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- Australian rules football in South Africa is a team sport played in the country with a small audience. Earliest recollections in South Africa indicate that Australian rules football was first introduced to the colonies of Transvaal, Natal and Cape in the 1880s with a premiership competition and intercolonial matches operating from 1896. By 1904, it had become one of the most popular codes of football in those colonies, however it soon faded with the success of the 1906–07 South Africa rugby union tour of Europe and with a lack of support from Australia, the game died out just prior to the Union of South Africa. Since 1997, the sport has grown quickly amongst indigenous communities, beginning in the North West province and later spreading to Gauteng, KwaZulu-Natal and Western Cape province through the Australian Defence Force and later through dedicated development officers. In 2006, the game received a boost when the Australian Football League, seeking access to international sports funding from the Australian Institute of Sport began to show an interest in the game's development. South Africa's national team, the Lions, made history in 2007 by competing against Australia's best under 17 players annually (until the AFL abandoned the program in 2011), as well as defeating a touring Australian amateur senior team for the first time. The Lions reached a peak of bronze at the 2008 Australian Football International Cup however its performance, like the state of the game in South Africa, collapsed in the 2010s. The governing body for the game in South Africa is AFL South Africa. The junior variant, similar to Auskick, is locally known as "FootyWild" and was played in 92 primary schools and 46 high schools. (en)
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