Birthday Tribute | Makazole Mapimpi | 26 July 2026 | Sharks · Springboks · Rugby
There are wingers who chase a reputation someone else built for them. And then there are those who build the entire thing themselves, with nobody standing behind them to hand it down. Makazole Mapimpi belongs firmly in the second category. Born on 26 July 1990, in Tsholomnqa, Eastern Cape, he turns 36 today.
TSHOLOMNQA, TWENTY KILOMETRES A DAY
Tsholomnqa is a rural village in the Mdantsane district outside East London, and it is not a place that produces Springboks by design. Makazole Mapimpi grew up there in poverty, raised by his grandmother, with none of the machinery that usually built a Bok backline. He did not go to a rugby school.
He was never picked for Craven Week. He attended Jim Mvabasa Senior Secondary School in King William’s Town, and he walked there and back, twenty kilometres a day, because that was the only way to get an education.
Nobody was scouting that walk. He played rugby because he loved it, not because a system had identified him as a prospect. By the time other future Springboks were already being fast-tracked through provincial academies, Makazole Mapimpi was still an amateur playing second-division rugby for a union that could barely afford him.
THE EARLY CAREER: BORDER, THE KINGS AND THE CHEETAHS
He joined the Border Bulldogs in 2014, a side so financially stretched that it had little choice but to blood unheralded, unsponsored players like him in the second division of the Currie Cup. There was no fast lane. He worked his way through Border until 2017, when the Southern Kings gave him his first taste of Super Rugby. He was 27 years old and playing top-flight rugby for the first time in his life, and he scored 11 tries in that debut Super Rugby season, an emphatic answer to anyone who had overlooked him. A move to the Free State Cheetahs followed later that year, and by 2018 he had signed for the Sharks, the union he still calls home.
THE JERSEY WITH ONLY HIS OWN FACE ON IT
By then, Makazole Mapimpi had already buried most of his family. His mother, Eunice, died in a car accident when he was 14. His father was never part of his life. His brother and sister were also gone before he became a household name. He was raised, entirely, by his grandmother.
Ahead of the 2019 Rugby World Cup, Springbok players were asked to supply a family photograph to be stitched into the flocking on the back of their jersey numbers, a reminder of who they were playing for. Makazole Mapimpi could only hand over a picture of himself. Director of rugby Rassie Erasmus asked him why. Mapimpi told him plainly that he had no one left.
THE BREAKTHROUGH: WASHINGTON DC, 2018
His Test debut came on 2 June 2018 against Wales, in Washington DC, of all places, one of 13 players capped for South Africa for the first time that day. He scored a try in a 22-20 defeat. It was not a winning start, but it announced exactly what kind of player had arrived: a 27-year-old with nothing handed to him and a finisher’s instinct that had been sharpened, not gifted. Within a year he had become Cheslin Kolbe’s first-choice partner on the wing.
THE PINNACLE: YOKOHAMA AND THE TRY THAT MADE HISTORY
At the 2019 World Cup in Japan, Mapimpi finished the tournament with six tries, second only to Wales’ Josh Adams among all try-scorers. But the number that matters is one. In the 66th minute of the final against England, Makazole Mapimpi found space out wide, chipped over the defence, and watched Lukhanyo Am chase it down and offload back to him for the score. It was the first try any South African had ever scored in a Rugby World Cup final, in either the 1995 or 2007 wins.
South Africa won 32-12 to lift the Webb Ellis Cup for a third time, and the boy who once had no family photo to give became a household name in every home in the country.
The recognition followed him off the field. In 2022, Mapimpi was named South African Sportsman of the Year at the SA Sports Awards, an honour covering his form through the 2019 World Cup and the Springboks’ 2021 series win over the British and Irish Lions.
THE JERSEY IS NOT BLANK ANYMORE
The story since has carried both the cost and the reward of staying at the top. At the 2023 World Cup in France, Makazole Mapimpi was again part of the squad, scoring a hat-trick against Romania in the pool stage. Then, in a match against Tonga, a clash of heads left him with a fractured eye socket.
He was ruled out for the rest of the tournament, replaced in the squad by Lukhanyo Am, the same man who had put him through for South Africa’s history-making try four years earlier. Mapimpi watched the final from outside the matchday 23 as the Springboks beat New Zealand 12-11 to become four-time champions, a second World Cup medal earned without a single minute on the field in the biggest match of the tournament.
He kept playing anyway. On 21 March 2026, he reached his 100th appearance for the Sharks, scoring twice in a 45-0 demolition of Munster, and has since extended his contract at Kings Park through June 2027. His Test involvement has narrowed with age and injury, mostly standby duty behind a deeper Springbok squad now, though he remains one of only a handful of players to have won two World Cups with South Africa, and his 32 tries in his first 46 Tests still rank among the best in Springbok history.
Off the field, the blank space on that 2019 jersey has finally been filled. Makazole Mapimpi married Sasha de Sousa quietly, without any public announcement, and the news only became public in September 2024 when Erasmus revealed Mapimpi had missed a Test against the All Blacks because his wife was giving birth to their son.
The couple marked the boy’s first birthday with a Disney-themed party in 2025, and Sasha shared a rare family photo of father and son on Father’s Day this June. The man who once had nobody to put on the back of his jersey now has a wife and a son waiting for him at home.
Happy 36th Birthday, Makazole. From all of us at Just Plain Sport — the boy with no family photo built one anyway, and it starts with his own name on it.
📸 Images via SABC Sport / Springboks / AFP / Getty Images
