From ‘Taking a While to Settle’ to Becoming the Imbokodo: Women's Rugby Union in South Africa during the Post-apartheid and Professional Era, 2001–2020

Abstract

Women's rugby in South Africa is a recent development. Inaugurated four years after the professionalisation of the men's game in 1997, the ‘Springbok Women’ national team faced an uphill battle in their struggle to match the century-old reputation and international respect enjoyed by the male ‘Springboks’. The women's game grew slowly over the last two decades, starting from a low base with only a few clubs in 2000. Despite its designation as a national team with the title of ‘Springbok’ in 2012, the women's game on the national and club level remains an under-resourced largely amateur game with only a small group of semi-professionals. Given the country's lack of a dedicated professional league or national competition, the national team struggled in the international arena. Poor results, in the end, resulted in the prioritisation of rugby sevens, despite this shortened version retarding the growth of the traditional game. After two decades, the semi-professional ‘Women Springboks’, known as ‘Imbokodo’ or ‘grinding stone’ since 2019, is still facing salary discrimination, inadequate resourcing and a lack of genuine recognition as its exclusion from Team South Africa for the 2016 Rio Olympic Games demonstrated. At the start of the second decade of the millennium, the situation looks decidedly bleak for women's rugby in the country despite the South African Rugby Union's endorsement of World Rugby's international programme for game development.