Victory for England on Saturday may turn out to be a win of historic significance because we may not see the Springboks again. The South Africa team will be back, that is for sure, but the leaping antelope on the left breast of the shirt may be gone, replaced by a protea.

Be it flower or animal, this is a matter of feverishly intense politics and has been for years. Yet from this safe distance, it seems a little late to argue over whether the shirt badge is the emblem of the old South Africa or that of the new post-apartheid republic. There can surely be nothing that better reflects the Springboks, as they still are this week, as a transformed institution than a man of coloured skin being their coach. The first black captain will top it. Nothing else.

The team Peter de Villiers is coaching are one that, in his youth, he was prevented from playing for because of his skin colour. De Villiers was brought up in a coloured township in Paarl and he played scrum half for, and captained, his province, Boland - although this was the non-racial Boland team that ran parallel to and utterly separate from the white Boland team, the one for which he was not qualified and from which the best players would be considered for Springbok honours.

It is worth recalling that in those days, when the Springboks were allowed into the international rugby arena, the non-white population would support the opposition. Most would declare themselves All Blacks supporters; De Villiers decided to root for Wales.

The recolouring of the Springbok team has been immeasurably significant because it was the great bastion of white, Afrikaner pride. However, last Saturday at Murrayfield, an early injury meant that the South Africa team against Scotland included eight non-white players, more than half the team, and yet this barely merited mention.

In the 1995 World Cup final, the Springbok team had only one black player, Chester Williams. In last year's final, there were two. That is painfully slow progress. Now suddenly there are eight and this may well be De Villiers's greatest achievement. These were not token black selections, they were not picked to fulfil a quota; there is no gaggle of white players at home feeling discriminated against.

The difference between the selection of this team and the selection of their coach, however, is vast. De Villiers had coached the under-21s for three years and his credentials were better than those of the previous incumbent, Jake White. So, in January, he was a credible name on the shortlist, albeit less well qualified than Heyneke Meyer, who ended up at Leicester, although that credibility was damaged when, in announcing that De Villiers would get the job, Oregan Hoskins, the president of the South African Rugby Union, declared that race had been a determining factor. “The appointment was not entirely made for rugby reasons,” he said. “We as an organisation have taken into account the issue of transformation very seriously.”

The pressure on the Springbok coach is severe enough without him becoming, simultaneously, a symbol of black empowerment. There is little more acutely sensitive in South Africa at present than the labour laws of affirmative action that oblige businesses to employ percentages of non-white staff. By definition, a meritocracy does not exist and many are they who believe that the one place it should remain is within the national rugby union team. Conversely, when Corne Krige, the former Springbok captain, greeted De Villiers's appointment with the prediction of seven years' drought for the team, the media response implied not that he had made a judgment call but a racist one.

When De Villiers accepted the job, it was with the request that “the fact that I'm the first black coach must end now”. Extreme circumstances, though, suggest that he feels his colour deeply.

When his side pulled off their most notable win this year, over the All Blacks in Dunedin, it was reported by one black journalist as a victory for Jake White-style rugby. De Villiers, furious, responded: “If you want to be white, why don't you just be white?” And, at the moment of his worst exposure to the media, when it was written (but never proven) that he had been videoed having sex in a car, he called it a “racist plot” and said that he may as well “give the job back to the whites”.

Like any other coach, the pressures lift when you are doing well and De Villiers's first season has been mediocre to poor. Defeats at home by the Wallabies and the All Blacks can be offset by the win in Dunedin and putting 53 points on the Wallabies at Ellis Park in Johannesburg. In beating Wales and Scotland these past two Saturdays, however, South Africa have appeared there for the taking and, on this form, it should be England who finish the job on Saturday.

It would be wrong to overinflate the value of the result at Twickenham, because whichever way it goes, the rugby public will continue to judge De Villiers when the Lions visit next summer and probably beyond. However, because of who he is, De Villiers's success or failure has significance beyond the scoreboard. One of the ground-breakers of Rainbow Nation rugby, Morne du Plessis, the manager of the World Cup winners in 1995, embraces another in De Villiers. “He's a pioneer,” Du Plessis said. “He is on uncharted waters. For the dynamics of our rugby, it is important that he does well. There's a large growth in black support and we have to keep that going.”

Indeed, but De Villiers is representative of more than the black population in rugby. The reason it is so important that De Villiers's appointment works is because were he to fail, his failure would resoundingly represent the obvious flaws in South Africa's black-empowerment policy.

Of course, this is a preposterously tough position in which De Villiers finds himself because he would by no means be the first Springbok coach to fail. When Harry Viljoen, Rudi Straeuli and Carel du Plessis left the job, no one suggested that their comparative failures said anything about the colour of their skin. If De Villiers were to fail, it would not be because he is coloured, but it might be because he was promoted because of his colour.

So that is some responsibility for this pioneer in sporting history, but how marvellous if those uncharted waters led him to success.

Pioneers of colour

Errol Tobias

The first non-white player to win a cap for the Springboks, selected for the first of his six caps in 1981, the height of the apartheid era. The national coach, Nellie Schmidt, was seen as revolutionary for picking him, although many, particularly in the non-white population, saw it as extreme tokenism.

Chester Williams

The first non-white player to play in the post-apartheid era, the “Black Pearl” became the face of the 1995 World Cup-winning team. Won 27 caps and went on to a coaching career that had him shortlisted with Peter de Villiers for the job of national coach.

Bryan Habana

The star player of the present Springboks side, Habana was first capped in 2004 and, having sparkled in the 2007 World Cup, became the first non-white player to be considered the best in the world.