Why the Kolisi divorce has shaken the nation

Rachel and Siya Kolisi during the South African Springboks Rugby World Cup 2019 Champions Tour on November 11, 2019 in Cape Town, South Africa. (Photo by Ashley Vlotman/Gallo Images/Getty Images)

By Rebecca Davis

24 Oct 2024

Celebrity divorce is hardly uncommon. So why does the dissolution of the Kolisis’ marriage feel like such a personal betrayal?

Do you remember the time when Rachel Kolisi took to Instagram to name and shame a woman she accused of sending flirtatious messages to her husband, rugby hero Siya Kolisi?

If you were too high-minded to register this seismic cultural moment back in 2019, chances are you’ve been apprised of it in recent days. It is, obviously, distasteful to speculate about the reason why two complete strangers are getting divorced – but that hasn’t stopped South Africans taking to it like a new national sport this week.

The announcement that Springbok captain Siya Kolisi and his wife Rachel are to part ways after eight years of marriage has detonated like an emotional atom bomb, leaving even those of us who are not particularly avid rugby fans feeling curiously discombobulated.

Read more: Siya and Rachel Kolisi set to part ways after eight years of marriage

Incidents like Rachel Kolisi’s 2019 doxxing of crazed female fans have suddenly seemed to take on a new significance, as the nation surgically dissects the carcass of a very public union.

It’s gross, of course. But the thing is: we really care.

How did we get here?

***

There’s a myth doing the rounds that Siya and Rachel were high school sweethearts: the boy from Zwide and the girl from Makhanda, both with fractured family lives and difficult childhoods, their lives intertwined from the days of braces and Space Cases.

Very sweet, but untrue, at least according to Siya’s 2021 autobiography, Rise.

There, he recounts meeting Rachel for the first time while already playing for the Stormers.

“It was 19 May 2012. We’d just beaten the Waratahs in a pretty dull Super Rugby game at Newlands, and I went to Gino’s with my girlfriend at the time, some of the Waratahs boys, and the cousin of a woman called Rachel Smith. We’d been there a while when Rachel arrived with her brother and sister.”

It was not immediately a romance for the ages, writes Siya.

“At first it was just as friends; I was in a relationship at the time, even though it was on and off and not particularly serious. I was young, still 20, and full of it. I loved rugby, I loved drinking, I loved girls. I wasn’t much of a long-term bet for anyone looking for a relationship.”

The Siya he describes there with retrospective candour is a world apart from Brand Kolisi in 2024: a polished, urbane, insanely lucrative product which is under the stewardship of ROC Nation, the “full-service entertainment company” founded by Jay-Z in 2008.

The Siya chronicled in Rise wrenchingly describes drinking to “obliterate the world just as my dad could when he drank”.

He tells of how, in the early days, “Rachel would have to pay for our dates because I’d spent all my money on alcohol, and this was when I was getting paid good money as a pro player.”

At the 2015 Rugby World Cup, he “just drank”, the book records.

“Rachel had come out with baby Nick and this would have been the perfect opportunity to spend some time with them; but no, I preferred to be out with the boys.”

What turned things around? On the evidence of his autobiography: the stabilising influence of Rachel; a decision to re-commit himself to Christ; and – here’s the kicker – a growing acceptance that his life was not his own any more.

The minute Siya became the first black Springbok captain, his existence as a fun-loving party boy had to die. He was now the Mandela of rugby, less sportsman than statesman. Not for him the freedom to be a James Small, or a James Dalton, or a Percy Montgomery.

“I was a symbol, a totem, a talisman,” recounts Siya.

Elsewhere in the book: “People projected onto me what they wanted to see about South Africa, its past, present and future, and even about themselves”.

When you think about it: that’s what we’ve collectively done to the Kolisis’ marriage too. How could it possibly survive, under all that weight?

***

It is almost impossible to imagine the Rachel Kolisi of 2024 pulling the doxxing stunt of the Rachel Kolisi of 2019. She, too, has been a vital cog in the Brand Kolisi machine, repositioned as a fitness influencer, skincare ambassador, philanthropist, mom of the year and Makoti to the nation.

The Kolisi social media content archive, which is vast, closely resembles that of American family vloggers: couples’ pranks; kids’ birthdays. God and family above all else, except maybe rugby.

It is so wholesome, in a country genuinely starved for wholesome content. It is pure interracial goodness; the Rainbow Nation made flesh.

Siya and Rachel Kolisi during the 2019 South African Sports Awards held at The Playhouse Company on November 10, 2019 in Durban, South Africa. (Photo by Gallo Images/Darren Stewart)

There is Siya, captain of a team of giant Avengers playing a notoriously machismo-dripping sport, painstakingly combing a Barbie’s hair with a miniature comb alongside his daughter.

There is Rachel, a white woman who appears to have embraced her husband’s Xhosa culture and family with total sincerity, spending quality time with the younger half-siblings of Siya whom the couple adopted as their own children.

The two were still in their early 20s when this decision was made: Liyema and Liphelo would be raised by Siya and Rachel.

“Here they were, hundreds of miles away in Cape Town, with a brother they hardly knew and a girlfriend they knew even less,” Rise records.

“I was often away travelling and playing, so half the time they were on their own with Rachel. For a while she carried that, and lots of other things, alone in our relationship.”

People speak often of Siya as a kind of superhero. Seen differently, the real superhero of the family might just be Rachel.

***

But this kind of mythologising is what has landed us all in this mess, grappling with a strange feeling of personal betrayal about the heartache of two people most of us have never met.

They are not superheroes. They are two people in their 30s thrust into the public eye through Siya’s preternatural sporting talent, who in the last few years have been freighted with the kind of symbolic baggage no ordinary mortals should have to bear.

They have amassed fame and fortune, but at what cost? Siya writes of being unable to set foot in a bar any more because women throw themselves at him and men alternately want to drink with him and fight him, bent on taking away an anecdote for their friends about their encounter with the hardest oke in South Africa.

Rachel and Siya Kolisi during the South African Springboks Rugby World Cup 2019 Champions Tour on November 11, 2019 in Cape Town, South Africa. (Photo by Ashley Vlotman/Gallo Images/Getty Images)

Now they have made what has to have been the hardest choice of their lives. Whatever the reasons, it cannot have been a decision taken lightly. Not with all this at stake; not with a nation staring at them with wounded eyes. Not, most importantly, with small children who will be deeply impacted.

Let’s leave them be – and let’s remember this, the next time we anoint a spiritual flagbearer for the nation: they, too, are flesh and blood. Even Mandela, in the end, proved mortal. DM

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