LONG READ 'Talent, neglect and deprivation' - the fight to save South Africa's Eastern Cape hotbed

Around the jagged cliffs of Coffee Bay, the Wild Coast earns its name. Undulating green hills plunge from great heights into a frothing sea. Fat oysters cling to the surf-battered rocks. The sandy beaches are vast, the water brilliant and the views staggering.

The roads in and out are less romantic. They turn to porridge when it rains and are pocked with potholes beneath the baking sun. Coffee Bay is a place that can take your breath away, provided you are only passing through.

Life is harder for those who stay. The health clinics are stretched, houses are scarce and work is hard to find. The beauty is real, but so is the deprivation. They exist beside each other, sometimes within the same view.

Look at Coffee Bay long enough and you begin to see the Eastern Cape: South Africa’s poorest province, but also a wellspring of extraordinary people. Nelson Mandela was born in Mvezo. Steve Biko grew up in Ginsberg. Chris Hani was born in Cofimvaba. Their names have become part of the country’s political mythology, even as the villages and townships that produced them remain tethered to a way of life that can feel distant from the cities pulling their young people away.

Rugby carries the same contradiction.

This is a story about black rugby players because black rugby in the Eastern Cape was forced to survive outside the structures that controlled the sport. Its history is one of exclusion, resistance and achievement: players, administrators and communities creating their own pathways when the official ones were closed to them.

That does not mean black people are the only important figures in the province’s rugby history. The Eastern Cape has produced outstanding white players, coaches and administrators too. Its rugby story is shared and complicated. But any account that fails to centre the black players and communities who sustained the game through apartheid would repeat the very omission this story examines.

The Eastern Cape has produced some of South Africa’s most consequential players: Siya Kolisi, the first black man to captain the Springboks; Makazole Mapimpi, who came from Tsholomnqa to score in a World Cup final; and Lukhanyo Am, who emerged from Zwelitsha to become one of the world’s finest centres. It has also produced generations of players who kept the sport alive through poverty, segregation and institutional neglect.

The next time New Zealand return to South Africa for this event will be in eight years. That makes the Eastern Cape’s omission harder to stomach.

Yet when New Zealand came to South Africa, the Eastern Cape was not on the itinerary.

The South African leg of Rugby’s Greatest Rivalry is now over. It ended in Soweto on Saturday, where the Springboks beat the All Blacks 29-24 in front of almost 88,000 people to take a 2-1 lead. The teams have gone to Baltimore for the final match. The next time New Zealand return to South Africa for this event will be in eight years. That makes the omission harder to stomach.

Kaya Malotana, the first black man to play a Test for the Springboks in the professional era, had an alternative. “One of my first thoughts was how great it would have been to see an All Black M?ori side against a combined Border and Eastern Province side,” he says.

Instead of sending undercooked provincial franchises to play the All Blacks during pre-season, Malotana imagined a match with local meaning: a representative team drawn from the region that has supplied South African rugby with so much of its talent.

In 1976, just weeks after police opened fire on protesting students in Soweto, the All Blacks played Border in East London and Eastern Province in Port Elizabeth. They won both matches. The tour became one of the most controversial in sporting history, contributing to an international backlash against New Zealand’s decision to maintain contact with apartheid South Africa.

Almost 50 years later, the symbolism is inverted. The All Blacks could come to a democratic South Africa without passing through the province that helped produce so much of its rugby identity.

“Rugby has become so commercial that if you get left behind, you are left behind,” Malotana says.

The Eastern Cape has not been left behind because it lacks talent or passion. It has been left behind because its rugby institutions have struggled to convert those qualities into durable power.

Eastern Province and Border have endured financial crises and administrative instability. The Southern Kings, once presented as the province’s route into Super Rugby and the professional game, disappeared. Players have continued to emerge, but increasingly they have had to leave to progress.

The richer unions take the best of what the Eastern Cape produces. The province keeps the stories.

Malotana believes the region must reclaim responsibility for its own revival. But responsibility is not the same as blame. Many children cannot depend on their parents to fund transport, equipment, coaching or a private-school education.

Malotana is careful not to place all responsibility elsewhere. SA Rugby can point to provincial constitutions and say unions must govern themselves. Local administrators can point to funding shortages and historical neglect. Everyone can explain why the situation is somebody else’s fault.

“The buck gets passed around quite easily,” Malotana says. “You can’t really ever stop and say, ‘okay, this is where the hole ends and now we start digging back up’. The hole just finds a way of getting deeper and deeper.”

He believes the region must reclaim responsibility for its own revival. But responsibility is not the same as blame. Many children cannot depend on their parents to fund transport, equipment, coaching or a private-school education.

“Somebody else needs to intervene in that space,” Malotana says. “It used to be there before.”

He was one of the products of Border’s old development system. It gave him a route from rural Eastern Cape rugby to Queen’s College, then to the Border Bulldogs, the Cats and ultimately the Springboks. That route remains possible, but it is narrower than it was.

The elite school system still offers the clearest path. Scouts attend tournaments. The best players are recruited. They gain access to stronger coaching, better pitches and the national schools structure. From there comes Craven Week, provincial selection and the possibility of a professional contract.

“It does provide another opportunity,” Malotana says. “But at the same time, it stifles the amount of development that still needs to happen.”

A handful of players are taken from township and rural schools and moved into affluent institutions. They may flourish. The national team may benefit. But the original system is weakened each time its best players are removed without anything being built in their place.

There are efforts to answer that problem. The Zwandile Mali tournament has created a competition for rural and township schools. A wider school league structure is beginning to emerge. Selected players travel to festivals elsewhere in South Africa, and some have been given opportunities to tour abroad.

But some children still train and play on grounds that are barely safe.

It doesn’t serve your bigger unions to have Eastern Province or Border rugby competitive. It only serves as a place to pick the right players and take them for themselves.

“Because of the passion that exists, somebody has taken the time to say, ‘On my watch, I will endeavour to create opportunities,’” Malotana says. “You’ve got to admire that. You’ve got to want to find a way to support that as well.”

That is the Eastern Cape’s duality. It is not a place waiting for a white saviour or a television camera to discover it. Its people have repeatedly created something from very little. The question is why they have so often been required to do so alone.

Dan Qeqe’s history offers the clearest example. When black teams were denied access to proper grounds in Port Elizabeth, Qeqe helped mobilise the community to build its own stadium in the township. The KwaZakhele Rugby Union, founded in 1971 and known as Kwaru, was not simply an alternative competition for players excluded by white rugby. It was a challenge to the structures that had decided where black people could play, who could administer the sport and which teams were allowed to matter.

Kwaru affiliated with the non-racial South African Rugby Union and became a meeting point for more than rugby. It provided a platform for political discussion, community organisation and resistance to apartheid’s control of public space. The stadium was proof of what the state had refused to provide: a place built by and for black rugby players and supporters.

Malotana worries the people who benefited from those struggles are now being forgotten.

“All these guys went through various levels of weight that they had to bear to create this system,” he says. “Now they are spoken about less and less.”

After South Africa’s 2023 World Cup final victory over New Zealand, Kolisi put it plainly: “I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for that, and the people that came before me. The people that made it possible for people of my colour to play.”

Kolisi is often presented as an individual miracle: the boy from Zwide who became captain, champion and national symbol. But he understood his place in the Springbok jersey was inherited. Other people had fought, organised and endured before he arrived.

Soweto made that inheritance audible. As South Africa began to exert control over the third Test, gwijo rose from the stands. A traditional isiXhosa form of collective, call-and-response singing, usually performed without instruments, it has become part of the emotional language of Springbok rugby. The singing came from the crowd as the Boks’ physicality began to overwhelm New Zealand’s speed. It was not imported entertainment or a choreographed attempt to manufacture atmosphere. It was the sound of South Africa remembering itself through rugby.

The moment carried the Eastern Cape into FNB Stadium. The Gwijo Squad, a supporters’ movement whose members are largely from the province, has helped take the tradition from local communities to stadiums around the world. Its songs travelled from the communities that sustained black rugby into Soweto, another place shaped by resistance and memory. The Eastern Cape was absent from the schedule but present in the culture.

Malotana does not want another story about the child who escapes the hills of his homeland. He wants a story about what happens when the hills are given proper roads, schools, pitches, coaches and institutions.

“It doesn’t serve your bigger unions to have Eastern Province or Border rugby competitive,” he says. “It only serves as a place to pick the right players and take them for themselves.”

His solution is blunt: build locally, invest patiently and stop depending entirely on the old elite-school pipeline.

“We can’t keep depending on the prominent schools that were there before democracy,” he says. “Build new infrastructure where it’s mostly needed. So that there is a wider base of development happening.”

The Eastern Cape has already supplied South African rugby with enough evidence of what it can produce. Now it needs the chance to keep some of that talent, develop its own teams and build for generations who will never be famous enough to become inspirational stories.

“Wherever people are inclined to think about investing in grassroots development,” Malotana says, “by all means consider the Eastern Cape. It will be investment well spent.”

By the time New Zealand returns for another Rugby’s Greatest Rivalry tour, another generation of Eastern Cape children will have grown up watching the rivalry from a distance. The question is whether they will still be expected to leave home before South African rugby decides they are worth coming to see.