SOUTH AFRICA, Namibia, Ivory Coast, Morocco, Madagascar, Zimbabwe, Kenya and Uganda. These would be your best guesses if we asked which African countries play rugby.
Although you wouldn’t be wrong, there are a few new nations giving the sport a genuine go – with Mozambique being one of them. Despite bordering South Africa and Zimbabwe, the coastal country is in its rugby infancy because the game didn’t exist in Mozambique until 2012.
This is easily explained: first, the Portuguese, who controlled the country throughout most of the past century, never rated rugby highly and didn’t introduce it in any way, shape or form; and then, after independence in 1975, Mozambique saw rugby as a sport played mostly by colonisers and apartheidists, distancing themselves from it.
But from 2012 their destiny…
