Tobias did not play in a test match on this tour. He made his test debut the following year (as a centre) against Ireland on Newlands. He also played in the second match in Durban and his performance made him a sure choice for the touring team of 1981 to New Zealand. It was the first Springbok tour in 16 years and no one really knew what to expect. It was certain that there would be resistance. Activists in South Africa and New Zealand were heavily opposed to the tour. An organisation called Halt All Racist Tours spearheaded the opposition to the Springboks touring in New Zealand. But it wasn’t only political activists that made the Springboks feel unwelcome. A petition with more than 3 000 signatures from residents of Auckland and Dunedin requested that the Boks stay out of their country and was sent to SARFB. It was known as the ‘Book of Unwelcome’. Bruce Robertson, an All Black that toured in South Africa in 1976, refused to play against the Springboks. So too did Graham Mourie, captain of the All Blacks. Naive South Africans believed that the presence of Tobias and Abé Williams, one of the officials on the tour, would be enough to undercut resistance; to show that the South African rugby authorities were serious in their intentions to move away from apartheid; to attempt to make rugby normal in an abnormal society.
This could not be further from what happened. New Zealand was torn in two by protests. It was a small civil war with the police in the middle. Violent clashes were the order of the day. The Springboks watched powerlessly in Hamilton from the pavilion as protestors occupied the field and the match was cancelled. Another match was cancelled due to safety concerns. Pieces of glass and smoke bombs were thrown onto the fields. Stadiums were fenced off with barbed wire and guarded by the police. A special police unit was founded to protect the Springboks. The team frequently couldn’t even sleep in hotels and at one point had to sleep in a squash court. The third test in Auckland was preceded by bloody clashes between the police and protestors in the streets around the stadium. A light aircraft swooped down on the players during the match and dropped flour bombs on them. One of them downed Gary Knight, an All Black prop.
A short visit of three matches to the United States of America also led to protests. The first ever test match between South Africa and the USA was an example of the precarious international position the Springbok team found itself in. It was played in secret on a polo field. A little over 30 people (estimated) watched the match. Even members of the touring team didn’t know the match was being played. And that in the USA, a country that, unlike New Zealand, was not well-known for its rugby.
The tour of 1981 by New Zealand and the USA closed nearly all doors for South African rugby for good. The Springboks were in action only five times over the following decade: twice against the Jaguars, once against England, hosting a rebelling team from New Zealand in 1986 (the Cavaliers) and in 1989 played two tests against a world team to celebrate the centenary of SARFB. The All Black tour of 1985 was cancelled and the Springboks were forced, in that year of states of emergency and increasing political unrest, to tour South Africa in matches where they were not to wear official national colours. The British Lions also decided to cancel their tour in 1986. In 1987 a team from the South Sea Islands, the South Sea Barbarians, toured South Africa. They didn’t even play against the Springboks.
The tour of 1981 was anything but a highlight for Tobias. He also received criticism because they saw him as an ‘Uncle Tom’. The utterly inappropriate way he was treated by manager Johan Claassen and coach Nelie Smith is infamous. He did not let this stop him. His biggest Springbok moment came three years later with the English team touring through South Africa. He was 34 years old then – a touch over the age range for a running back, especially a fly-half, was muttered in certain circles. But which true rugby connoisseur would ever forget the way Tobias played in the Proteas against the English? His deadly corkscrew runs where he sometimes teased the English defenders by holding the ball out to them, as if daring them to take it from him. ‘Errol Tobias is not coloured,’ the English coach, Dick Greenwood, observed. ‘He is pure gold.’ The second test in Johannesburg was quite possibly his best while wearing a Springbok jersey. At Ellis Park he reached yet another milestone in becoming the first black Springbok to score a try for South Africa in a test match. By this time, Tobias was no longer the only black Springbok; the wing Avril Williams also played in two tests against England. Today one can only wonder how many other black players during the years of apartheid could have made the kind of contribution to the Springboks as Tobias and Williams did if the principle of normal sport in a normal society held true.
This slogan finally became a reality in South Africa towards the end of the 20th century, with the first democratic election resulting in the majority rule. Many observers of South African history would say that the pressure that organisations like SASCOC and SARU brought to the table helped to speed up the end of apartheid. They would not be wrong. They would ask if people such as Tobias truly accomplished the same. He didn’t change society, after all, they would say. Again they would not be wrong. He did play for the Springboks. But the society in which he lived was anything but normal. It did not even have the illusion of being normal: Tobias was severely limited as to where he could live, where he could work and for who, where his children could go to school, where he could go on vacation, where he could buy groceries, who he could vote for. Like many other South Africans, white people included, he couldn’t even read what he wanted to. The white government could decide where he could go to the hospital and where he would one day be buried. Nearly three years after Tobias played his last test for the Springboks, he couldn’t even swim wherever he might like to. Even if you were a cabinet minister like Reverend Allan Hendrickse.
Someone like Tobias was also not accepted everywhere in his own rugby world. White players complained about him. Officials were openly hostile towards him. In 1987 two rugby bosses (Boetie Malan from Northwest Cape and Daan Nolte from East Transvaal) announced that they were electoral candidates for the Conservative Party (CP). The CP, under the ultra-conservative leadership of the former scrumhalf of the Southwest District, Dr Andries Treurnicht, did not believe in normal sport in the least. They actively wanted to keep society and sport abnormal. The Conservatives were, among other things, heavily opposed to mixed Craven Week rugby teams. Springbok teams with Tobias and Williams in the ranks stuck in their craws.
The fact that Tobias played his rugby in a largely racist society and, according to some, was cynically abused by the white rugby bosses to mislead the world about the true state of affairs in South African sport, is still sometimes held against him. But the judgment of history is never that simple; even if it is only sporting history. Tobias’s tale has another side. It must be told and read. It is a story that tells of a man that struggled for his whole rugby career against prejudices and an unfair system. A brave and talented man who leapt on the small chances offered to his career and used them. A man who crossed borders, racial borders, in his divided country where no choice was ever easy. Unlike SARU players and officials who were mostly faceless and anonymous to white people during the apartheid era, easily dismissed as ‘agitators’, Tobias was on the rugby fields and television screens. He proved that black players were just as good, if not better, than white players. For that reason an older white man would, years later in an airport restaurant, want to shake Tobias’s hand for providing him with so much rugby pleasure, because he helped to open eyes, to change attitudes. For that reason spectators on Loftus Versfeld got to their feet to cheer him on. For that reason white boys from a conservative Free State dorp like Hoopstad were already standing in line in 1980 at the Free State stadium just to touch Tobias or get his signature; something that was nearly unthinkable in the South Africa of those days. I know. I was one of them.
For that reason Tobias should perhaps be judged the way an English daily newspaper based in Cape Town did in 1903 with the centre Japie Krige. Krige was one of the South African rugby heroes when a British team came in 1903, barely a year after the Anglo-Boer War, to tour through a South Africa with a divided (white) population. With each step Krige took on the rugby field, the newspaper said with perhaps a touch too much enthusiasm in one of its editorials, he did more than all the political speeches to bring closer together English speakers and Afrikaners. With each step that Tobias took on the rugby field, he helped to ensure that decades later the borders between white and black would