99% Invisible - 522- The Comrades

Episode Date: January 25, 2023

If you live in South Africa, you definitely know someone who runs ultra-marathons, probably lots of someones. Here, ultras are the stuff of a whole country’s new years resolutions and mid-life crises. They’re the kind of thing that a totally ordinary, not-athletic person wakes up one day and decides they’re going to do -- and then does.  In one of the most economically unequal countries in the world, extreme distance running is a sport that feels like it includes everybody. And improbably, that inclusiveness happened during one of the darkest, most divided moments in South Africa’s history – during the final years of apartheid. The Comrades

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. It's 5.25am outside of the city hall in Peter Merritt's Berg, South Africa, and Shahita Tungo is ready to go on a run. She's wearing a white running skirt and knee socks, one pink, one blue, and she's cracking jokes. Listen, I'm not there to run for the money, so I have to look good. I choose my struggles. I can't be fast, so I must be cute. The road around her is packed with other equally chipper runners, adjusting the race numbers,

snapping selfies, and dancing. Altogether, there are about 13,000 people here, and they're not getting ready for a 5K or a 10K or even a marathon. This is the start line of the comrades, which is 56 miles long. That's Ryan Lenora Brown, reporter in South Africa who was there the morning of the race in August. Most years, more than 15,000 people run the comrades, way more than run any other ultramarathon in the world.

For reference, about 25,000 people ran the last Boston marathon, but the comrades is more than twice as long. And as a foreigner in South Africa, I've been haunted for a long time by a question. Why the hell do South Africans think running a race like this for fun is a normal thing to do. Not only is it very, very long, the comrades goes to a part of South Africa whose name sounds pretty ominous when you're doing two back-to-back marathons through it. The Valley of a Thousand Hills.

How are you? Good, good, good, good, good, can I'm looking forward to it. Shihita is one of the Comrades' Pacers, who are appointed by the race to help groups of runners trying to finish in a certain time. In South Africa, these Pacers are called bus drivers, and the people they pace are their bus. Shaheeda paces the Comrade's slowest bus, made up of runners trying to finish just before the race's 12-hour cutoff. She's a kind of evangelist for running very slowly, very far.

I just want to make the slower runners like myself believe that the how is irrelevant, whether you crawling or rolling or whatever, as long as you're going forward it converts you are going forward. Today she's got a little piece of paper tucked into her pocket, telling her what times and distances she needs to hit to come in just under that 12 hour mark. Basically she's aiming to do this like a human metronome, 13-minute miles all day long. No faster and definitely no slower.

Over the course of the day, they'll follow a route that weaves through what feels like all of South Africa. The race winds through wealthy suburbs full of cafes and craft breweries and sleepy run down little farming towns. It cuts across the sugar cane plantations that first brought British colonizers to this region in the 1800s. There are shack settlements and rich private schools.

A few minutes after I see Shahida, they play the national anthem, and then another song comes on. Shoshunosa. It's a haunting tune that migrant laborers used to sing on their long journeys home from South Africa's gold mines. It's refrain means go forward. They were underground and it was dark.

It's a very draining task to do and that's exactly what comrades is. You know, you're going to try to along the whole day. So it is just saying, I can't do it. I will show Sholosa on, I will move on, I will keep going and no matter how hard it is, I have a purpose why I'm doing this. And then the cannon goes off. Then you start to watch. And we off. and we off. Around the world, ultra-marathons are having a moment.

These are races that are any distance longer than a standard 26.2 mile marathon. The number of people running them more than quadrupled between 2010 and 2020. There are now thousands of these races annually. But in most of the world, ultras are pretty niche, and they attract a very particular demographic. Your average Ultra runner in the US or Europe is a well-educated married man about 45 years old. In other words, they look a lot like me. And you only have to eyeball the start line of an Ultramarathon in North America or Europe

to see that this is still an overwhelmingly white sport. But in South Africa it's a different story. So all kinds of people run comrades. White, black, Indian, colored, male, female, others, wealthy, poor. If you live in South Africa you definitely know someone who runs altrues, probably lots of someone's. Here Ultramarathons are the stuff of a whole country's New Year's resolutions and midlife crises. They're the kind of thing that a totally ordinary, not athletic person wakes up one day and decides they're going to do.

And then does. It might be your doctor, your kid's teacher, the man pumping your gas, the woman who cleans your house. In one of the most economically unequal countries in the world, extreme distance running is a sport that feels like it includes everybody. And improbably, that inclusiveness happened during one of the darkest, most divided moments in South Africa's history, during the final years of apartheid. When the Comrades' Ultramarathon first started, it wasn't the little rainbow nation and

Nike's that it later became. In fact, in its earliest days, the Comrades looked a lot like Ultramarathons elsewhere. So back then, look, I mean, this is 1921. This is South Africa in its early days. This is Matzalani Mama Bolo. He's a South African sports journalist. And also, like so many of his countrymen, a comrades runner. The race was only open to white people. It was just the white people who ran and only made, actually.

The comrades was started by a white South African World War I veteran named Vic Klappum. To honor his comrades who had fallen in the war, he designed a run between his hometown of Peter Meritzburg and the coastal city of Durban about 56 miles away. And a few people apparently signed up. I think there was about 34 people who signed up to run the race. And he tries a big deal because I mean who who who runs from Marath big to devin. The race alternated directions each year and in those early days the press called it a quote

marathon go as you please. Guys ran in rugby boots they stopped for a beer and carried chicken at a hotel along the way. This definitely wasn't the first ultra-marathon in the world. Actually, even long before the first modern marathon was held in the 1896 Olympics, a form of super-long-distance racing had been popular in the US and Europe. It was called pedestrianism, and in its heyday in the 1870s and 80s, it was a hugely popular spectator sport,, where competitors racewalked distances up to

1,500 miles. The sport was so popular that the biggest names earned the equivalent of millions of dollars of prize money. The comrades, on the other hand, was a much more amateur affair. Over the decades, the race grew in size, but not dramatically. By the 1960s, there were maybe 150 guys running it every year, and they were all white. Every once in a while, a woman or a person of color would show up on the start line and run the race unofficially without a number.

The organizers generally didn't pull them off the course, but they never got recorded in the official finish list. In some years, the organizers actually blocked their entry to the stadium where the race ended, so they would never cross the finish line. Between excluding 90% of the population from participating, and then also being, you know, 56 miles long, the comrades seemed doomed to obscurity. But then, the ground started to shift. By the 1970s, apartheid South Africa was one of the last white-ruled countries in Africa, and it was coming under global pressure to change. Anti-apartheid campaigners believed that one of the best ways to force South Africa's

hand would be to isolate it from the rest of the world. South African activists organized boycotts of the country's exports. They pressured international companies to divest from the country and urge the world's artists and musicians not to perform there. We are not asking that you make a political decision. We are not asking you to make an economic decision. Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the South African anti-apartite leader. We are asking you to make a moral decision?

Those who invest in South Africa for goodness sake must know that they do so, and in doing so are upholding and buttressing one of the most vicious systems the world has ever known. For many South Africans, one of the most painful forms of isolation came in the realm of sports. By the 1970s, the country was no longer allowed to compete in the Olympics or the World Cup.

They partake government lobbied hard to FIFA to not kick them out, but they were so bizarrely committed to segregation that they pitched some weird, compromised idea of sending an all-white team to the World Cup in 1966, and then an all-black team in 1970. FIFA said no. I don't think you can ever have normal sport in the kind of society we have, a totally abnormal society. Activists understood how this withdrawal from world sports

would make the white government feel like pariahs. And it worked. South Africa desperately wanted back into the world's competitions. And so beginning in the early 1970s, it began to experiment with integrating domestic sports. Running was one of the first. In 1974, sports journalist Matsulane Mamabolo's uncle, Titus Mamabolo,

became the first black athlete to win an integrated national championship in the five kilometers. And suddenly, Black South Africa started believing that we can compete with white people and even beat them. And I think because of that, the whole country started shifting towards, let's open up to the Black people. The comrades organizers were cornered. They didn't want to be left behind. A year later, in 1975, the organizers opened up the race to people of color. At the time, distance running was enjoying a worldwide boom in popularity.

It was also beginning to include more and more women. For a long time, the conventional wisdom held that women couldn't run marathons because it would damage their delicate reproductive organs. But by the 1970s, prohibitions on female runners were also starting to fall. The comrades dropped its ban on women the same year as it became multiracial. All these circumstances helped running become more popular in South Africa, too. Still, the comrades might have languished forever and of security if it weren't for one more factor. In 1976, South Africa became one of the last major economies in the world to get television,

when it began broadcasting a single state-run channel. For nearly a decade, many of the country's leaders had resisted the introduction of TV because they believed it could indoctrinate South Africans with dangerous ideas. The country's minister for posts and telegraphs called it the devil's own box for disseminating communism and immorality.

Already we can see how easy it is to create and instill wrong impressions about peoples and countries by slanted news and pictures and unbalanced presentation of facts. This is South African Prime Minister BJ Forster, giving his first televised address about television. But even as it was trying to stop South Africans from seeing too much of the world, that TV channel had a lot of space to fill, and so it started playing a lot of local sports. Beginning in the 1980s, the SAPC began to broadcast the Comrades' Live in its full,

tedious entirety, for the whole country to see. For a new station with a lot of time to fill, a race that took literally all day was actually perfect. And what South African saw when they tuned in felt to many like a revolution. They're on their way. South African runners, greatest challenge of human endurance. In a country where almost everything was segregated,

from neighborhoods and schools, down to park benches and beaches, the comrades was mixed. What we are witnessing is an almost nakedly explicit presentation of the greatest race of all, the marathon of life itself. For Black South Africans who watched the race in that era, the comrades wasn't just a stunning athletic feat.

It looked in many ways like a parallel universe. When you're watching comrades, you see this spectacle that is abnormal actually. You see a white guy running with a black guy even hiding him, like, oh, you can touch a white man. You know, they're sharing their interests. It was aspirational. It was, oh, this is what our country should be like. In the years after the race integrated, most of the runners were still white, but at every level, black runners were making quick inroads. From the weekend, warriors finishing the

race in 11 hours up to the elites running it in less than six Around the time the race integrated Hosea Charlie was working as a gardener for a white family in the northern suburbs of Johannesburg During the day he planted flowers and clipped hedges and then it mattered much greener kitchen to help wash the dishes. As you were the gardener during the day and the at night you were the dishes. And in between, sometimes, he went for a jog. I just had a time as that to run for fun. Pretty soon, he realized he was really fast, and the longer the distance, the better. He started running marathons, and then he decided to go bigger.

Just in the river, there's a comrades. What is a comrades? It's a death and tomorrow's back. I don't know what that death looks like. I don't know what that death and tomorrow's back looks like. In 1979, Josea ran his first comrades and finished 21st of nearly 3,000 runners. He started to think, hey, maybe I could win this thing someday.

At that point, the comrades had never had a black winner, but soon, Hosea became one of the race's favorites. He ran with a distinctive, lopsided gate and almost always raced in a floppy blue and white bucket hat. Fans, particularly in black areas, along the comrades' route, would pour into the road as he ran by cheering him along. It didn't just make us believe

that we could be good in just sports, in just about every field you started thinking, oh, no, white people are not that great. I can be better in this, I can be better, and it gave hope. In those years, Hosea was racing to beat a white archaeology student named Bruce Fordes. Two men are out in front, one is Ebony and one is white. Maybe that's why they call this classic race the comrades.

And in South Africa, what a refreshing side it is to see a black man and a white man striving side by side in search of victory. It was almost a tale of South Africa really. You know, it told us, here was this black guy and this white guy, they became rivals and in the country I can bet you we all supported them along racial lines. But the hierarchies of apartheid were hard to outrun. Throughout the 80s, Bruce Fordi's trained full time

with the comrades and other altress, living off speaking gigs and sponsorships. Jose got his training by running 15 miles to his job as a delivery driver and competing in races at any distance from six miles up to 60 every weekend. I don't know, did you ever feel angry that he had more resources? Because he was a white person. It's that luck. That lucky.

white person. It's their luck. They are lucky. But even on this very uneven playing field, long distance running was a life-changing experience for many runners of color. Everybody's feeling the same pain, the aches and pains, they're all feeling the same thing as you feeling. You know, if a guy's struggling and you're happy my longing, because you know the pain he guy is struggling, you have been alone, because you know the pain he's going through, and you can identify what it is. That's Pubi Nidu, a runner of Indian heritage who also raised the comrades in the Sierra. At his peak, he could finish the race in a little more than six hours, which meant averaging

just over a six and a half minute mile for 56 miles. As soon as the comrades at Gangos off, there's no quality of human, there's no segregation, there's nothing to do with color. Everybody's out there to run the base to prove that they can't finish the race and that type. And so everybody's sort of like the lawyers and doctors and all this, all come down to your level now.

So the playing feels like equal. But if for those 56 miles there was no apartheid, as soon as athletes stepped off the course, it was back to normal life in South Africa. After Congress is back to the same black and white. In other words, you've got to know your place. You're black and you stay black. Hosea left his running club in the early 80s

after the chairperson allegedly called him by a racial slur. And he might have been allowed in white areas while he was running a marathon. But the rest of the time, he could be arrested if he didn't have the correct stamps in his past book. That's a document black people had to carry to show they had permission to be in a white neighborhood.

He told me about a time this happened to him outside a train station in Johannesburg when he was on his way to work. In the station when he came in the train, we come out in a platform and street the police tried me. Heidi, you're not allowed to come here working in a traffic.

So what did you do? Well, I got to do, to the gym and jeep. But the late 1980s apartheid was on its last legs. South Africa was in the grips of a low grade civil war. The government was cracking down violently on protests. Black areas of cities were patroled by soldiers. Abductions, torture, and beatings of activists were common.

A part aid is a criminal act against the empire. That's Winnie Mandela, the anti-apartite activist and wife of Nelson Mandela, who by the mid-1980s had been in prison for more than 20 years. In this world, the comments began to take on a kind of outsized symbolic meaning. For several years in a row, it had seemed like Hosea was on the brink of winning the race, but every year, in the final miles, Bruce Fordis would surge from behind and win. Then, in 1989, Bruce and Hosea both competed in a 62-mile race shortly before the comrades. As a result, Bruce decided not to compete in the comrades at all,

and Hosea raced it on tired legs. That blew the field wide open. Good morning, nice to have you with us. It's 545, and we are counting down to the start of the world's greatest long-distance road race, the comrades. On the morning of May 31, 1989, the elite runners eyed each other nervously. After all, Bruce was the only man who had won the race since 1981. What else could a comrades champion look like? That morning several runners pulled out in front, but for a long time, no one could break away. But in the final 10 miles, two runners surged ahead. Both of them gritting their teeth, determined no smiles for the crowd, slugging it out toe-to-toe

like two boxes in the ring. For the first time in the closing miles of a Comrades, both of the leaders were black. One of them, William Tolo, had been among the favorites, but as the race approached the finish in Durban, he suddenly slowed down, grimacing in pain. That left only a relatively unknown runner named Samuel Shabbalala. He was a railway worker from a small farming town, who often trained by running the 30 miles home from his job in his work. For the first time in more than 65 years, the comrades had a black winner.

He has this first black man to win the conference and he then added to what Horsia had done isn't it? Yes, we believed he can compete, yes, but now we believe he can win. Eight months later, South African President F.W. Declorek delivered news that would change the course of the entire country's future. For decades, anti-apartheid activists had been relentlessly harassed, intimidated, and imprisoned. Now, suddenly, the government was unbanging them. The prohibition of the African National Congress, the Pan-Africanist Congress, the South African Communist Party, and a number of subsidiary organizations

is being resented. I wish to put it plainly organizations is being rescinded. I wish to put it plainly that the government has taken a firm decision to release Mr. Mandela unconditional. So you have same winning and then following him Mandela comes out of jail and just black people we all just start thinking we own the country now. Everything is ours. Four years later, in April 1994, South Africa held its first democratic election. Nelson Mandela became president. We're the people of South Africa.

Feel fulfilled that humanity has taken us back into its bosom. That way, we were outlaws, not so long ago, had today given the rare privilege to be hosted to the nations of the world on our own soil. Mandela had always been big into sports throughout his life. He was a boxer and also a regular runner. And that wouldn't be remarkable except that he did all of his jogging for more than two decades inside of an 8x7 foot prison cell. Running taught me valuable lessons. He wrote in his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom. Training counted more than intrinsic ability, and I could compensate for a lack of natural

aptitude with diligence and discipline. I applied this in everything I did. So it felt symbolic when, in 1996, Nelson Mandela came to the comrades to present the winners their trophies. After we've listened, what happened today? And especially after seeing the current and determination of those who just made it, I have decided to take part in the next public marathon.

To be clear, he was joking, even if you're Nelson Mandela, running 56 miles when you're 78 is a big ask. But his presence at the race underscored that it had become a South African institution, and throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, its popularity continued to grow, drawing more and more new runners. Runners like future comrades-pacer, Shihida Tango. So you would watch comrades from start start to finish and the whole day. When she was growing up in a black township south of Johannesburg in the 1980s,

her family always watched the race. And that's what I knew about Conrad's. And I knew it's very long. I knew it's very painful because I saw what Tranas looked like they had to finish. And I knew I would never do that thing. That's what I knew about Conrad. Then in 2011, when Shehita was in her mid-30s and working at a bank in Johannesburg, her life was ripped up by its roots.

I was actually diagnosed with the form of skin cancer and it was a week after that my husband passed away and I just started walking and then I started jogging and then the jogging came into running and I went for my first 10 kilometers and it clubbed me good and proper and I love the feeling at the end. Soon she was racing longer and longer distances. She never ran fast but she found she had nearly endless endurance. And as she went along, she'd chant and sing to herself to distract her from the pain of running. Other runners started to join her, and pretty soon, race organizers began to ask her to

be an official pace. This isn't a small job. Imagine that not only do you have to commit to running a 56-mile race, but you must also promise to finish it in a very specific time. They wanted her to pace to finish in 12 hours. 12 hours is the official cutoff time for the race. That meant that she had absolutely no margin for error. If she ran slower than she expected, her bus wouldn't just finish late.

Those runners would be blocked from crossing the finish line at all. At the time, Shaheeda had only run the Comreds once, but she loved pacing slow runners, because sure, if you pace faster runners, you might help them break a personal record or something. But if you pace the slowest runners, you might be the difference that helps them achieve this nearly impossible thing.

I become a comedian on the day, I become a mother, I become a psychologist. I find runners that are going through the most. And I'll tell them, we all feel like you. If you think you are the only one in pain, you are not. You know, put on your big go, bloomers, come let's go. Just take two steps. She's paced the 12-hour bus ever since.

And this year, after two years off because of COVID, the race was back, and so was Shihita. So, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to your day, stay high, you freebie! After the gun fires, I watched the runners streaming over the start line. It takes more than 10 minutes before I finally see Shaheeda, jogging slowly just in front of the ambulance that follows the slowest runners in case of medical emergencies. I see her again about seven miles later, in a little farming town called Ashburton. At this point, the 12-hour bus is still tiny. She has maybe a dozen people running with her, and they're all looking suspiciously cheerful.

Before the comrades this year, I spoke to a runner who'd finished it 41 times. He told me that what appeals to him about running a 56-mile race over and over and over is that it's like living your entire life in one day. The experience holds the entire range of human emotion from elation to despair, and gathered all along the course are thousands and thousands of spectators, singing, cheering, and encouraging the runners on.

Good for singing, ladies and most of them! Woo! Hi, guys! By the time I see Shaheeda again, we are more than 35 miles into the race, in a Durban suburb called Pine Town. Her bus has swelled to about 50 people. There's this super-dazed look in her eyes, and she seems a bit wobbly, but she's still cheerful. How you doing? How you feeling?

Amazing. How you doing? How you feeling? And then a couple hours later, I'm waiting for her at the finish inside Moses Amazing! And then a couple hours later, I'm waiting for her at the finish inside Moses Mbita, a World Cup stadium in Durban. The clock is ticking down. There's 30 minutes left, then 10. Still no sign of Sheheda. Suddenly, I hear it. It's a bunch of shots of our side-hours. I can't get through to the one-point, so we can't let our eyes see the stars.

Now, there is a huge pack of runners behind Shaheeda, this tidal wave of bright-colored running jerseys. And in the middle of it all, I see her little pacer flag with a big 12-written on it, bobbing up and down. You tell all the pains like this, and you can come after the finish line is fine. And we're just going to dance, and we're going to shut comrades down. And that's what we did when we hit the grass aden. The eat was just amazing, you know.

The stadium became alive. The clock reads 11 hours 53 minutes as she jogs over the finish line and bursts into tears. We cross the finish line and it was so emotional, the hugs, the guys were like, I could get it if they could love me up, they probably would have even a once. It's so his we were. Meanwhile, hundreds of people are still streaming over the finish line as the stadium speakers begin to play final countdown. All at once, a line of Comrade staff swarms across the whole finish line, blocking anyone still on the course from finishing.

Dazed, exhausted runners keep slamming into it. I hate this part. Seeing all these people who have been running for 12 hours not finish, they look shattered. But watching them also reminds me why Shahidah's 12 hour bus is so powerful. All those people could easily have not finished too, but somehow they did it. Convex is painful. You are really going to hurt on the road. You're going to lose your mind while running. But if you do it with someone or some people, it makes it not so mammoth. There's a story that sports psychologists like to tell about Roger Bannister, the Oxford University Medical student who first broke the four-minute mile in 1954.

Until then, four minutes seemed like an almost superhuman barrier. People had been trying and failing to break it for nearly 70 years. But once Roger Bannister ran a sub-four-minute mile, four more people did it in the next year. Now more than 1,600 people have run a mile and under four minutes. The barrier, it turned out, was largely psychological. Shahida and the 12-hour bus feel like a comrades equivalent of that. Watching them pour over the finish line, the race feels doable.

Running 56 miles feels like a thing that anyone can achieve. At least, it is in South Africa. Coming up after the break, we talk about one of the most famous South African sports stories ever and how it connects to post-apartheid South African politics. We're back with Ryan Lenora Brown, who reported this week's story, to talk a little more about sports and politics in South Africa. Yeah, and what I want to talk about in particular is the sport that most Americans know very little about, but that's really, really popular in South Africa and has played actually a big role in the country's recent history. Rugby.

Well, I know about rugby. I know rugby exists. You are right, though. It is not very popular here in the US. Yeah, so maybe the easiest place to start here is with a rugby reference Americans might be familiar with. Have you ever seen the film Invictus? Uh, I'm aware of its existence, but I have not seen it, no. Okay, so it's this Clint Eastwood movie starring Morgan Freeman as Nelson Mandela with an honestly slightly questionable South African accent. The only friends why, how do we inspire ourselves to greatness when nothing less will do?

How do we inspire everyone around us? Yeah. But anyway, Invictus is the story of South Africa's unexpected victory in the 1995 Rugby World Cup. Okay, so what was significant about that? Well, for one thing, it was a kind of masterclass in Mandela's ability to make these big, sweeping symbolic gestures of unity, which he did a lot in those years. Yeah, I mean, I can imagine he had to, because he had recently become president in the country

that was incredibly divided and deeply segregated, and he became president after 27 years in prison. So there's a lot to heal there. Right. And that actually included sports. So, you know, we just talked in this episode about how long distance running became the sport that transcended all these divides. But by the 1990s, most sports in South Africa were still seen as kind of quote unquote,

belonging to certain races. Obviously, I don't mean people of other races didn't play those sports, just that they were very strongly, culturally associated with particular groups. So for instance, soccer was a quote, black sport, cricket was a quote, white sport. And where did rugby fall in this divide? There've always been black rugby leagues in teams in South Africa, but rugby was widely seen as a white sport. So to get back to the rugby world cup in 1995,

this is the biggest tournament for the sport, teams from all over the world compete with each other. And that year South Africa hosted the tournament, which was significant because it was also the first time that South Africa was allowed to play since apartheid had ended. But the team it fielded was almost entirely white, and so were the supporters. And actually it was like even worse than that.

A lot of Black South Africans were rugby fans, but they would cheer for whoever was playing against South Africa, particularly New Zealand. They saw the Spring Box who are South Africa's national team as actually a symbol of white supremacy. So what did Mandela do here? Well, first he approached the Spring Box captain, who was this white guy named Francois Pinar,

and basically asked him to make the point to the team, to the public, that they represented the new South Africa. Do you hear? Listen to your country. This is it. This is our destiny. Oh, fuck out, dude.

That's another clip from Invictus, and I was met Damon, by the way, doing actually a pretty good Afrocon's accent. Anyway, the rest of what Mandela did was pretty simple. He went to the games, he wore the team's jersey, and he cheered for them like they were his team. When they won the whole thing in this nail-biter game in downtown Joeburg against New Zealand, he presented them with their trophy. There it is.

Francois Pina, Nelson Mandela, is cheering along with the whole of the stadium. See her flags. Wonderful moment for the whole of South Africa. This footage is actually really sweet. You can see Mandela pumping his arms and genuinely looking very jazzed about the team winning. And so what happened after that? What was the result of all this unity

at the rugby world cup? Well, obviously South Africa didn't change overnight. Neither did the rugby team. The gesture was really significant to a lot of people, but it took also actual policies to make really significant changes happen. And what that looked like is that in the late 1990s, the government started creating these racial quotas for sports teams to get them to transform.

Those quotas have been really controversial. And so that goes, you can imagine. Yeah, I can imagine those are controversial, but to eventually they just become part of everyone's life and therefore it not necessary anymore. I would say yes and no, you know, a lot of people would argue that these kind of transformations really have to start at the level of youths for club sports to be meaningful to not tokenize black players, not put them forward when they're not ready. And you've seen that start to happen. And in rugby in particular, rugby is sort of one of the leaders among South African sports. But in any case, the South African rugby team now does look really different

than it did back in 1995. So what's it like now? Well, to answer that question, we're actually gonna go quickly to another rugby world cup. This one's in Japan in 2019 and spoiler alert. South Africa actually won again. The biggest prize of the world! South Africa!

A world cup winners in 2019! The captain of that team was a guy called Cia Colisee, who was the first ever black player to hold that title, and the squad itself was the most diverse it had ever been. Cia, just tell me when the final whistle went, what were your first thoughts? You know, we face a lot of challenges, but you know, the Pueblo Sanfika have got in behind us, and we are so grateful for the Pueblo Sanfika. And, you know, we have so many problems in our country,

but to have a team like this, we know we can't put different backgrounds, different races, and we came together with one goal, and we wanted to achieve it. I really hope that we've done that for Sanfika to show that we can put together if we want to achieve something. It sounds like he's really like taking Mandela's example and continuing on into the next generation.

Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, sports are political everywhere, obviously. But South Africa has been a particularly stark example of that just because of the transformation it's undergone, has been so stark. So obviously, you know, we saw it with the comrades in running. And this rugby story is just another interesting, significant example I think of a place you've seen that really powerful kind of transformation in sports in South Africa that mirrors what's been happening in the country. Does this mean I should watch the movie Invictus or I should not

watch the movie Invictus? Roman, I want to leave that one up to you. Hahaha. I'll leave that decision between the audience and their God. Thank you so much. Thanks, Roman. 99% Invisible was produced this week by Ryan Lenora Brown, edited by Delaney Hall, original

music by Swansea. Sound Mixed by Martin Gonzales, fact checking by Graham Haysha. Kurt Colsted is our digital director, the rest of the team, includes Chris Barube, Jason Delion, Emmett Fitzgerald, Christopher Johnson, Vivian Leigh, Lashmodon, Jacob Molta-Narabadena, Kelly Prime, Joe Rosenberg, Sophia Klatsker, and me Roman Mars. Special thanks this week to Isaac Inguenja, Roxy Thomas, Bob Dylan-Mott, Doshin Moodley, and Tommy Nitski. We are part of the Stitcher and Serious XM podcast family. Now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building. And beautiful. Uptown, Oakland, California. You can find the show and

join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roan Mars and the show at 99PI Ork. We're on Instagram, Reddit and TikTok too. You can find links to others to your shows I love as well as every past episode of 99PI at 99PI.org. dot org On your marks get set stutter Thank you.