A non-racial future: The Baby Boks, Joburg and economic growth - Sindile Vabaza
Key topics:
Schoolboy rugby now reflects meritocracy and demographic shifts
Elite schools drive talent regardless of race, proving quotas unnecessary
Upward mobility among black middle class fuels social integration
Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here.
Support South Africa’s bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.
If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here.
The auditorium doors will open for BNIC#2 on 10 September 2025 in Hermanus. For more information and tickets, click here.
By Sindile Vabaza*
I was recently pondering the Junior Springboks’ 73-17 thrashing of Australia and the fact that the starting line-up had seven black players, four coloured players and four white players.
As a keen watcher of rugby at school level and having watched the youngsters play for their schools, for their Craven Week teams and many of them for the SA Schools sides, I knew that what this represented was a triumph of meritocracy and the natural changes wrought by the rise of the black and upper middle class at elite-school level.
Putting aside the ethical problems with picking players based on an immutable characteristic like race (or phenotype if you want to be technical), the Baby Boks showed both why quotas are unnecessary, and why upward mobility for black people (more on that later) would help address much of South Africa’s racial animus and many of our societal problems.
It is important to explain the mechanics at play in how this came about for the Baby Boks. Firstly, it needs to be said that many of the Baby Boks attended famous and well-funded schools (well-funded by old boys with corporate connections and deep pockets), with names we would all recognise, ranging from King Edward VII to Maritzburg College to Bishops to Paul Roos, Grey College and many others. This is regardless of colour.
This is true of the test-championship-winning cricketers KG Rabada (St Stithians), Temba Bavuma (SACS and St David’s Marist) and Lungi Ngidi (Hilton). It is also hard to argue about so many boys being selected from elite schools, considering how well these elite schools perform year after year, especially Grey College and the power-three from the Western Cape in Paul Roos and the Paarl schools.
KZN school rugby is especially notable for how the natural changes have altered the look of the schoolboy sides. When I was in grade 8 in 2002, Durban High School’s first XV had two black players. In 2024 and 2025, the same school had two white players each year, while being the best school in 2024 and being second to Westville in 2025.
Westville’s eight Craven Week representatives consist of two white players, two coloured players and four black players, one of whom, Zekhethelo Siyaya, is considered by many to be the best player in the country along with Markus Muller of Paarl Gym. (Both played SA Schools in 2024).
Racial accounting
All this racial accounting is simply to point out that schoolboy rugby has led to a meritocratic system undergirded by a well-funded and semi-professional school elite which competes ferociously for talent and which wants to win.
Read more:
Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Bristol Owen Crankshaw points out this same effect of upward mobility in Johannesburg in a 2022 article for The Conversation:
“But, the large size of the black managerial, professional and technical middle class has nonetheless meant that there were enough black residents willing and able to move to the formerly whites-only suburbs in sufficiently large numbers to result in the desegregation of these neighbourhoods.
“This is best shown in the most expensive northern suburbs. There, the occupational class composition of black residents almost exactly matches that of the white residents. In 2011, 60% of all employed white residents living in the main house were middle class. For Indian residents it was also 60%, for African residents it was 51%, and 49% for Coloured residents.”
This is especially important, as upwardly mobile people of colour in Johannesburg are the most wedded to the private sector (as white people are). I think when a lot of people on Twitter and in the media call Cape Town “racist” (in contrast to Johannesburg), what they are really talking about is the contrast in lived experience between a largely desegregated city and one which is not.
Quite a bit of this has to do with the fact that Johannesburg has an economy that is over 30% larger than Cape Town’s economy, with higher quality and quantity of white-collar jobs and cheaper real estate. It is deeply unfortunate that people use a sledgehammer (calling Cape Town racist) rather than a scalpel (trying to understand the different compositions of the two cities, and how that affects lived experience).
Meritocracy
All this makes me wonder how much more successful (and peaceful and crime-free) South Africa would be if this country adopted pro-economic growth, pro-market policies that focused on the country “winning” and a meritocracy that allowed “natural changes” to happen to our economic and social order.
I suspect our cities and towns would eventually desegregate naturally and with much less racial animus and much less racialised politicking built on the politics of envy. I suspect that racially divisive and inflammatory voices would get much less airtime. I at least hope that Madiba’s social vision of a rainbow nation would be complemented by a suitable economic apparatus that would make it possible for many more South Africans to become meaningful participants in the economy and a broader social order.
It is a vision of the future worth fighting for.
*Sindile Vabaza is an avid writer and an aspiring economist.
This article was first published by Daily Friend and is republished with permission.