Sport in South Africa

It's the national religion. Transcending race, politics or language group, sport unites the country - and not just the male half of it.

When a South African team wins, a cacophony of hooting, cheering, banging of dustbin lids, trumpeting on cow horns and fireworks reverberates across the largest cities. The national adrenaline goes into overdrive. Maybe even the GDP goes up. Just don't look too cheerful on the Monday morning after a dismal sporting weekend!

Sport, like no other South African institution, has shown it has the power to heal old wounds. When the Springboks won the Rugby World Cup on home turf in 1995, Nelson Mandela donned the No 6 shirt of the team's captain - Francois Pienaar, a white Afrikaner - and the two embraced in a spontaneous gesture of racial reconciliation which melted hearts around the country.

A single moment, and 400 years of colonial strife and bitterness … suddenly seemed so petty.

It wasn't always that way. During the apartheid era, racially segregated sport was a highly divisive issue, as exemplified by the case of Cape Town cricketer Basil D'Oliviera, a world-class talent who just happened to have the "wrong" colour of skin.

Disqualified from local first-class cricket on the grounds of race, D'Oliviera went to live in England in 1960, becoming one of the stars of the English team.

When he was selected for a 1968 tour of South Africa, the apartheid government barred him - an act of folly that offended even the crustiest British conservatives, and turned South Africa into an international sporting pariah.

But it was a sporting moment that first helped to heal the country's racial rift. In 1992, the country returned to the Olympics for the first time since it was barred 32 years earlier. In the women's 10 000 metre finals in Barcelona, two runners dominated the field, running shoulder to shoulder, lap after lap, way ahead of the field. One was South African Elana Meyer; the other was Ethiopian Derartu Tulu.

With just metres to go, Tulu found the strength to "kick" ahead of Meyer and become the first African woman to win a major Olympic title. But the big moment was to follow, when Tulu and Meyer embraced, then ran a lap of honour together, each draped in her country's national flag, a white Afrikaner and a black African together, cheered on by the crowds.

The major sports in which South Africa excels are the aristocratic British games of rugby and cricket. For over a century, the country has regularly fielded teams of world-beating class, playing chiefly against arch-foes England, Australia and New Zealand.

Thirty years of apartheid isolation did some damage, yet despite many international disappointments, both teams have risen to the occasion since South Africa's readmission to international sport in 1992, winning honours against the world's toughest opposition.

But it is football - or soccer, as it is universally called here - that has won the hearts of South Africa's black majority.

South Africa is by no means a giant in the world of soccer, but for many black South Africans, the country's proudest sporting moment came when it won the African Nations Cup on home turf in 1996 - having failed to even qualify for the previous cup.

Soccer is intensely followed, and the quality of the local game keeps improving - as is demonstrated by the increasing number of South African players-in-exile among the glamorous European clubs.

The national team, nicknamed Bafana Bafana, which means "The Boys", is extraordinarily erratic, beating giants, then succumbing to minnows.

Local teams, organised in a national league plus a plethora of knock-out cups, are followed with the same passion as in many other countries, by paint-daubed, costumed, whistling and cheering fans. Mercifully, the country has been spared the spectre of football hooliganism.