Around the jagged cliffs of Coffee Bay, the Wild Coast got its name. Rolling green hills plunge from great heights into the foaming sea. Fat oysters cling to the surf-crammed rocks. The sandy beaches are huge, the water brilliant and the views stunning.
NEW: Track your favorites in the app 📱
Now you can follow their favorite teams, tournaments and players in the RugbyPass app!
The roads in and out are less romantic. They turn to mush when it rains and are punched with holes under 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. Health clinics are overburdened, houses are scarce, and work is hard to find. Beauty is real, but so is deprivation. They exist side by side, 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 source of extraordinary people. Nelson Mandela was born in Mvez. Steve Biko grew up in Ginsberg. Chris Hani was born in Cofimvaba. Their names have become part of the country’s political mythology, although the villages and towns that produced them are still associated with a way of life that can feel distant from the cities that lure their young people away.
Rugby carries the same contradiction.
This is the story of black rugby players as 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 create their own paths when the official ones were closed to them.
This is not to say that blacks are the only important figures in the history of rugby in the province. The Eastern Cape has also produced outstanding white players, coaches and administrators. His rugby story is shared and complicated. But any account that fails to center the black players and communities that sustained the game through apartheid would repeat the very failure this story examines.
The Eastern Cape has produced some of South Africa’s most notable players: Siya Kolisi, the first black man to captain the Springboks; Makazole Mapimpi, who came from Tsholomnqa to score in the World Cup final; and Lukhanyo Am, which emerged from Zwelitsha and became one of the world’s best centers. It also produced generations of players who kept the sport alive through poverty, segregation and institutional neglect.
Next time New Zealand return to South Africa because this event will be in eight years. This makes the omission of the Eastern Cape harder to stomach.
However, 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 won All black people 29-24 in front of nearly 88,000 people for a 2-1 lead. The teams traveled to Baltimore for the final game. New Zealand will next return to South Africa for the event in eight years. This makes leaving it out harder on the 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 be to see an All Black M?ori side against a combined Border and Eastern Province side,” he says.
Instead of sending underprepared provincial franchises to play the All Blacks during pre-season, Malotana envisioned a match with local meaning: a representative team from the region that supplied South African rugby with so much of its talent.
In 1976, just weeks after police opened fire on student protesters 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 the history of the sport, adding to the international backlash against New Zealand’s decision to maintain contact with apartheid South Africa.
Almost 50 years later, the symbolism is reversed. The All Blacks could come to democratic South Africa without passing through the province that helped forge so much of its rugby identity.
“Rugby has become so commercial that if you’re left behind, you’re left behind,” says Malotana.
The Eastern Cape is not left behind because it lacks talent or passion. It has fallen behind as its rugby institutions have struggled to turn those qualities into lasting strength.
The Eastern Province and the border suffered financial crisis and administrative instability. The Southern Kings, once touted as the province’s route into Super Rugby and the professional game, are gone. Players continued to appear, but more and more had to leave to progress.
The wealthier syndicates take the best of what the Eastern Cape produces. The province keeps the stories.
Malotana believes that the region must take responsibility for its own revival. But responsibility is not the same as guilt. Many children cannot depend on their parents to finance transportation, equipment, training, or private schooling.
Malotana is careful not to shift all responsibility to another place. SA Rugby can point to provincial constitutions and say the unions must govern themselves. Local administrators can point to a lack of funding and historical neglect. Anyone can explain why someone else is to blame for that situation.
“The dollar is quite easily transferred,” says Malotana. “You can’t really stop and say, ‘okay, this is where the hole ends and now we start digging back in’. The hole just finds a way to get deeper and deeper.”
He believes that the region must take responsibility for its own revival. But responsibility is not the same as guilt. Many children cannot depend on their parents to finance transportation, equipment, training, or private schooling.
“Someone else needs to intervene in that space,” says Malotana. “It’s been there before.”
It was one of the products of the old Border development system. It saw him go from rural Eastern Cape rugby to Queen’s College, then the Border Bulldogs, the Cats and finally the Springboks. That path is still 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 get access to stronger coaching, better pitches and the structure of national schools. From there comes Craven Week, provincial selection and the possibility of a professional contract.
“It really provides another opportunity,” says Malotana. “But at the same time, it stifles the amount of development that still needs to happen.”
A handful of players were taken from city and country schools and transferred to wealthy institutions. I can flourish. The national team could benefit. But the original system is weakened every time its best players are removed without anything being built in their place.
There are efforts to address this problem. The Zwandile Mali tournament created a competition for rural and urban schools. The wider structure of the school league is beginning to emerge. Selected players travel to festivals somewhere in South Africa, and some have been given the opportunity to tour abroad.
But some kids still train and play on fields that are barely safe.
It does not work for your larger unions to have rugby compete in the Eastern Province or the Border. It only serves as a place to select the right players and download them for yourself.
“Because of the passion that’s there, somebody took the time to say, ‘On my watch, I’m going to try to create opportunities,'” says Malotana. “You have to admire that. You have to want to find a way to support it.”
That is the duality of the Eastern Cape. It is not a place waiting for a white savior or a television camera to discover it. His people have repeatedly created something from very little. The question is why they were so often asked to do it themselves.
The history of Dan Qeqe offers the clearest example. When black teams were denied access to proper pitches in Port Elizabeth, Qeqe helped mobilize the community to build their own stadium in the city. KwaZakhele Rugby Union, founded in 1971 and known as Kwaru, was not just an alternative competition for players excluded from white rugby. It was a challenge to the structures that decided where blacks could play, who could manage the sport, and which teams were allowed to matter.
Kwaru joined the non-racial South African Rugby Union and became a rallying point for more than rugby. It provided a platform for political discussion, community organizing and resistance to apartheid’s control of public space. The stadium was a testament to what the state refused to provide: a place they built for both black rugby players and fans.
Malotana worries that the people who benefited from those struggles are now forgotten.
“All of these guys went through different levels of difficulty that they had to endure to create this system,” he says. “Now they are less and less talked about.”
After South Africa’s 2023 World Cup final win over New Zealand, Kolisi made it clear: “I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for that, and the people who came before me. The people who made it possible for people of my color to play.”
Kolisi is often portrayed as an individual wonder: the boy from Zwide who became captain, champion and national symbol. But he understood that his place in the Springbok jersey was inherited. Other people fought, organized and endured before his arrival.
Soweto made that heritage sound. As South Africa began to take control of the third Test, gwijo rose from the stands. The traditional isiXhosa form of collective call-and-response singing, usually performed without instruments, has become part of the emotional language of Springbok rugby. Chants erupted from the crowd as the Boks’ physicality began to overwhelm New Zealand’s speed. It was not an imported party or a choreographed attempt to create an atmosphere. It was the sound of South Africa remembering itself through rugby.
The moment took the Eastern Cape to the FNB Stadium. The Gwijo Squad, a movement of fans whose members are mostly from the provinces, has helped bring the tradition from local communities to stadiums around the world. His songs traveled from the communities that sustained black rugby to Soweto, another place shaped by resistance and memory. The Eastern Cape was absent in the schedule but present in the culture.
Malotana does not want another story about a child who ran away from the hills of his homeland. He wants the story of what happens when the hills are given real roads, schools, fields, coaches and institutions.
“It doesn’t sit well with your major unions to have rugby in the Eastern Province or the Borders competing,” he says. “It serves only as a place to select the right players and take them for yourself.”
His solution is crude: build local, invest patiently, and stop depending entirely on the old channel of elite schools.
“We cannot continue to depend on the prominent schools that existed before democracy,” he says. “Build new infrastructure where it’s most needed. So there’s a broader base of development.”
The Eastern Cape has already provided South African rugby with ample evidence of what it can produce. Now he needs a chance to keep some of that talent, develop his own teams and build for generations that will never be famous enough to become inspirational stories.
“Wherever people tend to think about investing in civic development,” says Malotana, “be sure to consider the Eastern Cape. It will be an investment well spent.”
By the time New Zealand returns for another tour of Rugby’s Greatest Rivalry, another generation of Eastern Cape kids will have grown up watching the rivalry from afar. The question is whether they will still be expected to leave home before South African rugby decides they are worth a visit.
