South African African Rugby Board

The South African African Rugby Board (later renamed the South African Rugby Association) was the body that governed black South African rugby union players during the apartheid era, and one of three segregated rugby unions operating during that time. The representative team of the African Rugby Board was known as the Leopards.

As with the game among whites, clubs for black and coloured players emerged before unions were established, and before that may have started in missionary schools. Black rugby received a considerable boost from the missionaries who introduced the game to their schools for indigenous peoples. A region that particularly benefitted from such intervention was the Eastern Cape, which remained the stronghold of black rugby until the present day.

Canon Robert John Mullins, headmaster of the Kaffir [sic] Institution from 1864, is usually credited as the first to introduce rugby to blacks, in the shape of his students. Mullins is the father of rugby international Cuth Mullins, who played forward for the 1896 British touring team to South Africa. The Institution was initially a branch of the all-white St Andrew's College in Grahamstown, where Mullins had been a teacher. Rugby was first played at St Andrew's in 1878.

The earliest black rugby club probably was the Union Rugby Football Club, founded in 1887 at Port Elizabeth, with games played on the grounds where the current hospital stands. Union's first opponents were local coloured teams, but soon other black clubs were established in the city, including Orientals (founded 1894), "followed by the Morning Star, Rovers, Frontier and Spring Rose Clubs". Rovers and Union in turn had formed the Port Elizabeth Union by 1897. Inter-town contests were a fixture of black rugby before the end of the 19th century, with challenges occasionally issued via black newspapers such as the Xhosa-language Imvo Zabantsundu.

The earliest attempt to establish a national rugby governing body for players of colour was the South African Coloured Rugby Football Board (SACRFB), formed in 1897 during South Africa's British colonial period. The SACRFB emerged from a meeting of all clubs and unions called to Kimberley by the Griqualand West Colonial Rugby Football Union. Black administrators like Budlwana (Bud) Mbelle[3] had earlier persuaded Cecil John Rhodes to provide a trophy like the Currie Cup to "'all the coloured Sporting People if South Africa'". The SACRFB then organized a domestic rugby competition for the Rhodes Cup, which started in 1898 and was first won by Western Province.

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