SCRUMMING AGAINST ALL ODDS, voices of SARU rugby legends

263pp., b/w & colour illus., paperback, Mercury, Johannesburg, 2025

ISBN: 9781990956775

Short biographies of 15 rugby players who were denied the chance to represent their country because of apartheid-era race classification.

Players discussed include Salie Fredericks, Yusuf 'Tatts' Davids, Cassiem Jabaar, Riyaadh Najaar, Yusuf 'Jowa' Abrahams, Faiek Davids and Dale Santon.

"It is common knowledge by now that the rich traditions and remarkable stories of black and nonracial rugby players going way back to the 1800s were erased from the narratives of South African sport during the colonial and apartheid years. A surge of recent books ... provides welcome correctives to these past omissions. Scrumming Against All Odds by Omar Esau and his circle of fellow academics and community activists now joins the list, with an intimate look at how the lives of the SARU rugby legends they know or knew personally were closely intertwined with the activities, struggles and dignified aspirations of their communities in the decades before democracy." Professor André Odendaal

Dr. Omar Esau is a NRF-rated researcher and senior lecturer of Curriculum Studies at Stellenbosch University.