Twenty years on, the image of Nelson Mandela, wearing the number six jersey of the white Springbok captain, Francois Pienaar, remains a poignant moment in South African and global sport. The 1995 Rugby World Cup victory by the overwhelmingly all-white Springboks remains a powerful symbol in post-apartheid South Africa. Clint Eastwood’s (2009) Hollywood film, Invictus, based on John Carlin’s Playing the enemy: Nelson Mandela and the game that made a nation (2008), has dramatised the significance of Mandela wearing the jersey and the South African victory. The formerly exclusive symbol was seemingly appropriated and made socially inclusive and became part of the lexicon and rhetoric of nation building post-1994. For Ashwin Desai (2010: 1), rugby had become ‘the sport that would help to catalyse the building of a “rainbow nation” predicated on a common identity, a common sense of “South Africanness”’. Jay Coakley (1994: 5) noted that ‘sports cannot be ignored because they are such a pervasive part of life in contemporary society’, and the same holds true for South Africa.
