On that first trip in the 19th century, as well as on the one in 1938, the Boers played a game before going to sleep, the jukebox. A kind of pétanque where, instead of making balls fly, everything is done with wooden sticks. It may seem like a simple game, without further significance, but for the Boers it is an activity that reminds them of their roots. The first chronicles that tell us about this sport are from 1750, when the first Europeans who lived near the Cape of Good Hope were exploring the interior of the continent with carriages. When it was their turn to spend the night in the savannah, songs were sung and fables were told. And, for entertainment, various games were played. Back then, games were already popular where aiming with rings was demonstrated, but there were no rings in the middle of the savannah. So he was created jukebox. Apparently, the travelers unyoked the oxen at night. And those wooden yokes had vertical poles that were used to make the structure very firm around the necks of the beasts. It would be these poles that, taken out of the yoke, were used to demonstrate the competitors’ marksmanship. The practice was very easy: a stick was left stuck in the sand and from a distance you had to try to touch it by sending the yoke poles flying.
When the Boers started the Great March into the interior of Africa, they did it by playing the jukebox. And when in 1935 they celebrated the centenary of that movement by reproducing the trip, it continued to be played jukebox. It was a sport that recalled the Boer roots and was easy to play, very familiar. You didn’t have to be strong or get hit, like in rugby, which was already a very popular sport among white South Africans. So in 1939 a group of enthusiasts organized the first tournament of jukebox in the city of Paarl. A year later, the first federation of this sport was created and a congress was organized in the city of Bloemfontein to bring order, as it was necessary to set rules that were common to everyone. It would take two years to do so.
Currently, the jukebox it is played with four participants per team. The distance to the stick to be touched is seven meters and each player has two turns to touch it. In each turn, two sticks are blown. Hitting gives you three points and getting close gives you one. The first team to reach 23 points wins. Naturally, this is a sport that has always been played by the whites of South Africa, who organize various tournaments, some international against the Boers of Namibia and Zimbabwe, but not by the blacks, who have always seen it as a game of old Boer people. Until 2001. That year the South African government created a project to identify traditional games that had been played by local tribes and the Boers requested that the jukebox was included. In doing so, he has received aid and entered into programs to find more practitioners, and for the first time has reached black-majority neighborhoods.
