Often we witness our nation up in arms fighting for transformation in South African sports, especially when it comes to Rugby and Cricket and particularly during world cup tournaments.
But when it comes to our national football team, Bafana Bafana, there's little to no noise about this issue. More people of colour is being demanded by the masses in our national teams, but what about those of no colour?
Since Bafana got re-admitted to international stage in 1992, blacks always made up most of our players. One may argue that it's because black people are more into soccer than any other race. Maybe yes, maybe not.
Since we all don't have factual evidence about which race plays soccer, we just assume it's black people. But I believe there are more white people also playing football. Maybe not more than blacks, but enough to be included in the national team.
I know Indian and coloured people are sometimes classified as black people, but allow me to classify Indian people here as different to black people. There are quite a few Indians and whites in the Bafana set-up. This has been a worrying factor. Since 1992, we've had a handful of white players in Bafana. Only Neil Tovey, Pierre Issa and a few others represented Bafana for a while. Others just made a few appearances then tossed aside. I'm not quite sure about Indians though.
As we speak, the country is trying its best to curb racism and discrimination amongst our people and it's always been believed that sports play a major role in bringing people together. It does, but for how long? One-and-a-half hours? We can do better than that. There are quite a number of white and Indian players that deserve to be called up to Bafana, but they're being overlooked.
We should fight for transformation not only when it's black people being sidelined, but other races too. Transformation and racism don't only apply when the victim is a black person. White people, Indian and Chinese people can also be discriminated against or be the victims of racism just as much as blacks. We need more white and Indian players in Bafana as much as we want blacks in rugby and cricket.
Do you think Bafana Bafana has achieved transformation?
*This article was written by a Soccer Laduma reader and reflects their opinion, not that of Soccer Laduma.
