Siya Kolisi’s journey towards his Mandela moment

The Springboks’ first black captain can deliver the nation a more symbolic moment than Nelson Mandela at the 1995 World Cup.

Siya Kolisi leads the South African players in an acknowledgment of the crowd before the semi-final against Wales in Yokohama. Picture: Getty Images

Through the window of a room at the prestigious Grey High School in Port Elizabeth, Siya Kolisi could see the visiting Springboks. His teacher sensed the burgeoning ambition. “You want to get their autographs?” he asked as he held out a pen and paper. The photograph of the small boy at the front of a throng around the blond hulk of Schalk Burger resurfaced this week. It is a snapshot of teenage hope. Fast forward 15 years and that boy is front and centre as he carries the hope of nation.

Dean Carelse was that teacher. He coached rugby and was also the South Africa captain’s housemaster. Few have a better insight into how a skinny boy from a trouble-torn township rose to the cusp of becoming the first black man to lift the World Cup. The ascent has meant overcoming racism, tragedy and insinuations that he is a token rather than a totem. If you are not inspired you may not have a pulse.

“So many stories,” says Carelse, now working on Australia’s Sunshine Coast but still in contact with the boy he made drag a tyre called Suzie across Grey’s playing fields.

“His English was not good when he came to us but he wanted to embrace every opportunity. He tried out for the water-polo team even though he couldn’t swim; the first time he saw a pool he followed the other kids in and sank to the bottom. The first time he went to a shopping centre he just didn’t know what to do. The first time he saw the ocean he was 14 and he broke down and cried. He had nothing. We had to buy him toothpaste. The kids would buy him lunch. But he had an infectious smile and everybody wanted to help him.”

The impact of a black South African lifting the World Cup would be another indelible image. Bryan Habana, the black wing who played in the 2007 World Cup final win over England, believes that it could be even more meaningful than 1995, when Nelson Mandela used South Africa’s World Cup triumph as glue for a nation emerging from apartheid.

Stream England v South Africa in the 2019 Rugby World Cup Final on KAYO SPORTS. Live & On-Demand on your TV, computer, mobile or tablet. Get your 14-day free trial and start streaming instantly >

Kolisi’s mother was 16 when he was born and he was raised by his grandmother in Zwide. He slept on the floor and says his favourite toy was a brick. At the age of 12 his grandmother died in his arms; his mother died in his teens. Rugby would be his way out and he was determined to shake off the culture shock that came from his scholarship.

Nick Reid, an Englishman who was a Grey teacher and housemaster at the time, explains just how big school rugby is in South Africa.

“I played first XV here (in England) and it was in front of 35 men and a dog. These guys were running out in front of 10,000. The call would come over the Tannoy on Friday that lessons were cancelled and everyone should report to the stands to practise Saturday’s chants.”

Being transplanted from poverty to privilege was fraught with challenges. There were late-night phone calls to the school at weekends saying that his parents were fighting and asking for someone to pick him up.

“When we dropped kids off in the townships a lot of them would not wear their school uniform,” Carelse says. “People in the townships would say, ‘You’re too good for our culture now’, so most kids would go round the corner and get changed into their casual clothes. Siya never did. He’d refuse to take off his uniform and say, ‘I’m proud of the opportunity’. That was special. And when we dropped him off after those games, there would be kids waiting for him at the bus stop and they would run and hug him all the way home.”

Kolisi, now 28, was spotted by Eric Songwiqi, a teacher and mentor at Emsengeni Primary School and an unsung hero of rugby in the black community. He first saw something in Kolisi even though his side had just lost 50-0. Kolisi remembers the game mainly because he had to play in boxer shorts because he didn’t have any rugby ones. “He was very small but always had so much enthusiasm,” Songwiqi said. “I had maybe 250 boys and Siya always helped me organise them. The boys played together and grew together. Now he is changing minds. We are singing the same song through the whole country.”

Kolisi has bought iPads for his old primary school. In return there was a prayer service for him at the Apostolic Church in Zwide before the pool stage. Initially he was overshadowed at Grey by two other boys from the townships. Then came the growth spurt.

“At the end of Grade 10 (aged 16) he went on holiday,” Carelse says. “At the start of Grade 11 he came back and he was like a monster. He had always had to box clever when he was small and fast. Now he had the power too.”

On one occasion a boy with an Afrikaner background took a dislike to him fuelled by hand-me-down racism. “I don’t think he could handle a black kid coming in and taking the limelight away,” Carelse says. “But Siya had so much support and this guy ended up leaving. He realised he was not going to win this one.”

He goes back to his high school too, preferring to mingle with kids in the classrooms rather than attend formal assemblies, taking photographs with the black matrons who work in the kitchen. The main man in the photograph doing the rounds this week is now fan and friend. Burger played in that 2007 World Cup final win. “I don’t think he understands the political importance,” he says of the significance of this week. “But for a lot of kids in modern society, heroes are diminishing.”

Burger, who has holidayed with Kolisi, is uniquely placed to judge Saturday’s captains. “They are completely different,” he says of Kolisi and Owen Farrell, whom Burger played with at Saracens. “Siya is very relaxed, fits well into the social group and relies on those around him. Owen leads through example, if not words.”

He says Farrell is influential through his many touches of the ball; Kolisi, by contrast, is “the firestarter”.

Burger says that Farrell is more intense off the pitch but adds: “He’s improved massively on an emotional level. He understands what’s needed for the team. That comes with experience and maybe different life changes, becoming a father.”

Farrell became a father this year. The first of Kolisi’s two children was born in 2015. After years of looking he finally found his half-sister and half-brother in Zwide in 2014. They had been taken into care. Now they all live together.

His background made him grow up at breakneck pace. Even as an elite player he has had to deal with the suggestion that he is the captain for non-rugby reasons; as a husband he had to endure racist trolls accusing his white wife of “a waste of good genes” by marrying him.

“I’ll be delighted if England win and crying on the sofa if Siya lifts the cup,” says his old teacher Nick Reid. “He was one of the guys you could trust but he wasn’t a suck-up. He just didn’t have a mean bone in his body.”

Rassie Erasmus, too, sees the big picture. “It’s also sunk in for me,” the South Africa head coach said.

“I understand how big it is.”

It would be the black-and-white picture for all of South Africa to frame.

THE TIMES