My grandfather was roughly a contemporary of Vic Richardson, a leading Australian sportsman of the 1920s and 1930s who captained the cricket team and the Aussie rules team in South Australia, as well as representing the country in baseball and South Australia in golf. For a sports lover like me, it's also hugely impressive that he won the South Australian state tennis title and was a leading local player in lacrosse, basketball and swimming. That's quite a resume.
But nothing about Richardson impresses me more than the way he handled British cricketer Douglas Jardine's complaint during an Ashes match in 1932 when the English captain reported that one of the Australian team had called him a “bastard”. Standing at the threshold of the change room, Richardson turned to his teammates and simply said: “OK, which one of you bastards called this bastard a bastard?”
Conjecture around Bongi Mbonambi's alleged racial slur incident has kept the traffic at water coolers heavy this week. Most South Africans agree that they think Mbonambi was speaking in Afrikaans when he allegedly said “Wit kant” or “Wyd kant”, or whatever it was that English flanker Tom Curry thinks he heard when he went to the referee and asked: “Sir, Sir, if their hooker calls me a white c*** what can I do?”
Would Mbonambi ever use that particular word, when South African slang is prop vol with so many better ones? We have a plethora of languages and cultures to choose from when picking an insult, so the allegation in the English media that suggests Mbonambi wouldn't speak in the “language of the oppressor” but would rather choose the Queen's English as an insult is far-fetched.
As Jeanette Serdyn writes in The Guardian: “The use of the C-word is pretty rare in South Africa. The expletive that denotes the same body part in a similarly transgressive tone is the word poes, the diphthong “oe” pronounced a bit like the double-o in soot. In Dutch, innocently enough, that word denotes a cat, a frequent source of mirth to Afrikaners visiting the Low Countries.”
Dan Corder makes a similarly good point on his TikTok channel when he talks about the “mad idiots” who say that the South African team shouldn't use the word that means “side” because it sounds like a swear word in English. Corder says: “Screw you and your English supremacist notions of your own importance.” He continues: “If you follow that to it's logical conclusion, you're never saying 'push' again on a rugby field. Ever!”
The reason I mentioned my grandfather is because he was part of a generation that often imparted the following advice to their kids and grandkids: “Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words can never hurt me.” If scrums and tackles can't break rugby player's bones, what's the danger of a little Afrikaans peppered into the play?
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