“As I’m sitting here, something is definitely happening out there which is the same as the mental image I have from growing up,” Cheslin Kolbe says of the danger he senses on a quiet morning in Cape Town. When he was a boy Kolbe saw people being shot and stabbed on the Cape Flats and he describes the terrible murder of a childhood friend, whose tongue was also cut out, just before the Springbok wing won the first of his two World Cup winner’s medals in 2019.
Kolbe is now one of the best and richest players in world rugby. On a break back home, before he returns to Japan to resume playing for Tokyo Sungoliath, the 30-year-old is in the mood to reflect on his extraordinary journey from poverty and gangland violence, and to explain how rugby has the capacity to offer hope in a brutalised country.
