LONG READ 'Nothing was going to hold me back': Orphaned at 12, Siphosethu Mnebelele has defied the odds

Nosipho Mnebelele only watched her son play one rugby match. She didn’t care for the sport initially. Despite her boy’s prodigious size, she worried he would get hurt. She was suspicious of any activity which upset his focus or dragged him away from his schoolwork. A single parent in South Africa’s harsh and troubled gold mining country, her concerns were not unfounded.

Siphosethu Mnebelele was her youngest child. He has endured, conquered and achieved more in his 20 years on this planet than most encounter in three lifetimes. The unfathomable loss of both parents and a grandparent in a six-month period before he’d hit his teens. The sense-scrambling road from a West Rand township to one of the most prestigious schools in South Africa, his anointing as captain at the country’s great Craven Week talent show, back-to-back Junior World Championship crowns, the latter as skipper, invitations to Rassie Erasmus’ Springbok squad and now, this Saturday, a URC debut among the Sharks Galacticos. A battalion of relatives, coaches and teachers helped the hooker on his way; seeing the talent and drive in a boy who was forced to leave adolescence behind for the sake of his family.

The Mnebeleles are from a township on the outskirts of Fochville. It’s an hour’s drive up the N12 from the Joburg metropolis. The ravenous digging for gold drives the economy, but those who chisel it from the ground see none of its value. Poverty is rife. The communities are a tapestry of relations and friends, languages and cultures, often bound together by their circumstances. Nosipho raised her three children with the help of her sister Ntombizodwa and her mother Noziphiwo, who lived in the ‘main house’. These were redoubtable ladies. “It was always the three women and all the children,” Mnebelele says. Cousins were brought up as close as siblings and the kids were more into football than rugby. When Siphosethu took up the game at his Afrikaans primary school, Nosipho had plenty to say about it.

“My mom hated rugby,” Mnebelele recalls. “It got to a point she hated it so much and believed it was distracting me from school that she wouldn’t give me money to take the taxi back home after training. I would walk about 4km. That went on for two or three weeks.

“Nothing was going to hold me back; I had really fallen in love with it. Eventually I think she started to fall in love with it as well. Those were the good old days when I had to convince the old lady: this is what I want. Whenever I think about that I have a smile on my face.”

Mnebelele was poor in financial terms but he remembers his early years as rich in contentment. He spent hours cavorting around the streets and could speak four languages fluently by the time he reached high school. “We got up to a lot,” he says. “We would build small cars from milk cartons with the bottlecaps as wheels and sweet sticks to go through as axels, and use tree branches to be able to control it. If I think about Fochville, I think about how happy I was at that point in my life.”

In a sense, tragedy stole Mnebelele’s childhood. One day he was crafting cars from junk; the next he was rendered an orphan. There are many unimaginably cruel elements to Mnebelele’s story. Perhaps the cruellest is the passing of his mother and grandmother in a car accident, just as Nosipho was coming round to the idea of rugby. Mnebelele was 12 years old.

You are crying but the tears aren’t coming out. You just feel completely empty. I remember lying in bed for the longest time and thinking ‘who is going to pack my lunchbox for school?’

“I remember when I got the news it was about 3 or 4am, we got woken up and there were a whole lot of cars parked outside. Me and my cousin, who is a similar age, were like ‘what the hell is going on?’ The whole family was inside the house. The news got broken to us, and it was one of those moments you are crying but the tears aren’t coming out. You just feel completely empty.

“I don’t know how I did it, or how it was possible at that age, but I remember lying in bed for the longest time and thinking ‘who is going to pack my lunchbox for school? Who is going to give me taxi money? Who is going to do a lot of things for me?’ The only person who could do that for me was my aunt, but she can’t have that burden when she has three children of her own.

“I was still very young, but that was the day when I felt this was forcing me to make something of myself. I remember lying there like, this doesn’t mean I must quit rugby or quit school, I must keep going. I carried on. I wanted to honour her and make her proud.”

The Mnebelele children had a challenging relationship with their father, Luvuyo Vanda. The parents had long been separated and in Mnebelele’s words, “a lot had gone on between my mom and dad”. His elder brother and sister refused to engage with Luvuyo. Mnebelele would visit and speak to him occasionally. Six months after Nosipho and Noziphiwo were killed, Mnebelele’s father fell seriously ill and died in hospital.

“None of us knew he was sick,” Mnebelele says. “He never called, never said anything and whenever I spoke to him he never mentioned it. Eventually we got the news he got taken into hospital and he didn’t make it. That was equally hard. Losing one parent is one thing, but losing two is another.”

The Mnebeleles were living with aunt Ntombizodwa by then. She had taken them in after the car crash and there Mnebelele stayed for two years. He resolved to attack his rugby and vowed to rise for his mother. Driven by grief or simply a clarity of purpose, he played like a beast.

“I happened to play some of the best rugby I’ve ever played. I had about 10 of the dads after each game giving me such positive comments. When they have the kindness to come up and tell you that you played well, it makes you feel like your own parent was watching.”

Around that time, the Gordon family came to Mnebelele’s aid. He was selected to play for an invitational team at the King Edward VII School Easter festival. ‘KES’ is the alma mater of Bryan Habana, Joe van Niekerk and Mnebelele’s idol, Malcolm Marx. Golfing sage Gary Player is another alumnus. Nobody was surprised when the school wanted Mnebelele to enrol. The TAG Foundation, affiliated to KES and “committed to transforming the lives of promising learners facing financial challenges”, covered his fees, paid for his uniform and rugby kit.

I used to go to school with wrinkled shirts which hadn’t been washed, socks which smelled a little bit. She took me in and to them, I’ll forever be grateful.

“I needed a place to stay when I played in the ‘Easter Fes’,” Mnebelele says. “Colin and Natalie Gordon put their hands up to host me. Mrs Gordon is a teacher at KES. I got to know them.

“When I moved to KES in grade eight, I’d gone away from everything I knew in the township, I had to go into this big world, this big city of Joburg. I didn’t know how things worked, the mentors were tough ‘okes’, and that’s when I was blessed enough to have Mrs Gordon take me in like one of her sons. She already has two.

“I used to go to school with wrinkled shirts which hadn’t been washed, socks which smelled a little bit. She took me in and to them, I’ll forever be grateful.”

The Gordons’ son Travis had an immense impact on Mnebelele. He knew little of the opportunities rugby could provide, nor the pathway from where he stood to the fabled green and gold at the peak of it all.

 

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“On my first day at KES, going into their house, I saw he had a frame with three photos: him in his reds jersey – our first team for KES – him in a provincial Lions jersey and him in an SA Schools jersey. I was so motivated. I asked him, ‘Trav, are these all the teams you played for? How does it work?’ He explained it to me and I remember he said ‘you’re going to get all of these bro, don’t worry’. How am I going to get all of these?

“He actually coached me a little bit at Under-16s. He told me ‘keep going, you are closer than you think, you are going to achieve so much’. His dad Mr Gordon, my coaches, they all kept saying the same thing. All these people saying this when I didn’t have that much confidence in myself.”

These days, Travis plays in the back-row for Rotherham Titans in the English Champ. One by one, his predictions for his ‘adopted’ brother became reality. Mnebelele skippered his school. He went to Craven Week as captain too. Then he led the SA Schools team. He graduated, was signed by the Bulls and headed for Verona with the South Africa U20s aged 18. His coach, Kevin Foote, is a KES old boy and brilliantly attuned to the South African rainbow which makes up his squad. The Junior Boks annihilated the competition and lifted the silverware.

My mom would have always wanted me not to ever stop going to school or stop chasing my dreams. I’m really glad I carried on doing that.

With Mnebelele captain, they defended their title in Georgia this July. Of the 2025 vintage, Riley Norton, Jaco Williams and Mnebelele’s close friend Vusi Moyo have been capped at Test level. The riveting Cheswill Jooste, the prince of Bo-Kaap, Haashim Pead, and Mnebelele himself have been involved in Erasmus’ alignment camps. The hooker has wonderful dynamism and a vast skillset and is benefiting now from reps with the big dogs at scrum and lineout.

“It would mean so much to me and my family to play for the Springboks,” he says. “There is no reason to shy away from that goal.

“I can look up to a guy like Malcolm Marx who is doing it for such a long period of time and only keeps getting better. There’s so much I can learn from him, and if I was to speak about where I want my game to go in the future, I just want to be as good as him if not better.

“I’ve been grafting hard on my set-piece the most at the Sharks. Scrummaging is a different beast with the bigger guys. I want to keep on getting around the park and be a reliable player.”

On his return from Georgia, Mnebelele moved franchises. The Bulls are stacked in the hooker department, with Akker van der Merwe and Johan Grobbelaar out-and-out specialists, while Jan-Hendrik Wessels and Marco van Staden are Springbok hybrids. There is a clearer route to regular minutes in Durban. And a clearer path to sunny skies and sandy beaches too. “Flippin’ lekka,” is Mnebelele’s assessment of the place.

He will play his first senior club game from the bench on Saturday when the Ospreys visit Kings Park. Moyo is the starting 10. Another U20s colleague, the iron-tough Matt Romao, is named as reserve loose forward. Mnebelele could wind up packing down next to the great Vincent Koch. South Africa’s ‘Mr Incredible’ made his first-class debut in March 2012, a month after Mnebelele’s sixth birthday.

“I’ve heard things from Vincent you can only hear from a guy who has his years of experience in the game.

“From the SA U20s, we are excited to hit the peak of our careers and get going, start getting consistent game time in the URC and being seen a lot more, but sometimes you just don’t bear in mind how young we still are and how far we still have to go. To be 20 and making my URC debut is really special and I’ll be working hard to make sure I bring it, and make myself and my family proud.”

My next big thing is to get my family out of the township because I think there is so much more to see and do.

What would his parents make of all this, had they not been taken from him? “I know for a fact my dad would be proud as hell. I was never that close with him, but he was always a fan of me playing rugby, he used to tell me he played a little bit back in his days in the rural areas.

“With my mother, I think I would have had a big smile while I’m looking at her and telling her she should have just let me play from day one! That’s how mothers are. They want the best for their sons and that’s all she ever wanted for me. In saying that I think she would also be proud regardless.

“If I think about it now, one thing she would have always wanted was for me not to ever stop going to school or stop chasing my dreams. I’m really glad I carried on doing that. Her passing away really hit my two siblings harder than it did me. I think she would have been really proud of how I handled the whole thing.”

Mnebelele’s aunt, cousin and sister still live in the Fochville area. He hopes to change that someday soon, with the income professional rugby may offer.

The name Siphosethu means ‘our gift’ in his isiXhosa mother tongue. Mnebelele’s middle name, Thembalethu, translates as ‘our hope’. He is those things and many more to the people he loves.

“I do what I do for them, to make my family proud and to put them in better situations. My next big thing is to get them out of the township because I think there is so much more to see and do instead of a little town where it’s basically just known for mining. I do go there quite regularly to visit them but that’s about all I go for.”

The gift and the hope. The orphan who became a champion. The kid from the township who captained his school then his province then his country. The 20-year-old still at the start of what everyone around him believes, and has always believed, will be a storied career.

The boy who became a man.