Cake politics
The Rugby Championship, the World Cup, and Springbok politics in South Africa.
Screenshot from the "Stronger Together" TV advert.
Before the All Blacks-Springbok match in Wellington on Saturday, July 27th, a Checkers supermarket in Cape Town displayed two cakes. One was frosted in black with the familiar silver fern of New Zealand Rugby’s All Blacks. The other had the green and gold with the contested Springbok logo, but instead of reading “Springboks” the baker wrote “Quota Squad,” the clear implication being that the Springbok selection process was politicized and black players were being selected because of a (nonexistent) political quota.
The accusation itself, so often heard by white rugby fans (and held by some in the media), so infrequently legitimate, was even more absurd in the context of the 2019 Springboks.
The cake predictably caused a furor. But like most furors in our Twitter-fueled world it largely faded. Checkers apologized. An unnamed baker’s head may or may not have rolled. The Boks and All Blacks played to a 16-16 draw. Two weeks later, South Africa smashed Argentina in Salta to win The Rugby Championship, the first time the Boks had won the vaunted southern hemisphere championship in ten years, since then-coach Peter De Villiers’ Boks had won the Tri-Nations in 2009.
