1980, Tony Ward arrived in South Africa to join a British Lions party already stricken by injury. Ward vividly remembers in those few steps on South African soil his first contact with the twin symbols of the place where" he was to spend the next eight weeks — apartheid' and rugby.

“As I walked through customs I spotted those toilet signs, ‘blacks only toilets’ and ‘whites only toilets.’ At the other end I was astonished to be met by a battery of nearly 30 photographers. It was my first taste of the intensity of rugby in South Africa. But as the tour went on, all this became a lot more meaningful. . .” Ward admits quite freely that he did not think twice about going to South Africa once the call came. “I wanted to be a Lion and it was really as selfish as that. I don’t deny it.” But in the coming weeks the Lions tour was to make a deeper impression on Ward than he had ever imagined. His first glimpse of how many of South Africa’s 20 million blacks live came when he accompanied the Lions scrum-half, Colin Patterson, and some friends on a visit to a black township outside Bloemfontein. ■ The group drove around slowly in the car with Patterson snapping-off pictures from the back seat. They were afraid even to stop and get out. "I found it absolutely horrific.” Ward recalled. ‘’The shacks were made of tin, there seemed to be thousands upon thousands of them. If they had toilets it was just a barrel at the back, and one thing that struck me was the number of cars they had — old bangers, mind you. I understand under law they can’t buy their houses so they buy these cars instead.” Township was sealed off At a later stage in the tour, W’ard and a group of players and journalists attempted to visit the New Brighton black township near Port Elizabeth. However, the reporting on other townships earlier in the tour had annoyed the South African authorities and, with a huge international press corps in Port Elizabeth for the third test, they took action. All 11 entrances to the township were sealed by armed police, in LandRovers. The group were warned off, being told that

there was rioting going on. "Quite clearly,” Ward said, “the place was totally quiet. We could see right down into it.” An attitude which ■ the Lions encountered that confused them most was the way they found the blacks all willing them on to beat the Springboks. “This I found extraordinary. After all, they were South Africans too, but everywhere we met blacks in the street or whatever, it was always. ‘Go man, beat ‘the Boks’,” Ward recalled. ’f | Damaged black | cause One quiet Sunday afternoon on their second visit to Bloemfontein Ward, accompanied by John Robbie, Clive Woodw’ard, and Paul Dodge, decided to play golf. On the course they were surrounded by about 30 black youngsters — “about late teens and all literally dressed in rags. They wanted to caddy for us.” said W’ard. “Master, master,” they clamoured. “This w r as the bit I could never take — people calling me master. We selected two kids and I took them aside and I said this is John and Paul and Clive and I’m Tony, but after that they didn’t call

us anything at all. It really confused them.” The youths explained that they were allowed to playgolf only on a Monday morning and had to pay "for the privilege. The cost'was way beyond the two rand they received for the average two or three-hour caddy. “Tipping was forbidden but we left them thinking they- were millionaires. But all these little inequalities, they were simply just everywhere,” Ward reflected. Ward was also involved in two incidents where hostility was openly displayed towards them. At Cape Town University, when he and Ollie Campbell went for some kicking practice, a large crowd of coloureds gathered and began a barrage of abuse. They called them racists, and told them to go home to where they came from. On another occasion — which to Ward was quite inexplicable — a white soccer team with whom they were sharing the same hotel booed and jeered at them in .the hotel lobby, again taunt-, ing them with the term racists. Reflecting at this stage, Ward finds hundreds of little incidents flooding back, like the morning some Lions .were coming down in the hotel lift for breakfast. A

black chambermaid entered the lift, weighed down with a huge tray of glasses. Seeing her, the manager roared at her to get out and walk down. ‘ "We were all deeply embarrassed.” said Ward. s But perhaps the most im- " pressionable afternoon of all that Ward experienced in South Africa was when he W'ent to visit the Watson brothers. Both Chick Watson and his brother, who live in Port Elizabeth, decided some years ago to play rugby with a SARtJ (non-racial union) team in the New Brighton township rather than continue to play with a whitesonly club. Cheeky Watson was a top-class rugby player and had won a Springbok trial. That afternoon Ward was accompanied by, among others, Bill Beaumont, the Lions captain. “They have been renounced by all their white friends because they are playing with a black club.” said Ward. "Cheeky has even lost his wife. He’s also been arrested numerous times for breaking th law by entering the black township without a permit. “They explained in great depth the set-up in South African rugby and they told us in unequivocal term's that we shouldn’t have come at all,” Ward said. That incident was in many ways a unique occasion, a debate abut South African rugby among rugby players only.

The Watsons underlined the damage the Lions were doing- by being there at all and this seemed to have a strong effect on Beaumont, according to Ward. Beaumont, of course, as Lions captain, was in a difficult position. “As we drove back •in the car, I talked to Beaumont and he seemed both deeply impressed and depressed at what he had heard.”

As the Lions tour progressed the eyes and ears of the players 'became more and more attuned to the delicate racial mix that was going on all around them. However, events approached something of a crisis at

Springs after the game against Eastern Transvaal. The Lions noticed that, among the huge crowd of nearly a thousand people at the after-match reception, there was not one black face to be seen. Then for some strange reason the Lions were refused entry into the members-only bar at the Springs ground. To cap it all, in his aftermatch speech, the Mayor ("or someone like that,” said Ward) cracked a joke. "Its punchline was something about a coloured television. I can't remember the actual joke but it was clearly a racist one and the Lions in the room felt very uneasy.” On one occasion, after the Transvaal match in Johannesburg, Ward and some other players were given a stark lesson in white attitudes towards the blacks. They engaged in conversation with some apparently wealthy women at the aftermatch function. The women talked about the black problem and boasted about the number of servants they had. ‘Scum of the earth’ Ward recalled: "The way they were talking about them was that these people were the scum of the earth. They really believed this, and I don’tknow where this attitude comes from. It just sickened me.” '■ The emerging star black player, Errol Tobias, was one 1 with Whom Tony Ward struck up a close friendship. "We were both out-halves, and he admitted he owed everything he had to rugby. He could become the first black Springbok.*But he had his feelings, too, and when we were talking together he was always very careful and very conscious as to who was around him and might be listening. One felt he longed to speak his mind but couldn't.” On the final visit to Cape Town, Roger Young, the former Irish scrum-half, now living there, brought Ward and some other players to visit a children's hospital.

Many of the children were seriously disabled, but for Ward what compounded their tragedy was that here, even in the wards, there was segregation between. whites, blacks, and coloureds. "It was unbelievable. I found that the saddest sight I had ever seen.”

Ward’s decision not to go with Ireland back to South Africa this year was made long before the tour became the public controversy it now is. He made that decision the day he returned from the Lions tour last June. It was a clear moral decision as far as he was concerned —- under no circumstances would he play rugby in South Africa again.

"I remember when I was in college, I did a paper arguing that sport and politics don’t mix. But really, when you boil it down, by representing your country you are playing for a political entitv for starters.

"In South Africa, I have no doubt whatsoever that politics and sport are one and the same. To my mind rugby is used as a political weapon and that’s why I. am against the tour. I believe that rugby is so important. I might be wrong, to the Afrikaner, that if you take it away from him he’s got to have a look at himself and say, ‘Why is this happening?’ ” ‘ Reflecting now on the 1980 Lions tour, Ward said that it

was more like a war. “I will readily admit that I didn't enjoy the rugby at all. The pressure from the Afrikaners to beat us was enormous. They even cheated by loading' the mid-week teams.” "The day they had won the test series I remember the six-jneh headline in the papers. Springboks — World Champions.' There was an awful lot more than rugby at stake in that tour, for the South Africans." On the question of boycott Ward stresses that his personal opinion is that ' the only way change will take place in South Africa is by boycott, especially in rugby. And if that happens, only then will they wonder what they need to do to win back their friends in rugby.’’ A ‘Catch-22’ situation Does he feel any commitment to the black players of South Africa'?. "I most certainly do. Look at it this way. I am very privileged to have played international rugby, only a tiny minority do. And I love this great game, it's the greatest game (and I'm biased). "I feel that everyone who takes it up must have equal opportunity, at the very least, to develop their own game to the best of their ability. Now the South Africans argue that the blacks are not good enough yet to play at all levels, but this is the Catch-22 situation.. . "How can they' be good enough, how can they develop if they are not given equal opportunity? And responsiblity lies on the shoulders "of all rugby' players to ensure that this comes about.’’ ' . I Ward, however, is ada- 1 mant' that die respects the right - to make the tour :of i those Irish players who' are going. "My decision is my own personal one and I re-' pect theirs. i "However, in all of this let me say that the bravest decision of all must be Hugo McNeill's. An emerging bril-; liant young international! turned down his first over-' seas tour with his country;] that really is remarkable' moral courage. | "But at the end of the day; you and I play a game and* then we go to .the. bar for a; pint. If you are black in? South Africa, that’s not pos-: sible. I go to the bar and you go to your township or wherever . and I’m alone in the bar with my pint. That's neither rugby, sporting, nor moral.”