“While I waited for something to happen, other powers were at work to get me out. Odd how life sometimes goes. The officer commanding the base was a rugby fan – only later did I realize rugby wasn’t unpopular in the Soviet army, not nearly as popular as soccer but there were enough men who played rugby for Saraktash to be able to send a good team onto the field. They had come in second in the previous year’s Red Army championships and the league was on its way to playing again when the OC got it into his head that the South Africans, coming from the land of the Springboks, were just the people to give his team a good warm-up before the first league match against the previous year’s champions.
“You can imagine, among the one hundred and twenty of us, there were only colored guys who knew anything about the game. The rest were Xhosa, Zulu, Tswana and Sotho and Venda, and rugby was the sport of the oppressor and what we knew about it was just about nothing, but our Umkhonto leader was Moses Morape and if one of your men is in the cells and you see a gap, you take it. When the Russian OC came to issue the challenge, the guys had an indaba, and Rudewaan Moosa, one of the Cape Malays, a committed Muslim, who in any case hated the Russians because they were so godless, said he had been a fly half in the South African Rugby Federation setup and he would be their trainer because it was an opportunity to put the whiteys in their place.
“Morape went to negotiate. First suggested soccer as an alternative because we knew we could beat their Soviet asses hollow, but the OC wouldn’t hear of it. Then Morape said they would play rugby but that Mpayipheli must be freed. And the South African team must get the same equipment as the Russians.
“ ‘But Mpayipheli is a murderer,’ the OC said, and Morape argued that it had been a fair fight and the OC shook his head and said justice had to take its course and Morape said then there wouldn’t be a warm-up match, and for two weeks there was coming and going until the OC agreed, but there were two conditions. You have to win. And Mpayipheli must play, otherwise his troops wouldn’t accept the deal, and Morape said okay.
“I didn’t want to know. I said I’d rather go back to the cells, but the chief indunas explained the choices: either I play, or they would send me to Zambia, where I could be a pencil pusher in a supply store for the rest of the Struggle – if the Soviet army’s justice system had finished with me. They were sick and tired of me. I had to choose.
“Two days later we had our first practice. Two teams chosen according to size and height and potential talent. It was chaos. Like grade-one kids who gather around the ball and yell and run all over the place. The Russians who stood at the side of the practice field laughed so much that we couldn’t hear what Moosa was saying and we were so stupid that the writing was on the wall. Three weeks was far too little. We were cannon fodder.
“But Moosa was clever. And patient. The night after the first practice he spent in deep thought. Changed his strategy. Decided to shift the front to the classroom for starters, and for four long days we learned the theory of rugby on a blackboard, the rules, the involved, inexplicable, never-ending shower of rules, then analyzed every position, memorized every strategy, and on the fifth morning at six o’clock we were on the field, before the Russians got going. Moosa drilled us: the back line on one side, the forwards on another, line-outs, scrums, loose scrums, rucking, running, walking us through each step painfully slowly, quite literally at first.
“It got better but it was still pathetic. It was as if the guys couldn’t get their heads around this whitey game. You should’ve heard the remarks. All in the line of ‘It’s only the Boers who would be foolish enough to exchange a round ball and two nets for this stupidity.’ We wanted to dribble and kick, not pick up and pass. It seemed as if our whole nature was against the strange game. Not to mention the offside rule. But Moosa kept his head and Morape gave us courage, and on the Saturday one week before the match, we went out before sunrise for a secret practice in town, the two black teams against each other on an open piece of land next to the river, a kind of test game to choose the A team.
“Pretty it wasn’t. Moosa lost his temper for the first time that day, threw his hands into the air, and said it was an impossible task – it simply wasn’t possible to change a crowd of black idiots from soccer fans to rugby winners. He stormed off the field and went to sit under a large tree, his head in his hands, and we stood there, our bodies steaming in the cold, and we knew he was right. It wasn’t as if we hadn’t tried. It was simply – the handicap. And our hearts. If you know you’re going to be beaten, it’s difficult to get your heart in the right positive spirit.
“Morape went to sit next to Moosa and they talked for an hour or longer. And then they walked back to where we were sitting in a heap and Morape began to speak to us.
“He was a Tswana. A man with a face like an eagle, not tall or big, not very clever, but there was something in Morape that made you listen. And that morning, at the ass end of the world, we listened. Morape spoke softly. Said the match wasn’t about keeping Mpayipheli out of jail. Which got me a few dirty looks. He said the match was about the Struggle. The match had come our way in a country that didn’t want us there, from people who didn’t think we were good enough. Just like at home. And even though we couldn’t choose the battleground and the strategy there to suit us, we could do it here. Must we look at our country and say no, the whiteys have more weapons, more money, better comforts, better technology, they hold the high ground, but should we surrender? If we surrendered, here in Holy Mother Russia, we could give up the Struggle, because then we would’ve lost before we started. It was about character. It was about the fighting spirit. It was about daring, about focus, about concentration, the unshakable belief that you could do anything if you believed in yourself and in the cause.
“Sport, he said, is the poor man’s war. With the same principles. Us against them. Standing together against superior forces. Solidarity. Tactics and strategy and the same deep emotion. And just like war, sport eventually teaches us about ourselves. To test ourselves and our capabilities and our individual and collective character…
“He wouldn’t mind if we lost the battle. It happened in war, it happened in sport, and it happened in life. But if we lost because we hadn’t done our best, then we weren’t the kind of people with whom he wanted to go to war. Then Morape got up and walked away across the green grass and left us there to think.
“That Monday, Morape pinned the names of his first team against the notice board and my name was there as lock forward and my knees shook. But I wasn’t ‘Thobela’ any longer. Moosa had made me ‘Tiny’ Mpayipheli.
“For the rest of the week we practiced every day. With Morape on the sideline as a silent reminder of his words, and Moosa, fly half and coach, who drilled us, and then the jerseys came on Thursday. The OC of the base had had them made in Moscow, green and gold with a Springbok on the chest, and Morape said, ‘Now you’re playing for your country,’ and the whole thing took on a dimension for which we weren’t prepared. We wanted to complain about the jersey of the oppressor when Morape asked, ‘What are the colors of the ANC?’