The taxi driver at Johannesburg airport asks if he can leave his music on. Of course he can.
What is inescapable, as the car meanders through industrial areas and skirts the border of Alexandra, a sprawling township where Nelson Mandela once rented a room, is that all the songs coming through the speakers champion one thing – hope.
You swing around the corner, a stone’s throw away from the visceral poverty harboured within Alexandra, into the financial hub of the city, where trees line the three-lane road and glass-fronted high-rise buildings tower over them. The difference in less than a mile is stark.
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There are currently rolling power cuts taking place throughout the city. They were recently escalated and, currently, if you are not fortunate enough to have a generator, hours of darkness welcome you home from work. From 2pm until midnight, electricity sporadically cuts out without warning.
Violent crime is prevalent – some intersections are littered with warning signs over them being car-jacking and crime hotspots – and the hours of darkness do little to help in this regard. It also wreaks havoc with small businesses.
Traffic lights stop working, so driving through the city’s suburbs is akin to running a gauntlet, with traffic hitting a crossroads from all angles, drivers bunny-hopping their way out into the middle of the intersection trying to pick their hole. There is no light on the streets. Is there any light at all?
The official line is that the ‘load-shedding’ is caused by industrial action, but most will point to the corruption that has engulfed the nation’s power company, Eskom, which was established by the government.
Fuel prices are rising almost daily and the economic situation is trying, to say the least. The ticker on the TV news channel tells of an ‘education crisis’ and locals question whether a middle class even exists anymore. There is anger at the way the country is being run, it feels as though unrest is bubbling under the surface.
It is against this backdrop that Wales arrive in Pretoria on Saturday night, a 45 minute-drive from their base on the outskirts of Johannesburg.
To understand the size of the challenge that awaits them, you must first understand what lights the fire in the bellies of the Springboks they’ll meet.
Rugby, specifically that green jersey, is a galvanising force in a country that, for all it has overcome, still faces significant challenges.
Kaya Malotana, the first black player capped by South Africa in the professional era in 1999, explains it eloquently.
He tells WalesOnline: “Coming from a period where rugby was a symbol of divide, somehow it became a symbol of unification. Rugby is just a different bug in South Africa, whether you’re black or white.
“In the darkest hours in South Africa, rugby has risen to be that light, that beacon of hope.”
He refers to the British and Irish Lions series last year, which took place when Covid was rife throughout the country, there were uprisings and “our backs were against the wall, Gauteng (the province that houses Johannesburg and Pretoria) was burning down, basically.”
Malotana adds: “The series went ahead and it kind of breathed new life into the country.”
Then, of course, there is political change that the 1995 Rugby World Cup success drove.
“There could have easily been a civil war, with the resistance to change that was potentially there.
“Up comes the World Cup and all of us were behind this one thing. To go on and win that World Cup transformed life in South Africa, it made people look to a new direction of co-existing and growing the country together.
“Rugby has had its key moments of playing that unifying role, breathing that hope into all South Africans and especially towards transformation. You get moments where things are stagnating, we start to fight about what is rightfully deserved and then rugby comes up again.”
It is almost impossible to overstate the power the sport has in this country. In Wales we talk of the mood of a workforce being lifted on a Monday if Wales win on the Saturday. Here, the child with no shoes on their feet or running water at their dwelling, who is surrounded by violence and substance abuse, finds hope in the Springbok jersey.
Why? Because some of the players who will be wearing it on Saturday come from those very same beginnings.
The team’s inspirational leader, Siya Kolisi is from Zwide, a township near Port Elizabeth, where he grew up with no food or shoes, raised by his grandmother. Winger Makazole Mapimpi grew up in Tsholomnqa, a rural area in the Eastern Cape, where he had no light, no running water.
The most moving moment of the remarkable Springbok documentary, Chasing the Sun, sees Rassie Erasmus in tears as he tells the story of Mapimpi, whose mother, Eunice, died in a car accident when the youngster was just 14, leaving him in his grandmother’s care after his father had long since left the family. His sister Zukiswa died of a brain illness, while his brother Zolani passed away after being electrocuted.
Malotana explains: “Makazole didn’t have any other avenue in life other than to play the game and that’s how he became a Springbok.”
In the professional sporting arena, all of the emotional energy, the pressure and the reality of life in South Africa can be extremely powerful. It has the potential to overwhelm a team, but this Springbok side harness it.
Head coach Jacques Nienaber, and Erasmus before him, encourage the players to face up to it, to recognise it and to use it as a motivating force. When used in that way, it has the power to lift a team.
Before the 2019 World Cup final, which they went on to win comfortably, Erasmus told his players: “You don’t have the right to worry about your mistakes. If you worry about your mistakes today, you have an ego problem.
“You are not representing yourself. You know what you are really fighting for? The things that happen in South Africa. Siya, you are fighting for the next lad in Zwide to not suffer like you suffered. Lukhanyo [Am], you are going to tackle for the guy who didn’t get the opportunities that you got eventually.
“If you play s**t today, you don’t have the right to drop your head. It’s not about you.”
Malotana adds: “There are guys who understand where they come from and the difficulties of their community. So they carry that hope for another kid who lives in the same community, that they can also make it.
“Remember the things that these guys escaped. They could have ended up dead because they caught a stray bullet, growing up in a gang-infested community. They could have got caught up in drugs because there is such poverty and people find a way to cope through alcohol and drug abuse.
“But they made it somehow and they know the kids who live there now, who must survive what they survived. Guys carry those kinds of hopes and dreams for the communities they came from, over and above playing for their country.
“You are always playing for a higher purpose as a Springbok, which is all the struggle that the country still carries and all the hopes we still have for the country.”
So when you look at the hulking frames of Kolisi, Mapimpi and co. You must see beyond their physical stature. To understand the challenge they present, you have to understand how powerful their motivations are.
“We don’t see it as a pressure. It’s a privilege,” hooker Bongi Mbonambi says. “Pressure in South Africa is more about our situation as a country and the things we’re going through, that is pressure.”
Captain Kolisi jokes: “We don’t make the lights come on!" Before adding in far more serious tones: “When the Springboks play it just feels like everything is okay in that moment. It doesn’t take your problems away but it makes you feel okay for a couple of minutes.
“It gives you something positive to talk about when the Springboks do well. We think of that every single time we put on the jersey.
“Some guys say that it is just a rugby game – it’s not for us. It goes far deeper than that. We take that seriously and that’s why it hurts so much when we don’t do well on the field. That’s what keeps on driving us.”
In Wales, many deem rugby a way of life, we believe it to be of huge cultural significance and, in context, it is.
But it cannot hold a candle to the sport in South Africa, a nation that leans toward rugby like a protea bending towards the sun.
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