SPEAKER_14: Every kid learns differently, so it's really important that your children have the educational support that they need to help them keep up and excel. If your child needs homework help, check out iXcel, the online learning platform for kids. iXcel covers math, language arts, science, and social studies through interactive practice problems from pre-K to 12th grade. As kids practice, they get positive feedback and even awards. With the school year ramping up, now is the best time to get iXcel. Our listeners can get an exclusive 20% off iXcel membership when they sign up today at iXcel.com slash invisible. That's the letters iXcel dot com slash invisible. Squarespace is the all in one platform for building your brand and growing your business online. Stand out with a beautiful website, engage with your audience and sell anything. Your products, content you create and even your time. You can easily display posts from your social profiles on your website or share new blogs or videos to social media. Automatically push website content to your favorite channels so your followers can share it too. Go to squarespace dot com slash invisible for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use the offer code invisible to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. It's 5.25 a.m. outside of the city hall in Peter Meritsburg, South Africa, and Shahidatungo is ready to go on a run.
SPEAKER_06: We are here.
SPEAKER_14: She's wearing a white running skirt and knee socks, one pink, one blue, and she's cracking jokes. Listen, I'm not there to run for the money, so I have to look good. I choose my struggles.
SPEAKER_06: I can't be fast, so I must be cute. The road around her is packed with other equally chipper runners, adjusting the race numbers, snapping selfies and dancing.
SPEAKER_03: Altogether, there are about 13,000 people here, and they're not getting ready for a 5K or a 10K or even a marathon. This is the start line of the comrades, which is 56 miles long. That's Ryan Lenora Brown, a reporter in South Africa who was there the morning of the race in August.
SPEAKER_03: Most years, more than 15,000 people run the comrades, way more than run any other ultramarathon in the world. For reference, about 25,000 people ran the last Boston Marathon, but the comrades is more than twice as long. And as a foreigner in South Africa, I've been haunted for a long time by a question. Why the hell do South Africans think running a race like this for fun is a normal thing to do?
SPEAKER_14: Not only is it very, very long, the comrades goes to a part of South Africa whose name sounds pretty ominous when you're doing two back-to-back marathons through it. The Valley of a Thousand Hills. How are you?
SPEAKER_06: Good, how are you? Good, good, good. Can't complain. How'd you sleep? Ah, did I? Did I? I'm not sure, but I'm yellow. A couple of hours. Thank you.
SPEAKER_03: Shahidah is one of the comrades' pacers, who are appointed by the race to help groups of runners trying to finish in a certain time. In South Africa, these pacers are called bus drivers, and the people they pace are their bus. Shahidah paces the comrades' slowest bus, made up of runners trying to finish just before the race's 12-hour cutoff. She's a kind of evangelist for running very slowly, very far. I just want to make the slower runners, like myself, believe that the how is irrelevant.
SPEAKER_07: Whether you're crawling or rolling or whatever, as long as you're going forward at comrades, you are going forward.
SPEAKER_03: Today, she's got a little piece of paper tucked into her pocket, telling her what times and distances she needs to hit to come in just under that 12-hour mark. Basically, she's aiming to do this like a human metronome, 13-minute miles all day long, no faster and definitely no slower.
SPEAKER_14: Over the course of the day, they'll follow a route that weaves through what feels like all of South Africa. The race winds through wealthy suburbs full of cafes and craft breweries and sleepy, run-down little farming towns. It cuts across the sugarcane plantations that first brought British colonizers to this region in the 1800s. There are shack settlements and rich private schools.
SPEAKER_03: A few minutes after I see Shahidah, they play the national anthem, and then another song comes on.
SPEAKER_03: It's a haunting tune that migrant laborers used to sing on their long journeys home from South Africa's gold mines.
SPEAKER_11: — It's refrain means, go forward.
SPEAKER_07: — I'm doing this.
SPEAKER_07: And then the cannon goes off. Then we start the watch. And we're off.
SPEAKER_03: — Around the world, ultramarathons are having a moment. These are races that are any distance longer than a standard 26.2-mile marathon. The number of people running them more than quadrupled between 2010 and 2020. There are now thousands of these races annually. — But in most of the world, ultras are pretty niche, and they attract a very particular demographic.
SPEAKER_14: Your average ultra runner in the U.S. or Europe is a well-educated married man about 45 years old. In other words, they look a lot like me. — And you only have to eyeball the start line of an ultramarathon in North America or Europe
SPEAKER_03: to see that this is still an overwhelmingly white sport. But in South Africa, it's a different story. — So all kinds of people run comrades.
SPEAKER_07: White, black, Indian, colored, male, female, others, wealthy, poor.
SPEAKER_03: — If you live in South Africa, you definitely know someone who runs ultras. Probably lots of someones. Here, ultramarathons are the stuff of a whole country's New Year's resolutions and midlife crises. They're the kind of thing that a totally ordinary, not athletic person wakes up one day and decides they're going to do. And then does. You might be your doctor, your kid's teacher, the man pumping your gas, the woman who cleans your house.
SPEAKER_14: — In one of the most economically unequal countries in the world, extreme distance running is a sport that feels like it includes everybody. And, improbably, that inclusiveness happened during one of the darkest, most divided moments in South Africa's history. During the final years of apartheid.
SPEAKER_03: — When the comrades ultramarathon first started, it wasn't the little rainbow nation in the Nikes that it later became. In fact, in its earliest days, the comrades looked a lot like ultramarathons elsewhere. — So back then, look, I mean, this is 1921, this is South Africa in its early days.
SPEAKER_09: — This is Matsulani Mamabolo. He's a South African sports journalist.
SPEAKER_03: And also, like so many of his countrymen, a comrades runner. — The race was only open to white people. It was just the white people who ran, and only men, actually.
SPEAKER_09: — The comrades was started by a white South African World War I veteran named Vic Clapham.
SPEAKER_14: To honor his comrades who had fallen in the war, he designed a run between his hometown of Peter Meritsburg and the coastal city of Durban, about 56 miles away. — And a few people apparently signed up. I think there was about 34 people who signed up to run the race.
SPEAKER_09: And it was a big deal because, I mean, who runs from Meritsburg to Durban? — The race alternated directions each year, and in those early days, the press called it a, quote,
SPEAKER_03: marathon go as you please. Guys ran in rugby boots. They stopped for a beer and curried chicken at a hotel along the way. — This definitely wasn't the first ultra-marathon in the world.
SPEAKER_14: Actually, even long before the first modern marathon was held in the 1896 Olympics, a form of super-long-distance racing had been popular in the U.S. and Europe. It was called pedestrianism, and in its heyday in the 1870s and 80s, it was a hugely popular spectator sport where competitors race-walked distances up to 1,500 miles. The sport was so popular that the biggest names earned the equivalent of millions of dollars of prize money. — The Comrades, on the other hand, was a much more amateur affair.
SPEAKER_03: Over the decades, the race grew in size, but not dramatically. By the 1960s, there were maybe 150 guys running it every year. And they were all white.
SPEAKER_14: — Every once in a while, a woman or a person of color would show up on the start line and run the race unofficially, without a number. The organizers generally didn't pull them off the course, but they never got recorded in the official finishers list. In some years, the organizers actually blocked their entry to the stadium where the race ended, so they would never cross the finish line.
SPEAKER_03: — Between excluding 90% of the population from participating, and then also being, you know, 56 miles long, the Comrades seemed doomed to obscurity. But then, the ground started to shift.
SPEAKER_14: — By the 1970s, apartheid South Africa was one of the last white-ruled countries in Africa, and it was coming under global pressure to change. — Anti-apartheid campaigners believed that one of the best ways to force South Africa's hand
SPEAKER_03: would be to isolate it from the rest of the world. South African activists organized boycotts of the country's exports. They pressured international companies to divest from the country, and urged the world's artists and musicians not to perform there.
SPEAKER_10: — We are not asking that you make a political decision. We are asking you to make an economic decision.
SPEAKER_03: — Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the South African anti-apartheid leader. — We are asking you to make a moral decision.
SPEAKER_10: Those who invest in South Africa, for goodness sake, must know that they do so, and in doing so are upholding and buttressing one of the most vicious systems the world has ever known. — For many South Africans, one of the most painful forms of isolation came in the realm of sports.
SPEAKER_03: By the 1970s, the country was no longer allowed to compete in the Olympics or the World Cup. — The apartheid government lobbied hard to FIFA to not kick them out,
SPEAKER_14: but they were so bizarrely committed to segregation that they pitched some weird compromise idea of sending an all-white team to the World Cup in 1966, and then an all-black team in 1970. FIFA said no. — I don't think you can ever have normal sport in the kind of society we have,
SPEAKER_16: a totally abnormal society. — Activists understood how this withdrawal from world sports would make the white government feel like pariahs.
SPEAKER_14: — And it worked. South Africa desperately wanted back into the world's competitions. And so, beginning in the early 1970s, it began to experiment with integrating domestic sports. — Running was one of the first.
SPEAKER_03: In 1974, sports journalist Mazzolane Mambobolo's uncle, Titus Mambobolo, became the first black athlete to win an integrated national championship, in the five kilometers. — And suddenly, black South Africa started believing,
SPEAKER_09: oh, we can compete with white people and even beat them. And I think because of that, the whole country started shifting towards, let's open up to the black people.
SPEAKER_14: — The comrades' organizers were cornered. They didn't want to be left behind. A year later, in 1975, the organizers opened up the race to people of color.
SPEAKER_03: — At the time, distance running was enjoying a worldwide boom in popularity. It was also beginning to include more and more women. For a long time, the conventional wisdom held that women couldn't run marathons because it would damage their delicate reproductive organs. But by the 1970s, prohibitions on female runners were also starting to fall. The comrades dropped its ban on women the same year as it became multiracial. — All of these circumstances helped running become more popular in South Africa, too.
SPEAKER_14: — Still, the comrades might have languished forever in obscurity if it weren't for one more factor. In 1976, South Africa became one of the last major economies in the world to get television, when it began broadcasting a single state-run channel. For nearly a decade, many of the country's leaders had resisted the introduction of TV because they believed it could indoctrinate South Africans with dangerous ideas. The country's Minister for Posts and Telegraphs called it the devil's own box for disseminating communism and immorality.
SPEAKER_23: — Already we can see how easy it is to create and instill wrong impressions about peoples and countries by slanted news and pictures, an unbalanced presentation of facts. — This is South African Prime Minister B.J. Forster giving his first televised address
SPEAKER_03: about television.
SPEAKER_14: — But even as it was trying to stop South Africans from seeing too much of the world, that TV channel had a lot of space to fill, and so it started playing a lot of local sports. — Beginning in the 1980s, the SABC began to broadcast the comrades live,
SPEAKER_03: in its full, tedious entirety, for the whole country to see. For a news station with a lot of time to fill, a race that took literally all day was actually perfect. And what South Africans saw when they tuned in felt to many like a revolution. — They're on their way.
SPEAKER_02: South African runners' greatest challenge of human endurance. — In a country where almost everything was segregated,
SPEAKER_14: from neighborhoods and schools down to park benches and beaches, the comrades was mixed.
SPEAKER_02: — What we are witnessing is an almost nakedly explicit presentation of the greatest race of all, the marathon of life itself.
SPEAKER_03: — For black South Africans who watched the race in that era, the comrades wasn't just a stunning athletic feat. It looked, in many ways, like a parallel universe. — When you're watching comrades, you see this spectacle that is abnormal, actually.
SPEAKER_09: You see a white guy running with a black guy, even hugging him, like, oh, you can touch a white man, you know? They're sharing drinks. It was aspirational. It was, oh, this is what our country should be like.
SPEAKER_14: — In the years after the race integrated, most of the runners were still white. But at every level, black runners were making quick inroads, from the weekend warriors finishing the race in 11 hours, up to the elites running it in less than six.
SPEAKER_08: — My name is Khalimian Oseya Jaleh. I come from Mo'ganu Village.
SPEAKER_03: — Around the time the race integrated, Oseya Jaleh was working as a gardener for a white family in the northern suburbs of Johannesburg. During the day, he planted flowers and clipped hedges.
SPEAKER_03: — So you were the gardener during the day and then at night you were the dishes? — And in between, sometimes, he went for a jog.
SPEAKER_03: — Pretty soon, he realized he was really fast. And the longer the distance, the better. He started running marathons, and then he decided to go bigger.
SPEAKER_03: — In 1979, Oseya ran his first Comrades, and finished 21st of nearly 3,000 runners. He started to think, hey, maybe I could win this thing someday.
SPEAKER_14: — At that point, the Comrades had never had a black winner. But soon, Oseya became one of the race's favorites. He ran with a distinctive lopsided gait, and almost always raced in a floppy blue and white bucket hat. Fans, particularly in black areas along the Comrades route, would pour into the road as he ran by, cheering him along. — It didn't just make us believe that we could be good in just sports.
SPEAKER_09: In just about every field, you started thinking, oh, no, white people are not that great. I can be better in this. I can be better. And it gave hope.
SPEAKER_03: — In those years, Oseya was racing to beat a white archaeology student named Bruce Fordyce.
SPEAKER_00: — Two men are out in front. One's Ebony, and one is white. Maybe that's why they call this classic race the Comrades. In South Africa, what a refreshing sight it is to see a black man and a white man striving side by side in search of victory.
SPEAKER_09: — It was almost a tale of South Africa, really. It told us, here was this black guy and this white guy. They became rivals. And the country, I can bet you, we all supported them along racial lines.
SPEAKER_14: — But the hierarchies of apartheid were hard to outrun. Throughout the 80s, Bruce Fordyce trained full-time for the Comrades and other ultras, living off speaking gigs and sponsorships. Oseya got his training by running 15 miles to his job as a delivery driver and competing in races at any distance from 6 miles up to 60 every weekend.
SPEAKER_03: — I don't know, did you ever feel angry that he had more resources? Because he was a white person.
SPEAKER_03: — But even on this very uneven playing field, long-distance running was a life-changing experience for many runners of color. — Everybody's feeling the same pain, the aches and pains.
SPEAKER_04: They're all feeling the same thing that you're feeling. You know, if a guy's struggling, you help him along, because you know the pain he's going through, and you can identify with it.
SPEAKER_03: — That's Pube Naidu, a runner of Indian heritage who also raced the Comrades in this era. At his peak, he could finish the race in a little more than six hours, which meant averaging just over a six-and-a-half-minute mile for 56 miles. — As soon as the Comrade's gun goes off, there's no apartment anymore.
SPEAKER_04: There's no segregation. There's nothing to do with color. Everybody's out there to run their best to prove that they can finish the race and that type of thing. So everybody's sort of like the lawyers and doctors and all this stuff. It's all come down to your level now. So the playing fields are equal. — But if for those 56 miles there was no apartheid,
SPEAKER_14: as soon as athletes stepped off the course, it was back to normal life in South Africa. After Comrade's, it's back to the same black and white.
SPEAKER_04: In other words, you've got to know your place. You're black and you stay black.
SPEAKER_03: — Hosea left his running club in the early 80s after the chairperson allegedly called him by a racial slur. And he might have been allowed in white areas while he was running a marathon, but the rest of the time, he could be arrested if he didn't have the correct stamps in his passbook. That's a document black people had to carry to show they had permission to be in a white neighborhood. He told me about a time this happened to him outside a train station in Johannesburg when he was on his way to work.
SPEAKER_08:
SPEAKER_14: — By the late 1980s, apartheid was on its last legs. South Africa was in the grips of a low-grade civil war. The government was cracking down violently on protests. Black areas of cities were patrolled by soldiers. Abductions, torture, and beatings of activists were common.
SPEAKER_05: — Apartheid is a criminal act against mankind. — That's Winnie Mandela, the anti-apartheid activist and wife of Nelson Mandela,
SPEAKER_03: who by the mid-1980s had been in prison for more than 20 years. — A white man has been audacity. He is three and a half million. We are 30 million.
SPEAKER_05: — The Quran and Ali, the
SPEAKER_14: — Then, in 1989, Bruce and Hosea both competed in a 62-mile race shortly before the comrades.
SPEAKER_03: As a result, Bruce decided not to compete in the comrades at all, and Hosea raced it on tired legs. That blew the field wide open. — Good morning, nice to have you with us.
SPEAKER_20: It's 5.45, and we are counting down to the start of the world's greatest long-distance road race, the comrades. — On the morning of May 31, 1989, the elite runners eyed each other nervously.
SPEAKER_03: After all, Bruce was the only man who had won the race since 1981. What else could a comrade's champion look like?
SPEAKER_14: — That morning, several runners pulled out in front. But for a long time, no one could break away.
SPEAKER_03: — But in the final 10 miles, two runners surged ahead.
SPEAKER_19: — Both of them gritting their teeth, determined, no smiles for the crowd, slugging it out toe-to-toe like two boxes in the ring. — For the first time in the closing miles of a comrade's, both of the leaders were black.
SPEAKER_03: One of them, William Tolo, had been among the favorites. But as the race approached the finish in Durban, he suddenly slowed down, grimacing in pain.
SPEAKER_19: — And he's gone. William Tolo has stopped. Dead in the street. His hamstring is history. — That left only a relatively unknown runner named Samuel Chabalala.
SPEAKER_03: He was a railway worker from a small farming town, who often trained by running the 30 miles home from his job in his work booth.
SPEAKER_22: — And now, the last of the 30 miles of the 19 miles, and the first of the comrades, winner Samuel Chabalala.
SPEAKER_03: — For the first time in more than 65 years, the comrades had a black winner.
SPEAKER_09: — You know, he is the first black man to win the comrades. And he then added to what Hosea had done, and he presented to them, yes, we believed we can compete, yes, but now we believed we can win.
SPEAKER_14: — Eight months later, South African president F.W. de Klerk delivered news that would change the course of the entire country's future. For decades, anti-apartheid activists had been relentlessly harassed, intimidated, and imprisoned. Now, suddenly, the government was unbanning them.
SPEAKER_18: — The prohibition of the African National Congress, the Pan-Africanist Congress, the Pan-African Communist Party, and a number of subsidiary organizations is being rescinded. I wish to put it plainly, that the government has taken a firm decision to release Mr. Mandela unconditionally.
SPEAKER_09: — So you have Sam winning, and then the following year, Mandela comes out of jail, and just black people, we all just start thinking, we own the country now. Everything is ours.
SPEAKER_03: — Four years later, in April 1994, South Africa held its first democratic election. Nelson Mandela became president. — We, the people of South Africa, feel fulfilled that humanity has taken us back into its bosom.
SPEAKER_05: That we, who were outlaws not so long ago, had today been given the rare privilege to be a host of the nations of the world on our own soil.
SPEAKER_14: — Mandela had always been big into sports. Throughout his life, he was a boxer and also a regular runner. And that wouldn't be remarkable, except that he did all of his jogging for more than two decades inside of an 8-by-7-foot prison cell.
SPEAKER_03: — Running taught me valuable lessons, he wrote in his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom. Training counted more than intrinsic ability, and I could compensate for a lack of natural aptitude with diligence and discipline. I applied this in everything I did.
SPEAKER_14: — So it felt symbolic when, in 1996, Nelson Mandela came to the comrades to present the winners their trophies.
SPEAKER_05: — After witnessing what happened today, and especially after seeing the courage and determination of those who just made it, I have decided to take part in the next comrade marathon.
SPEAKER_03: — To be clear, he was joking. Even if you're Nelson Mandela, running 56 miles when you're 78 is a big ask. — But his presence at the race underscored that it had become a South African institution.
SPEAKER_14: And throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, its popularity continued to grow, drawing more and more new runners.
SPEAKER_03: — Runners like future comrades pacer Shahidah Tungo. — So we would watch comrades from start to finish, and the whole day.
SPEAKER_07: — When she was growing up in a black township south of Johannesburg in the 1980s,
SPEAKER_03: her family always watched the race. — And that's what I knew about comrades.
SPEAKER_07: And I knew it's very long, I knew it's very painful, because I saw what runners looked like at the finish, and I knew I would never do that thing. That's what I knew about comrades.
SPEAKER_03: — Then, in 2011, when Shahidah was in her mid-30s and working at a bank in Johannesburg, her life was ripped up by its roots. — I was actually diagnosed with a form of skin cancer, and it was a week after that
SPEAKER_07: my husband passed away, and I just started walking, and then I started jogging, and then the jogging came into running, and I went for my first 10 kilometers, and it clobbered me good and proper. And I loved the feeling at the end. — Soon, she was racing longer and longer distances.
SPEAKER_14: She never ran fast, but she found she had nearly endless endurance. And as she went along, she'd chant and sing to herself to distract her from the pain of running. Other runners started to join her, and pretty soon, race organizers began to ask her to be an official pacer. — This isn't a small job.
SPEAKER_03: Imagine that not only do you have to commit to running a 56-mile race, but you must also promise to finish it in a very specific time.
SPEAKER_14: — They wanted her to pace to finish in 12 hours. 12 hours is the official cutoff time for the race. That meant that she had absolutely no margin for error. If she ran slower than she expected, her bus wouldn't just finish late. Those runners would be blocked from crossing the finish line at all. — At the time, Shahidah had only run the Comrades once.
SPEAKER_03: But she loved pacing slow runners. Because sure, if you pace faster runners, you might help them break a personal record or something. But if you pace the slowest runners, you might be the difference that helps them achieve this nearly impossible thing. — I become a comedian on the day. I become a mother. I become a psychologist.
SPEAKER_07: You know, I find runners that are going through the most. And I'll tell them, like, we all feel like you. If you think you are the only one in pain, you are not. You know, put on your big gold, bloomers. Come, let's go. Just take two steps.
SPEAKER_03: — She's paced the 12-hour bus ever since. And this year, after two years off because of COVID, the race was back. And so was Shahidah.
SPEAKER_03: — After the gun fires, I watch the runners streaming over the start line. It takes more than 10 minutes before I finally see Shahidah, jogging slowly just in front of the ambulance that follows the slowest runners in case of medical emergencies.
SPEAKER_03: — I see her again about seven miles later, in a little farming town called Ashburton. At this point, the 12-hour bus is still tiny. She has maybe a dozen people running with her, and they're all looking suspiciously cheerful.
SPEAKER_03: Before the comrades this year, I spoke to a runner who'd finished it 41 times. He told me that what appeals to him about running a 56-mile race over and over and over is that it's like living your entire life in one day. The experience holds the entire range of human emotion, from elation to despair. And gathered all along the course are thousands and thousands of spectators, singing, cheering, and encouraging the runners on. By the time I see Shahidah again, we're more than 35 miles into the race, in a Durban suburb called Pinetown. Her bus has swelled to about 50 people. There's this super-dazed look in her eyes, and she seems a bit wobbly. But she's still cheerful.
SPEAKER_03: — And then a couple hours later, I'm waiting for her at the finish, inside Moses Mabita, a World Cup stadium in Durban. The clock is ticking down. There's 30 minutes left, then 10. Still no sign of Shahidah. Suddenly, I hear it.
SPEAKER_03: Now, there is a huge pack of runners behind Shahidah, this tidal wave of bright-colored running jerseys. And in the middle of it all, I see her little Pacer flag, with a big 12 written on it, bobbing up and down.
SPEAKER_07: — The clock reads 11 hours, 53 minutes,
SPEAKER_03: as she jogs over the finish line and bursts into tears.
SPEAKER_07: — Meanwhile, hundreds of people are still streaming over the finish line,
SPEAKER_03: as the stadium speakers begin to play Final Countdown.
SPEAKER_11:
SPEAKER_03: All at once, a line of comrades' staff swarms across the whole finish line, blocking anyone still on the course from finishing. Dazed, exhausted runners keep slamming into it. I hate this part. Seeing all these people who have been running for 12 hours not finish. They look shattered. But watching them also reminds me why Shahidah's 12-hour bus is so powerful. All those people could easily have not finished, too. But somehow, they did it.
SPEAKER_14: — There's a story that sports psychologists like to tell about Roger Bannister, the Oxford University medical student who first broke the four-minute mile in 1954. Until then, four minutes seemed like an almost superhuman barrier. People had been trying and failing to break it for nearly 70 years. But once Roger Bannister ran a sub-four-minute mile, four more people did it in the next year. Now, more than 1,600 people have run a mile in under four minutes. The barrier, it turned out, was largely psychological.
SPEAKER_03: — Shahidah and the 12-hour bus feel like a comrade's equivalent of that. Watching them pour over the finish line, the race feels doable. Running 56 miles feels like a thing that anyone can achieve. At least, it is in South Africa.
SPEAKER_14: — Coming up after the break, we talk about one of the most famous South African sports stories ever and how it connects to post-apartheid South African politics. The International Rescue Committee works in more than 40 countries to serve people whose lives have been upended by conflict and disaster. Over 110 million people are displaced around the world, and the IRC urgently needs your help to meet this unprecedented need. The IRC aims to respond within 72 hours after an emergency strikes, and they stay as long as they are needed. Some of the IRC's most important work is addressing the inequalities facing women and girls, ensuring safety from harm, improving health outcomes, increasing access to education, improving economic well-being, and ensuring women and girls have the power to influence decisions that affect their lives. Generous people around the world give to the IRC to help families affected by humanitarian crises with emergency supplies. Your generous donation will give the IRC steady, reliable support, allowing them to continue their ongoing humanitarian efforts even as they respond to emergencies. Donate today by visiting rescue.org slash rebuild. Donate now and help refugee families in need. If you want to give your body the nutrients it craves and the energy it needs, there's Kachava. It's a plant-based super blend made up of super foods, greens, proteins, omegas, vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, and probiotics. In other words, it's all your daily nutrients in a glass. Some folks choose to take it as the foundation of a healthy breakfast or lunch, while others lean on it as a delicious protein-packed snack to curb cravings and reduce grazing. If you're in a hurry, you can just add two scallops to your food. You can add two scallops of Kachava super blend to ice water or your favorite milk or milk alternative and just get going. But I personally like to blend it with greens and fruit and ice. You know, treat yourself nice. Take a minute and treat yourself right. You'll get all the stuff that you need and feel great. Kachava is offering 10% off for a limited time. Just go to kachava dot com slash invisible, spelled K-A-C-H-A-V-A, and get 10% off your first order. That's K-A-C-H-A-V-A dot com. That's K-A-C-H-A-V-A dot com slash invisible. Kachava dot com slash invisible. Kachava dot com slash invisible. Kachava dot com slash invisible. Kachava dot com slash invisible. Kachava dot com slash invisible.
SPEAKER_14: This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. Do you ever find that just as you're trying to fall asleep, your brain suddenly won't stop talking? Your thoughts are just racing around? I call this just going to bed. It basically happens every night. It turns out one great way to make those racing thoughts go away is to talk them through. Therapy gives you a place to do that so you can get out of your negative thought cycles and find some mental and emotional peace. BetterHelp is a free trial and trial for all of us. It's free and free. It's entirely online, designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist and switch therapists at any time for no additional charge. Get a break from your thoughts with BetterHelp. Visit BetterHelp dot com slash invisible today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp. H-E-L-P dot com slash invisible. We're back with Ryan Lenora Brown, who reported this week's story, to talk a little more about sports and politics in South Africa. Yeah, and what I want to talk about in particular is a sport that most Americans know very little about, but that's really, really popular in South Africa, and has played actually a big role in the country's recent history.
SPEAKER_03: Rugby. Well, I know about rugby. I know rugby exists. You are right, though. It is not very popular here in the U.S.
SPEAKER_14: Yeah, so maybe the easiest place to start here is with a rugby reference Americans might be familiar with. Have you ever seen the film Invictus?
SPEAKER_14: I'm aware of its existence, but I have not seen it, no. Okay, so it's this Clint Eastwood movie starring Morgan Freeman as Nelson Mandela with an honestly slightly questionable South African accent.
SPEAKER_01: Tell me, Francois, how do we inspire ourselves to greatness where nothing less will do? How do we inspire everyone around us?
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, but anyway, Invictus is the story of South Africa's unexpected victory in the 1995 Rugby World Cup. Okay, so what was significant about that?
SPEAKER_14: Well, for one thing, it was a kind of masterclass in Mandela's ability to make these big, sweeping symbolic gestures of unity, which he did a lot in those years.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I mean, I can imagine he had to because he had recently become president in a country that was incredibly divided and deeply segregated.
SPEAKER_14: And he became president after, what, 27 years in prison. So there's a lot to heal there.
SPEAKER_03: Right, and that actually included sports. So we just talked in this episode about how long distance running became the sport that transcended all these divides. But by the 1990s, most sports in South Africa were still seen as kind of quote-unquote belonging to certain races. Obviously, I don't mean people of other races didn't play those sports, just that they were very strongly culturally associated with particular groups. So for instance, soccer was a quote, black sport. Cricket was a quote, white sport. And where did rugby fall in this divide?
SPEAKER_14: There have always been black rugby leagues and teams in South Africa, but rugby was widely seen as a white sport.
SPEAKER_03: So to get back to the Rugby World Cup in 1995, this is the biggest tournament for the sport. Teams from all over the world compete with each other. And that year, South Africa hosted the tournament, which was significant because it was also the first time that South Africa was allowed to play since apartheid had ended. But the team it fielded was almost entirely white, and so were the supporters. And actually, it was like even worse than that. A lot of black South Africans were rugby fans, but they would cheer for whoever was playing against South Africa, particularly New Zealand. They saw the Springboks, who are South Africa's national team, as actually a symbol of white supremacy. So what did Mandela do here?
SPEAKER_14: Well, first he approached the Springboks captain, who was this white guy named Francois Pinard,
SPEAKER_03: and basically asked him to make the point to the team, to the public, that they represented the new South Africa. Do you hear? Listen to your country. This is it. This is our destiny.
SPEAKER_03: That's another clip from Invictus. And that was Matt Damon, by the way, doing actually a pretty good Afrikaans accent. So anyway, the rest of what Mandela did was pretty simple. He went to the games, he wore the team's jersey, and he cheered for them like they were his team. And when they won the whole thing in this nail-biter game in downtown Joburg against New Zealand, he presented them with their trophy. There it is. Francois Pinard and Nelson Mandela is cheering along with the whole of the stadium.
SPEAKER_13: Sea of flags. Wonderful moment for the whole of South Africa. This footage is actually really sweet. You can see Mandela pumping his arms and genuinely looking very jazzed about the team winning.
SPEAKER_03: And so what happened after that? What was the result of all this unity at the Rugby World Cup?
SPEAKER_14: Well, obviously South Africa didn't change overnight. Neither did the rugby team.
SPEAKER_03: The gesture was really significant to a lot of people, but it took also actual policies to make really significant changes happen. And what that looked like is that in the late 1990s, the government started creating these racial quotas for sports teams to get them to transform. Those quotas have been really controversial in South Africa, as you can imagine.
SPEAKER_14: Yeah, I can imagine those are controversial, but do eventually they just become part of everyone's life and therefore not necessary anymore? I would say yes and no. A lot of people would argue that these kind of transformations really have to start at the level of youth sports, club sports,
SPEAKER_03: to be meaningful, to not tokenize black players, to not put them forward when they're not ready. You've seen that start to happen, in rugby in particular. Rugby is sort of one of the leaders among South African sports. But in any case, the South African rugby team now does look really different than it did back in 1995. So what's it like now?
SPEAKER_03: Well, to answer that question, we're actually going to go quickly to another Rugby World Cup. This one's in Japan in 2019. And, spoiler alert, South Africa actually won again. The biggest prize of them all! South Africa! A World Cup winners in 2019!
SPEAKER_13:
SPEAKER_03: The captain of that team was a guy called Sia Kolisi, who was the first ever black player to hold that title. And the squad itself was the most diverse it had ever been.
SPEAKER_18: Sia, just tell me when the final whistle win, what were your first thoughts?
SPEAKER_17: You know, we faced a lot of challenges. But, you know, the people of South Africa have gotten behind us. And we are so grateful to the people of South Africa. And, you know, we have so many problems in our country. But to have a team like this, you know, we come from different backgrounds, different races, and we came together with one goal. And we wanted to achieve it. I really hope that we've done that for South Africa, to show that we can pull together if we want to and achieve something.
SPEAKER_14: It sounds like he's really, like, taking Mandela's example and continuing on into, like, the next generation.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, sports are political everywhere, obviously. But South Africa has been a particularly stark example of that, just because the transformation it's undergone has been so stark. So obviously, you know, we saw it with the comrades in running. And this rugby story is just another interesting, significant example, I think, of a place you've seen that really powerful kind of transformation. And in sports in South Africa that mirrors what's been happening in the country.
SPEAKER_14: Does this mean I should watch the movie Invictus or I should not watch the movie Invictus? Roman, I will leave that one up to you.
SPEAKER_14: Leave that decision between the audience and their God. Thank you so much. Thanks, Roman.
SPEAKER_14: Ninety-nine percent invisible was produced this week by Ryan Lenora Brown, edited by Delaney Hall, original music by Swan Rael, sound mix by Martine Gonzalez, fact checking by Graham Haysha. Kurt Kohlstedt is our digital director. The rest of the team includes Chris Berube, Jason De Leon, Emmett Fitzgerald, Christopher Johnson, Vivian Lay, Lajima Dawn, Jacob Maldonado Medina, Kelly Prime, Joe Rosenberg, Sophia Klatsker, and me, Roman Mars. Special thanks this week to Isaac and Gwenya, Roxy Thomas, Bob De La Motte, Darshan Mudli, and Tommy Nietzke. We are part of the Stitcher and Sirius XM podcast family now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building in beautiful uptown Oakland, California. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars and the show at 99 P.I. Org. We're on Instagram, Reddit, and TikTok too. You can find links to other Stitcher shows I love as well as every past episode of 99 P.I. at 99 P.I. Org.
SPEAKER_21: Amika is a different type of insurance company. We provide you with something more than auto, home, or life insurance. It's empathy. Because at Amika, your coverage always comes with compassion. It's one of the reasons why 98% of our customers stay with us every year. Amika, empathy is our best policy.
SPEAKER_12: Get everything in between. Gatorade Zero is the perfect partner for whatever workout comes your way. Helping you get more, do more, and be more with Zero. Get more out of Zero.
SPEAKER_15: With the McDonald's app, every order gets you closer to free McDonald's. So ordering a Big Mac today could earn you a free Big Mac in your future. Earn free food with the McDonald's app. And participate in McDonald's.
