Last Saturday, a professional rugby match in South Africa was switched from the white suburbs of Pretoria to a stadium in Soweto. The move was required because the stadium in Pretoria was needed is for the football World Cup. The organizers of the World Cup, FIFA, won’t allow the pitch to be turned into a swamp by hard-running rugby players. So, the rugby match and its overwhelmingly white fans had to travel to Soweto.

Not surprisingly, everything went off well, and thousands of white fans. Not everyone was a good guest in someone else’s neighborhood. Some rugby fans did take their offensive and racist views with them to Soweto. For example, watc this New York Times video at the 0:53 mark.

Then most of them went home again.

If you read South African newspapers, still aimed at white readers even if the editors are mostly black, or watched the news, you’d think something had transpired.

The news anchor on ETV, a private TV channel, announced after the match: “Nelson Mandela’s dream of a nonracial South Africa was starting to be realized.”

The New York Times announced on its front page this morning: “Rugby Helps Bridge South Africa’s Racial Divide.” Predictably, the 1995 Rugby World Cup was invoked. You know the tired, overblown story about how rugby supposedly united “the nation.” “Invictus” gets dragged into the conversation again, just as it did back then and when the film was released.

The correspondent of the Canadian Globe and Mail wrote: “Rugby conquers racism.” Even the normally level-headed and perceptive Guardian correspondent, David Smith, got swept up by this chimera. (Smith even made a false equivalence between race in rugby and race in football in South Africa. (Smith didn’t care to tell his readers that football had begun to integrate in the 1980s and was a stride ahead of rugby or cricket in terms of its professional clubs or national teams representing the majority of South Africans.)

This is what I find so infuriating about South Africa’s media (and often the ‘foreign correspondents’) reporting about it: Whites get special prizes for occasionally doing very ordinary things. And for doing it way past its sell-by date. Black people never seem to do anything for the “rainbow,” when all they’ve done is accept compromises, cosmetic change, and give up entitlements. Of course, this is all easier than all the hard work needed to transform South Africa.

And what is even worse are the mood swings exposed by this kind of reporting. As a friend of mine – a very senior South African journalist – opined: “ . . .  When ET [Eugene Terreblanche] was killed we were told SA [South Africa] was on the verge of a race war, now we told Madiba’s [that’s Nelson Mandela] dream of a rainbow nation is back on track cause white people went to Soweto to play rugby!”