Being a Black Springbok: The Thando Manana Story

By Sibusiso Mjikeliso

Thando Manana was the third black African player to don a Springbok jersey after unification in 1992, when he made his debut in 2000 in a tour game against Argentina A.
His route to the top of the game was unpredictable and unusual. From his humble beginnings in the township of New Brighton, Port Elizabeth, Thando grew to become one of the grittiest loose-forwards of South African rugby, despite only starting the game at the age of 16. His rise through rugby ranks, while earning a reputation as a tough-tackling lock and later open side flanker, was astonishingly rapid, especially for a player of colour at the time. Within two years of picking up a rugby ball, he represented Eastern Province at Craven Week, and by 2000 he was a Springbok.
But it isn’t solely Thando’s rugby journey that makes Being a Black Springbok a remarkable sports biography. It’s learning how he has negotiated life’s perils and pitfalls, which threatened to derail both his sporting ambitions and the course of his life.
He had to negotiate an unlikely, but fateful, kinship with a known Port Elizabeth drug-lord, who took Thando under his wing when he was a young, gullible up-and-comer at Spring Rose. Rejected by his father early in his life, Thando had to deal with a sense of abandonment and a missing protective figure and find, along the way, people to lean on.
Thando tells his story with the refreshing candour he has become synonymous with as a rugby commentator, pundit and member of the infamous Room Dividers team on Metro FM. He has arguably become rugby’s strongest advocate for the advancement of black people’s interests in the sport, and his personal journey reveals why.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pan Macmillan South Africa
• Release date: Jul 1, 2018
• ISBN: 9781770105454

Book preview

New Brighton

I was not born rich but I was born in a place rich in history. New Brighton, Port Elizabeth, the place I call home, was the birthplace of many influential figures of the past in all spheres of South African society. Walking through its streets, you inherit this history, this sense of great achievement and endeavour. You breathe it in the air.

If you take a stroll through the township, anyone you ask will point you to the houses of the greats: ‘The Majolas live there’ or ‘That is where former Cricket SA president Mtutuzeli Nyoka grew up’ or ‘That’s John Kani’s childhood home’ or ‘Not far from here you’ll find Winston Ntshona in that house’. Dan Qeqe Stadium is like a monument that binds the township together and it’s almost fitting that it’s the first sight that greets you as you enter the township.

Dan Qeqe was a great man, who lived and breathed humanitarianism. The spirit of ubuntu was innate to him. The story is passionately told – if you’ve got time and a beer for the storyteller – of how he forked out money from his own pocket back in the 1970s to build extra classrooms for the kids of New Brighton because the apartheid government of the time refused to do so. Qeqe didn’t stop there. When the government refused to let black people use the municipal sports facilities, Oom Dan galvanised the community for blacks to build their own stadium. And that is how the Dan Qeqe Stadium came to be. It’s not just a field where one can kick or hit a ball, it is a symbol of resistance against oppression, of hope and proof that black people can do things for themselves if they pull their oars in one direction.

My parents were ordinary, fun-loving folk. My father, Mawonga ‘Bankie’ Hoyi, was probably the most fun-loving guy of the lot. My mother, Khathala ‘Khathie’ Manana, is a beautiful woman who sacrificed a life of her own for me – but I guess that’s the contract mothers sign at the birth of their children.

My parents never married but I believe I was conceived during a loving time. What I know is that Bankie, from whom I got my tall frame, met my mother when he was working at Ford (now General Motors South Africa) in Port Elizabeth.

At the same time my mother held down what we tend to call ‘piece jobs’. From what I hear, they were a couple in love. They were young and partied together, attending live music events known as eshowini in those days.

Wherever they went, they were together, synonymous with each other. If you met my mother in the street you immediately recognised her as Bankie’s girlfriend. Before I even came onto the scene they’d hang out at these shows and the beach, especially on Sundays.

After I was born at Livingstone Hospital they had their problems like any young relationship does. My arrival naturally meant more responsibility on my mother’s shoulders and she had to go out and look for a permanent job.

I remember one of her earlier jobs was at a clothing store called Sales House, then she went to Edgars, before finally finding employment at Jet, all part of the Edcon Group.

Growing up in New Brighton and attending a ‘black primary school’ called Phendla didn’t acquaint me with rugby at an early age.

I remember my first day of school simply because they didn’t want to enrol me. They said I was too young. I think I was five years old at the time. But the principal, Ma’am Sofisa, lived in our street and knew my mother and father. The principal and I also shared clan names, she was MaGatyeni, and she took me in. I attended Phendla until I was in Standard 2 before going to Gelvan Park Primary School. I remember sitting in my mother’s kitchen prior to going to Gelvan Park, her cutting my hair with a pair of scissors and thinking all was well with my look. The next day, to my horror, I discovered that ndigqoloziwe – I’d been cut skew. In those days there wasn’t a barber or a hair salon every hundred metres around the block like there is today in the township.

That embarrassing moment aside, my mother was brilliant at thinking of ways we could improve ourselves, which most times involved putting me in better situations than she had experienced herself. It was as if her past experiences, socially and academically, were an ever-burning furnace in her mind and she didn’t want to relive them vicariously through me.

It wasn’t long after I started primary school that she decided I should attend a coloured school and that is how it came to be that I attended Gelvan Park Primary School, in Gelvandale. My mother wanted so badly for me to go to the school that she allowed them to make me repeat a grade I had already completed, just so they could enrol me. I had, apparently, started school too young and so needed to be in a class with my age-mates. She even coined the name Desmond for me, so that they wouldn’t fret about pronouncing my real name, Thando.

Gelvandale was about five kilometres from New Brighton and a few friends and I would make the long walk across the Gelvandale Sports Complex to shorten our route from the township to the coloured neighbourhood to get to school every morning.

My mother could only afford to give me two rand a day for transport, which wasn’t enough for a return trip from New Brighton to Gelvandale. But we would form groups with the fellas and take a steady walk back home after school.

South Africa at the time was socially divided and we were suffering the effects of a state of emergency declared by the apartheid government. This was in the early 1980s, not the best time in the country’s history. But the winds of change were blowing and a few coloured schools, plus a trickle of white schools, were accepting blacks for the first time. The jump from a black township school to a coloured school was so massive that it felt like I was in a white school. It was such a major step up. Even the air you breathed seemed different.

The first thing that jumped out at me when I went to Gelvan Park was the Physical Training subject, or PT, which I enjoyed because I was an active child. On the day you had PT you had to bring white shorts, a white T-shirt, white socks and takkies – something that was foreign to me. I learned that coloured people took pride in what they did and loved their sport. Sport was akin to religion, akin to drawing in breath; it coursed through their veins. I was introduced to a sport called hockey for the first time when I got there. The kids at school loved hockey and excelled at it. How many black township schools offered or still offer hockey? It was huge in all coloured schools but was never introduced by whites to the black township schools. I was also introduced to swimming for the first time. I learned about many things, things that I didn’t even know existed, at that school.

At Phendla Primary it was just classes, break time, then back to class and then home time. That was it. There were no school ‘houses’ that split us into various teams for sporting events like they did at Gelvan Park. Much like in the white former Model-C schools, you knew that February was the start of the athletics season and you would have inter-house athletics meets – an alien concept in the township at that time. The coloured school was vibrant. You had English-speaking coloureds, Muslim coloureds and Afrikaans-speaking coloureds. At lunchtime these groups would segregate; even though we knew each other, kids tended to hang around the religious or language groups they were familiar with. But I blended in easily with everyone and that was my character from day one. The first friend I made was Yenlee Li Choo – a friendship that would change the course of my very existence. Then there was Lee-Roy Newton and Trevor Neethling. Khaya Majola’s son Vukile was my junior at the school.

Khaya Majola, the late great cricketer and administrator, was very close to Allister Coetzee, who taught at Gelvan Park, and that was how his son ended up there as well. There was also Camagu Somyalo, the son of Judge Somyalo, who went on to become a lawyer. I would often visit the Somyalo home when we were growing up, as well as the Li Choo home.

Even though Coetzee taught and coached sports such as cricket at the school, rugby was not offered as an extracurricular activity. He taught me Afrikaans and was my Standard 5 class teacher. We would see rugby balls in the boot of his car and on some days he wore his rugby blazer or tracksuit emblazoned with the logo of Saru, the old South African Rugby Union. He was our cricket coach but we never took note that in our midst was the Saru captain and a great of the game of rugby. I later found out that he had tried to introduce rugby to the school but the parents were against the idea because a spate of rugby-related injuries had hit white schools in the 1970s and 1980s. They were afraid that their children would get hurt or be crippled by injuries.

Having Coetzee, an icon of black sport, as one of my teachers at primary school was a blessing in disguise, one that I would not fully appreciate until the year 2000, when I was chosen to play for the SA Under-23 national team under his mentorship.

This was the time when Coetzee was the captain of Saru, the non-racial national rugby team of the time, which comprised unions such as Sedru (South Eastern Districts Rugby Union), Kwaru (KwaZakhele Rugby Union) and Eastern Province Rugby Union. To me though, he was just my PT teacher. I later saw, when I was in high school, that he was the Saru scrumhalf and a prominent rugby player in the region. He was a hero of black rugby. I remember seeing his wedding photo in the Evening Post after he got married. We had all been excited about seeing Mr Coetzee in the paper at school the next day. He was always so humble. He knew he was dealing with kids and he loved introducing us to sport. That was his focus whenever he walked through the school gates. If you arrived in class without the proper gear, however, you would cop a meaty caning from him. In Standard 5 he administered canings a lot to undisciplined boys in his class. At that point he was preparing us for high school, when our paths went their separate ways and where, he said, our level of concentration would be critical to how well we did.

He was a proper guardian, a man with strong morals and ethics, and one who taught us well. From my first encounter with him as my PT teacher, I understood that Mr Coetzee was very strict and he would bliksem us when we stepped out of line.

He had a lot of ideas for his PT classes, which made him a very good educator, and we looked forward to whatever variation of physical activity he would introduce. We were going through our developmental stage at that point, doing exercises to assist our growth. Wednesday sports days took place at Gelvan Grounds (now known as Gelvandale Sports Complex), where we played soccer, tennis and cricket against other schools or amongst ourselves. Coetzee was the coach of these teams as well, on top of being the PT teacher. Having grown up in Grahamstown, he could speak a little isiXhosa too, which helped a lot of us from black township schools who were adjusting to a coloured school and having to speak English on a daily basis. This also meant that we couldn’t gossip about him behind his back.

He was short, stout and strongly built. But we knew virtually nothing about who he was beyond his school life. He liked sending me to his car to fetch stuff before class or to carry his bags back afterwards. He drove a navy-blue Toyota Corolla and his boot was filled with leather balls, green-and-gold socks and all sorts of other rugby paraphernalia. It never occurred to me at the time to question why we never played the sport that involved the strange, oval-shaped ball. Back then, rugby was prevalent in Afrikaans-medium coloured schools and white schools.

I was a very naughty kid at primary school. I loved being around girls, cracking jokes and performing attention-seeking stunts in class. It was all because of the excitement I felt at being part of a school that was abuzz with activity – a sharp contrast to Phendla in New Brighton.

One of the funny memories I recall from primary school was the ‘Miss World’ pageant we held. But the strange thing about this one was that it pitted boys against other boys dressed in women’s clothing. Gelvan was a co-ed school but in Standard 5 one of the teachers came up with the genius idea to have us cross-dress and compete in a mock fashion show as one of our farewell functions before we moved on to high school.

There was no farewell dance like they have in high school, but this was one of the ways the school could say goodbye to their group of kids. But here was the kicker for me: I was already so tall in Standard 5 and wore size-eight shoes, which wouldn’t have been a problem if we were entering a beauty pageant as men.

Because of the fondness I had for the West Indian cricket team, I had chosen to be Miss Jamaica, and the other guys went as Miss USA, Miss England and Miss Australia, for instance. I had everything: make-up, a wig, and dresses from my mother and aunts. But I just couldn’t find women’s shoes in size eight!

This was a crisis – I needed heels to look good. At the eleventh hour I did manage to find a pair, but less for their appeal than because they were the only shoes that would fit. Coetzee was one of the teachers at the fashion show – and one of the judges, I think – and he had a right old laugh about it when he recalled the incident while writing the foreword to this book.

Allister Coetzee, being the disciplinarian he was, made sure that I did well in his Standard 5 class. He loved us and everything he did was laced with a determination to see us become good, well-behaved youngsters. He was responsible for our all-round work and performance, even in subjects he didn’t teach. He signed off on all our reports. Before we left for high school, he gave me a stern warning: ‘You’re going to high school now, Desmond. You need to lift up your socks and you can’t play around in class any more. Things are changing and you’re growing.’

I was very active at school. I think I did every extracurricular on offer purely because I was thrilled there were so many. But, because of my mischievousness, my name was often in the Gelvan Park black book – where ill-disciplined kids would have their names noted – probably more than 20 times each term. But I recall being very competitive at school, academically – I was quite decent at maths – as well as on the playing fields. I was also one of those kids who never took things at face value or lying down. It was not uncommon for me to ask teachers why things were a particular way or why we had to abide by certain rules. I had a nagging curiosity that didn’t allow me to accept things right off the bat, even when it came from those in positions of authority. Obviously, that didn’t always serve me well with the people in whose hands I had been placed. And, later in life, that trend would continue.

When we were in primary school I spent an increasing amount of time at the Li Choo household and was fascinated by everything they had. There was a VHS video machine, an M-Net decoder and a lot of other ‘luxuries’ we never even dreamed about at home. A bunch of us played sport together, so we would go to Yenlee’s house after school, hang out or watch movies for a while before going to Gelvan Grounds. Camagu Somyalo and I went our separate ways after Standard 5, but my bond with the other two, Yenlee and Lee-Roy, grew stronger with time.

When it came to sporting facilities, the coloured neighbourhoods had everything in an easily accessible cluster. The multifunctional Gelvan Grounds, for instance, had cricket fields, tennis courts, a swimming pool and hockey fields all within a stone’s throw from each other. Even in the new democratic South Africa, you will struggle to find such easily accessible sporting facilities, catering to such a diverse range of sports in black township areas. In New Brighton you would have to take a taxi to Westbourne Road just to get to the athletics track. To locate soccer grounds you would have to leave New Brighton for a surrounding township, such as Korsten. The cricket grounds are in Zwide and from there you have to get back to New Brighton to play rugby at Dan Qeqe Stadium.

The way the kids played and had fun in the township was different to the way in the coloured areas. In lieu of toys, we created our own go-karts from used tyres. Your car would be made out of a worn-out tyre and two sticks of roughly the length of a broomstick inserted into the area meant for the rim, pointing in the direction you wanted your ‘car’ to move. You’d fill the inside of the tyre with water and then drive it using the two sticks, racing against the others down the dusty streets. Or you would have races between cars made out of fence wire and with bottletops for wheels. We’d also play marbles and yo-yos. To play cricket we would set up our pitch in the middle of the street, with two dustbins at opposite ends posing as stumps, a worn-out tennis ball as the cricket ball and any old plank for a bat. It wasn’t flush but we had a blast.

I found acceptance in the coloured areas, so much so that I identified with them and felt as though I was one of them.

In primary school, a group of us boys would head over to Yenlee’s house to change into our sports gear before going to play, or just to hang out, almost every day after school. Yenlee lived around the block and we would get a few slices of polony and cheese sandwiches and some cooldrink to refill our tanks, then we’d make our way to the sports fields. We’d disperse once we were done with our sporting activities; I’d go home to the township with the rest of the New Brighton lads and Yenlee and my coloured friends would stroll up the road to their houses. It was the strangest thing. I’d walk to and from school with my Xhosa friends from the township, but once we entered the Gelvan Park gates I would shoot off in a different direction to find my coloured mates.

I was enamoured of their company. It wasn’t a race thing; it was just that I identified with Yenlee, Lee-Roy and Trevor Neethling a lot more than I did with the friends I grew up with in New Brighton.

There were other alien customs that fascinated me, such as the culture of packing neatly cut sandwiches in white wrapping paper (wax paper) or foil for lunch. Back at Phendla and most days at Gelvan Park, I never took lunch to school, but the coloured kids did and they had these homely sarmies that their folks made for them daily. The sandwiches smelled and tasted like love. I felt that these people were on another level.

This was a reflection of a society that sought to separate race groups in the country of their birth, to create class and race differences where none existed. This was the by-product of the ruler’s divide-and-conquer mantra. My sense of awe of coloured people’s culture continued into my adolescence. When my eye widened and I began to discover dating I wanted to go out with coloured girls.

There was no discrimination among us kids; if there had been, I would never have made the friendships I made. In my myopic early existence in New Brighton I never thought for a moment that we were poor because I knew no better. If we didn’t have something, say M-Net, nine times out of ten my next-door neighbours didn’t have it either and neither did our neighbours across the street. We were all the same; I didn’t miss anything.

But life in the coloured neighbourhood was different. In Gelvandale, for example, nearly every coloured home had its own M-Net decoder. Similarly, going to the mosque at noon on Fridays also had me in awe, so much so that I wanted to convert to Islam so that I could also get a reprieve from school for an hour every Friday – the mosque was right across the road from the primary school – but this was no more than the fleeting fancy of a newcomer to Wonderland. I looked with envy at children who were picked up from school by their parents. In the township you learned to use public transport – taxis and buses – from an early age, or you would walk, in groups, for kilometres to school and back. There was a bus we used to take (coins in the pocket permitting) that used to go through KwaMagxaki, delivering people from Chatty, before making its way to our school and on to Korsten. Very few black people picked their kids up from school.

Absent Father

Things soured between my parents during my early years and I have recollections of the two of them arguing outside our New Brighton home on Madala Street, with my grandmother trying to shield me from the fracas.

My father was already a heavy drinker by then – something that has haunted both my father and me all our lives – and it wasn’t uncommon for him to lay a hand on my mother. Often my uncles, Mangaliso and Bandile, would have to intervene or check whether Khathie was all right. My father and my uncles would get into regular fights down our alleyway on Madala Street because my uncles had a duty to protect their sister, one of their own.

At some point my mother realised that the relationship was not going anywhere. One day she saw my father leaving the house of one of his friends on the street adjacent to ours, where he had slept with another woman. He was walking the other woman out just as my mother was leaving our place. That did it for her.

That day my mother took a decision to dedicate her life to taking care of her only child. In one moment she had forsaken her dreams of marrying the father of her child and I think she gave up on love because she never married.

My mother had relationships after my father but she didn’t want to bring me in as a kid in a new marriage. She is a happy person, joyous and full of life. I’ve asked her many times why she never settled down with someone in her later years but her eternal hope was always to have more kids with my father and build a life with him, which never happened.

When my mother had me she didn’t have her matric certificate. As the years went on she finally managed to attend night school and finally got her Senior Certificate. I look into her eyes sometimes and see nothing but a life of sacrifice. She was and still is a strong woman. Occasionally she blames my father’s friends for what happened between them. When the relationship reached its nadir she decided to shut him out of her emotions and to concentrate on me.

At a similar juncture my father took a decision to go the other way and he withdrew from my life for decades. While my mother committed herself to raising me, he abdicated his responsibilities, choosing instead to pursue the good life with his friends from the township.

In some ways, I understand the frustrations he went through under the apartheid regime and how tough life must have been for him, especially after losing his job at Ford.

But still I carried a lot of anger towards my father from a very young age. Once you see your father hitting your mother – and you’re a young, hapless boy – it burns a mark of ill will in your mind and eats away at your emotions. Your cognitive reasoning goes into such shock that you battle to reconcile what you’re witnessing. Instinctively, as a child, your mother is an image of warmth, tenderness, sometimes discipline but never abrasiveness. However, when that tender image is attacked by the brutality of your father’s hand and aggression, you seriously struggle to understand what is going on. You become David to your father’s Goliath; as a kid, you just go in there to stop this brute of a man.

My father’s neglect showed its root cause, when, years later, Khathie told me this story:

When Thando was still very young, his father used to come see him and check on him. Our relationship was on the way down at that point because of a number of strains, such as the fact that he didn’t have a steady job and that I was doing casual labour as well.

Mawonga [Bankie] was never chased away from our home, even though we had a child out of wedlock, which was taboo during those days. He had access to his child whenever he wanted to see him.

One day when Thando was about three months old I went to the clinic to get his vaccine shots and to go for a check-up. When we got there I saw a man who looked distinctly like Mawonga. We were about to enter the clinic premises but I just could not keep my gaze away from him because of this striking resemblance he had to my boyfriend.

I’d never heard Mawonga talk about his father or say anything about his father being in his life or living in the same area where we lived, so I was confused. But this man had Mawonga’s ears and those ears were consistent throughout the whole family. The strange man was a hawker, selling all kinds of things near the clinic, such as second-hand wardrobes, couches and similar things.

After a few