Rally commemorates 1981 Springbok tour, but anti-apartheid struggle continues
Sunday, 25 July 2021
Boisterous cheers and triumphant hand claps are familiar features of any rugby ground soundscape.
But there wasn’t a rugby ball – or player – in sight as a thunderous roar erupted deep within the bowels of FMG Stadium Waikato on Sunday afternoon.
The carefully timed applause, at 3.10pm, marked forty years to the minute that the match between the touring Springboks rugby team and Waikato was called off on July 25, 1981.
Back on that day, thousands of New Zealanders opposed to the tour marched to Hamilton’s Rugby Park. Hundreds made it onto the pitch, leading to the game being abandoned.
**READ MORE:
* 1981 Springbok Tour 40 years on: How Hamilton became a city of rage
* 1981 Springbok tour 40 years on: John Minto weighs up the legacy of the Rugby Park pitch invasion
* 1981 Springbok Tour 40 years on: Our reporter's account of Hamilton's day of violence
**
Many of those involved in the protest action reunited in Hamilton to commemorate that day.
Several hundred marchers gathered at Garden Place for speeches, and to reminisce, before journeying north through the CBD to the stadium.
The march towards Hamilton’s premier rugby ground was a few clicks slower than the corresponding march four decades earlier.
Yet demonstrators’ passion for social justice hasn’t waned.
“Remember racism. Remember Soweto. Remember Mandela,” march leader John Minto chanted through his megaphone.
“Remember those at the back,” came the good-natured reply from a few demonstrators who struggled to keep up with the front group.
At several central city intersections, motorists waited patiently as marchers navigated their way towards the stadium, with many offering supportive horn toots and waves. At the front of the march, a demonstrator carried a sign which read: “Racism is not okay, ever”. The sign proved more powerful than any stop sign in halting traffic.
Mingling towards the back of the march was Sir Tim Shadbolt who said the 1981 Springbok Tour was a historical event.
“I’ll remember those days for the rest of my life,” Shadbolt told Stuff.
“It was a victory in a way and changed New Zealand for the better.”
Angeline Greensill, along with her mother, the late Eva Rickard, was among the group of anti-tour protesters who made their way onto the pitch at Rugby Park.
Standing up to the “icon of rugby” took courage, Greensill said.
The minutes spent on the rugby ground, surrounded by police and angry rugby fans, seemed like hours.
“I’m sort of just thinking of my mother who said there are people who watch things happen, there are people that make things happen, and then there are people who wondered what happened,” Greensill said.
“On the day of getting into the rugby park at Hamilton here, we were definitely in the third category because we didn't know what happened … suddenly we were in the middle of a field.”
Although the actions of protesters were successful in promoting change, some families have still not healed from the events of 1981.
“It wasn’t funny being in it and I feel sorry for those that suffered injuries, and there were many,” Greensill said.
“I think about all those who put their lives on the line for a country a long way from ours. But that had such a huge impact on the people of South Africa.”
Minto said white South Africans got up in the middle of the night to watch the first televised rugby match from the other side of the world and were instead confronted with images of protesters.
When news the Springboks – Waikato game had been cancelled reached Nelson Mandela in his Robben Island prison, he remarked it was as “if the sun had come out”.
Minto said the actions of protesters reverberated around the world, but the battle against apartheid is unfinished.
He said the new apartheid struggle focuses on Israel and its alleged brutal repression of Palestinians.