Zintle Mpupha

Spurred on by Mr Koko’s offer of 50 Rand for every try, a young South African cricketer called Zintle Mpupha, from a village deep in the bush, was inspired to not only captain her country at sevens, but also make history in the English game.

Travelling between townships and villages in South Africa’s Eastern Cape is far from easy. There’s no regular bus services, trains or taxis, and few have access to their own vehicles to get between places of work. So, if you need to get somewhere, you have to leave early – sometimes a day or two early – to get where you need to go. And that’s exactly what Nomatheko Mpupha did.

Every Sunday, she’d head to the bus stop in her village of Middledrift and look for a vehicle that might be heading at least in the vague direction of Alice, the town where she had two jobs, as a domestic in a private house and a cashier at the supermarket. If she was lucky, the trip might be made in one ‘hike’, but it was usually several, often beginning with a journey as far as the nearest main road, where opportunities for a lift were more plentiful.

She’d return to Middledrift the following Saturday afternoon, enjoying a few hours and overnight with her family before starting the journey again. “I always looked up to my mummy,” explains Zintle Mpupha, the Exeter Chiefs and Springbok centre, as she recounts her childhood from the Baxter Suite at Sandy Park. “She had to leave the family for the whole week – it was too far to come back every day – just to make sure we were getting to school, getting fed, being looked after.

“The money she brought back would cover school uniforms, books, lunch in school and make sure we could eat at home, I would always see food on the table.

“It wasn’t easy for her,” she continues, “because my brothers didn’t have decent jobs, so they were living on my mummy’s money and grandfather’s pension. We were a huge family, so money was very tight.

“As I got older, I started to see a difference though,” admits Zintle, “I could see it was getting harder, especially when my grandfather passed on, it was really tough.

“By then it was only my mum and her younger sister and, because there were no older relatives, my aunty had to look after the house all of the time, which meant my mum was the only one out there working for the whole family.”

Middledrift lives up its name, as it lies north-west of East London, but is effectively a place between other slightly more well-known places, cut adrift in the South African bush. “I don’t think you can even see it on a map,” laughs Zintle. “I had a TV crew visit me there and I had to leave the village to find them on the main tarmac road.

“When people are trying to find it, even when they’re close, they can’t see it, it’s like you’re going through bushes, then there’s nothing, then a few houses, then more bushes, then it’s just there – very deep into the bushes.”

When Zintle was thirteen, she moved to the comparative metropolis of Mdantsane, a township just outside East London and lived with the family of her mum’s older sister. “It’s a huge township, the second biggest in South Africa. We lived in a four-room house, about the size of this,” she says, referencing the 15m x 5m suite. “It was split between two families, so about eleven people in total, and we each had two rooms: one room that was also the kitchen, dining room and bathroom, then the room you slept in.

“In my room it was my stepmum [aunty], my stepdad [uncle], my two cousins and myself. They would sleep on the bed, and I would be on the floor.

“As a kid I would dream of having my own room, my own space,” she explains, “but I still loved sharing with my cousins, I was happy.”

When it came to her future, her career ambitions extended only as far as jobs she could see. “I always thought I wanted to be a policeman,” she explains. “It was a typical ideal that any young person would have – that’s what I was seeing around me, police people.

“I never thought I could be a sports professional, people who were getting paid for sport, I just didn’t know they existed, but the police, I knew they existed, I saw them.”

Cricket changed Zintle’s life. “My cousins both played, and I would go to their games every week, keeping score,” she says, “that’s how I learnt to play. They taught me how to bowl, how to bat, I really started to fall in love with it.

“It all changed when one day they played a women’s team and I was like, ‘right, one day I want to be in that team’.”

In the meantime, she sharpened her skills with her cousins. “They took me to some cricket festivals, where you don’t get many girls, so I’d play with boys, it was super competitive,” she says.

Picking up the sport fast, she joined the Winter Rose Sports Club in East London and was picked for provincial under-19s cricket while still only thirteen and soon progressed to the national under-19s side as an all-rounder.

Rugby arrived very late in life. “It was very late,” she emphasises. “I tried it a bit in school, but didn’t really like it, and I never thought I’d do anything but cricket.

“But, one time after training at the sports club, one of the ladies asked if I wanted to try rugby. She kept on asking me time and again until I gave in.”

When it came to making decisions about her sporting life, Zintle looked for influence. “I never had a relationship with my father, but I wanted to know where the sporty side of me came from; maybe it was him,” explains Zintle, who was brought up entirely by her mother’s side of the family in the absence of her father. “My [birth] father had two sons and I knew them, and when I was eighteen they arranged for us to meet while I was at varsity,” she explains. “But he was very old already, he had bad habits, he drank too much, and after we met for the first time, he couldn’t get back to see me the next day...”

It was the only time she met him. “He passed away, right after I reconnected with him,” she says.

So, that influence she needed came from other people: cousins, uncles, and Koko Godlo. “Mr Koko Godlo was my mentor, he was part of the cricket club, he ran the boxing club, he owned the butchers, a security company, he was a busy man – but he just saw my passion for the sport,” she says. “He spoke to my stepdaddy [uncle] at the time and said he wanted to help because I couldn’t afford the equipment. He paid for that and when I was approached about rugby, I spoke to him about that too, he just said ‘give it a go, if you don’t like it, don’t do it, but at least the ladies won’t keep asking you.’

“The first session was contact, but the ladies said, ‘you don’t have to hit people, just get the ball and pass it’.”

Although still raw, she enjoyed the new sport and tried to balance cricket – where she was now playing senior matches, although still a teenager – and rugby training. “I kept going to those rugby sessions and, one day, I bumped a cricket match to play rugby.

“Mr Koko encouraged me too, trying to make it more exciting by offering me 50 Rand [£2.40] for every try. That was a lot of money for a kid in high school, so I was like, ‘right, I need to score some tries’.”

Soon, Zintle was bunking off more cricket sessions. “I would say I’m going to athletics to train, but then go and play rugby,” she says. “They found out and they said they would never take rugby away, and I could do both, but I had to be more open to them about it all.”

Matching her achievement with cricket, she made the provincial sevens side, before getting selected for the South Africa under-20s. “That’s when I got paid for the first time,” she says. “That did make me think, ‘maybe I want to do this full-time now, not cricket. I’d ticked that box of wanting to play for that women’s team, which I did, and so rugby was what I wanted to do.

“I wasn’t even twenty, but I was able to look after myself and my family with the money I earned from rugby. If I could do it at this age, then why wait for the right time in cricket?

“I needed to push the side that was helping me, and the best thing about rugby was that I could look after myself and my family.”

Rugby not only meant she got paid but she also went overseas for the first time, to England, and the experience of travelling proved eye-opening before she even reached the destination. “It was a long flight and scary too, you couldn’t just open the window to get the air,” she laughs. “But I could see the clouds, I was on top of the clouds, and it was just phenomenal, I wanted to do it over and over again. It also made you realise how far South Africa is from everything and how different it all is.

“I’d shared a room with five people at home, but on tour it was just me and a room-mate, there might even have been an empty bunkbed in that same room too, so much space.

“And I think we got paid 4,000 rand [£192] for that trip,” continues Zintle, “and you just weren’t used to that kind of money, it was so much, so it was  all super exciting.”

The following year – by which time she was in her second year of university, studying sport science – she was invited to the Springbok sevens camp in Port Elizabeth, and made her debut on a tour to the Netherlands. “I just went there wanting to score tries, so I could come back and tell Mr Koko how many I scored,” she laughs. “So, I made my debut against Russia and I scored a try and I was like, ‘what just happened?’. Everyone was jumping on me, I was so happy, it was a great feeling, as if I’d won something already.”

On her return from the Netherlands, she was offered a full-time contract, but she was only in the second year of a three-year course. “I felt I could finish the degree, and still do rugby, so I turned it down, they weren’t happy, and stopped picking me for camps,” she says. “If I did get picked, it was for fifteens as the third or fourth-choice fly-half.”

She continued to play provincial and club rugby. “But there wasn’t much provincial rugby, for sevens it would be a single weekend, for fifteens it was a single month, so most of my rugby was at club level,” she explains.

As her studies drew to a close in 2016, Zintle had the best of seasons at provincial level, winning a sevens competition in Nelspruit, finishing top scorer and player of the tournament in the process. “The sevens coach came to me again and said ‘are you ready to sign that contract now?’, and I was, so I did.”

She played in Dubai with South Africa at the end of 2016, before going full-time with Springbok sevens in 2017, but her time being excluded from the side had given her cause for hesitation. “It wasn’t a nice feeling at all, it made me doubt everything,” she admits, “but, as always, Mr Koko was in the background saying, ‘if you really know what you want, if you have a clear picture of how you want your life to go, then you can never go wrong, no matter what anyone says’.

“He would say to me, ‘so what if you’re not being picked for national camps, who cares? You’re only being saved for the great moments’.”

Great moments seemed a long way off in the early days of her full-time rugby life. First though, the important stuff: family. “The sevens paid me monthly and, for a young person at the time, it was decent pay,” she says. “I didn’t have bills to pay, so I was definitely looking after my family at the time.

“I was also in the city for the first time, and learning how to do lots of things: the basics, setting up bank accounts, cellphone accounts – but not in the first year though.

“That first year, 2017, I was just focused on looking after my family, to make them comfortable. I only started to think about these things after that was taken care of.

“I probably sent 70 per cent [of my salary] back, because I didn’t need anything really,” she explains. “I was in the high performance centre and everything was there – the gym was there, so I was training there, eating there, sleeping there, everything was paid for.

“Me sending money back took a bit of pressure off my mummy, it put the food on the table, and I was able to help her extend the house to make room for more people, so when I came home, it meant I got to have my own room, and my mum got her own room, so everyone wasn’t squashed together all the time.”

Although her mind was at ease from a family point of view, the task at hand of being a full-time South African rugby player was completely unsettling. “It was hard,” she admits. “It took three months to get used to it all: to the team, to training.

“I definitely wanted to quit, because it was tough,” she continues. “I had a feeling the coach didn’t even like me, I felt like I couldn’t even pass a rugby ball – I just thought, ‘what have I thrown myself into?’.

“Everyone was on a level I felt I couldn’t reach. At training sessions you’d get shouted at by coaches, and you’re in this huge bubble, and didn’t know which way to go. It wasn’t a nice feeling.

“I kept asking myself, ‘is this really what I wanted? Is this what I signed up for? How long is it going to take me to catch up with everyone?’.

“The language was mostly Afrikaans, whereas I’m Xhosa, and maybe English, but in the team it would be mostly Afrikaans. The coach, the players, would all speak in Afrikaans, so I couldn’t understand what they were saying, I didn’t know what was going on – it was tough.

“I was sharing a room with a mate, Eloise Webb, who I’d played cricket with, so we’d cry to each other. She at least could speak Afrikaans, so she’d help me, but she also felt she couldn’t play rugby either; she just wanted to go back home.”

Religion played a role in helping Zintle deal with the situation. “I grew up not believing in anything, but in Stellenbosch I started to go to church. The senior girls we’d cried to [because of the training] had taken us to church and my faith had started to grow. So, I just prayed about the situation.”

Senior players also rallied around, offering support. “Slowly things started to change,” she says, “I started to get the odd compliment, and then slowly I began to think I could call myself a professional rugby player.

“I’m not saying it was easy,” she adds. “The coach was still speaking Afrikaans a lot, he was still hard on me, but I prayed about it now and again, asking if God could help me with this guy – helping me to not get worked up by whatever he was saying to me.”

Despite the pressure put on Zintle by the coach, Renfred Dazel, she appreciates the impact he had on her. “I’m grateful I met him,” she says. “I’m grateful that he put me in that tough position because it made me the person I am today and to be where I am today.

“I learned that I could deal with being under pressure and that to be on top of the world isn’t something you’re going to get that easily.”

When Dazel left to join the men’s team, Paul Delport took his place. “I hadn’t met him, but they were saying he was tougher than Dazel,” recalls Zintle. “I was like, ‘oh my word, can it get worse than this?’

“But the first time I met him, he came to a skills session, and he was a very nice guy, not shouting. He said he was going to do things his way, he was going to change the captain as well, and he also still said that if we knew of any other girls who deserved to be in team, he wanted to know their names.

“I went to tell him some names and he said, ‘listen I wanted to call you in anyway, I’d like you to be captain’.

“I was like ‘what? no you’re mistaken, you want someone else, why would you want me to be captain?’. He said he knew each and every one in the squad, and he didn’t know me, but from what he’d seen, I was reserved and quiet, but I got things done.  That’s what he wants as a leader: it’s not about saying much, it’s what you do – leading by example.

“I went off to my room to think about it, and I thought ‘everyone is so experienced are they even going to respect anything I say?’ It was only my second year.”

Again, church played a role. The church she’d joined had home cells, where the congregation got together in small, local groups on a Thursday to go over the world. “We had a home cell in the high-performance centre which a lot of the women and men’s sevens players were part of and the pastor had asked me to lead the cell.

“He said, I mustn’t look at it in a way that God is trying to punish me because of the kind of person I am, I’m shy and uncomfortable standing in front of a whole group and talking, but I should look at the fact he’s putting me in a leading position, and he wants me to win souls from rugby.”

Zintle’s growing confidence as a cell leader played a role in her eventually accepting the role of leader on the pitch too.

She considers whether being made a cell leader for the church gave her the confidence to accept the role, and maybe win a few more souls on the pitch too. “No, that’s not why I took it,” she says, pausing, “or maybe it is, I don’t know.

“Either way, before I took it, I prayed again, just to go through a few things again – am I the right person, will I be listened to? And, ultimately, I thought if he’s there to guide me, I can’t go wrong.”

With Zintle as captain, the Springboks were a close unit, something that undoubtedly helped them in their qualification for the Commonwealth Games and bid to make the top table of the World Sevens Series. “We were very, very tight,” she says. “We did everything together to the point that the coach was worried we spent too much time together – he said ‘aren’t you with each other too much? Don’t you want to go home for a break, to see your families?’ But it was great, we loved it, and were all focused on that same goal of getting into the World Sevens Series.

“We all believed we were this close to getting to World Sevens Series but then covid happened, and rugby stopped.”

Even with no rugby, Zintle and the sevens squad remained contracted until the end of the year, but had to return to their homes to train. Shortly afterwards, they found out the squad’s contracts were being replaced with a limited number of contracts for players that could play both sevens and fifteens. Zintle was contracted, but it had a huge impact. “My life changed drastically,” she says. “There was no high-performance centre, so we had to go home, but that would’ve meant I had to travel so far for training that my rugby wasn’t going to grow, so I had to rent a flat and stay in Cape Town. I also had to support my family, buy my groceries, on the same money as before, but with all the expenses on top.”

The rugby contacts book of Susie Appleby is near legendary in women’s rugby, and it stretched to South Africa through Lynne Cantwell, the former Irish international recently appointed as women’s high performance manager at SA Rugby. “Lynne has done so much for South African rugby already and she’s not even been here a year,” says Zintle. “We were never on television, but now we’ve got TV time, provincially as well – that’s never happened – and if it’s not on TV, then every game is live streamed. She’s doing so well to put South Africa rugby on the map.”

It was Lynne that told Zintle of Susie’s interest. “I’d never heard of Exeter or Exeter Chiefs,” she admits. “But when Lynne told me they wanted me, I was super happy to get the move; it meant I could live the same way as I did the previous year.

“I started Googling everything: ‘who are Exeter Chiefs?...’ and I saw they had a lot of internationals, so I knew I wasn’t going to be the only foreigner.

“It all happened at the right moment, when I needed to do something about my career,” continues Zintle. “Coming to play overseas is a dream and I’m here to get exposed to more rugby, to learn new things and hopefully take them back to the Springboks.”

In a true baptism of fire, her debut came against the star-studded Saracens at the StoneX in a 32-19 defeat. “It felt like I was playing an international match, it felt like I was in a South African jersey playing England,” she admits. “Luckily we had big names too, but the physicality, the atmosphere – it was very tough for the team that day. I came on and I didn’t get the ball in hand but just thought, ‘stuff it, I’ll defend then’.”

Zintle is making history, as the first South African international to play in the Allianz Premier 15s. Does she feel pressure? “At first it was pressure, being the first South African,” she admits. “But then I thought of my younger self, and not knowing anything about rugby, and having nobody to look up to.

“So, I take the pressure for my younger self, for the young girls to have someone to look up to, someone to point to, and say ‘I want to be there one day’.

“And it can happen to them, not because they’re from big provinces, but it can happen even if you’re from nowhere. Even if you’re from an unknown village that nobody can get to in a single day.”

Story by Alex Mead

Pictures by Henry Hunt

This extract was taken from issue 16 of Rugby.
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