DEDICATION
2.6 Apartheid politics and sporting excellence
26 Western influences, PE and sport became noticeable in the African countries, especially in the curriculum of institutions of learning.
From the literature review it becomes clear that PE is not viewed seriously enough for it to have an impact on the PE curriculum at schools in South African. It stands to reason that schools with specialised PE teachers and an ethos of sports will continue to produce learners of sporting excellence, and learners at schools with no specialised PE teachers and no ethos of sports have little or no chance of excelling in sport.
In the next section, the literature review sets the scene of the changing political landscape of sport in South Africa, and this is followed by a selection of biographies of sporting heroes who excelled in sport in the different eras of South African history. This juxtaposition of political landscape and biographies will attempt to establish the trend in sporting excellence against the conditions that prevailed in a divided society over a period of time.
27 that involved participation of many of the disadvantaged people of the country.
Reference will be made to the campaigners for non-racial sport in South Africa, who played a pivotal role through sport in the reconstruction and development of our society towards a truly non-racial, non-sexist and democratic society.
Sports emphasised physical prowess, self-discipline, individual and collective effort, as well as team competitions, and was brought to South Africa in the 19th century by British immigrants. Sport was closely intertwined with British cultural values and its development reflected the emerging colonial society and sporting social structures.
Organised sport developed rapidly from 1875, and the late 1880s saw establishment of national associations as the industrial and mineral transformation of South Africa began.
With the intensification of racism and segregation that occurred after 1910, the contests between black and white teams declined. After 1948 the apartheid policies of the National Party infiltrated the sporting arena. The Government published its official sports policy based on racial differentiation in 1955, which saw to it that each race had its own sports amenities, emblems, controlling bodies and local and international competitions.
By the end of the 1950s the official policy of sport apartheid was entrenched in almost every sporting code, and between 1959 and 1962 several black federations of cricket, tennis, football and athletics made a transition towards non-racialism. In 1962 the most influential of these non-racial bodies was formed, South African Non-Racial Olympic Committee (SANROC), which established itself in exile in London in 1966 under the leadership of Sam Ramsamy,24 and led campaigns to isolate South Africa in the sporting world. Thus began the campaign to mobilise the international isolation of apartheid sport (Ramsamy & Griffiths, 2004).
24 Sam Ramsamy dedicated virtually his entire adult life not to the pursuit of personal gain or vanity but to the cause of securing equal opportunities in sport for all South Africans. In his words “it has been a just cause. Without seeming self-satisfied or smug, my conviction remains as strong today as it was 50 years ago. I honestly believed it then, and I honestly believe it now. Equal opportunity in South African sport: that has been the cause, the right of every South African to play sport and be eligible to represent their country, regardless of colour, race, religion, gender or wealth” (Ramsamy & Griffiths, 2004, p. 1).
28 The international boycott of South African sport, although not properly structured, increasingly began to impact on the white sports bodies. In 1964 South Africa was expelled from international football - and so began the expulsion of South Africa: in 1966 from the Olympic Games, in 1969 from the Olympic Movement, and in 1970 from international cricket. The unyielding attitude of the South African Government of the time was explicitly symbolised when it refused to grant permission to an England cricket players Basil D’Oliveira,25 who was a coloured sportsman born in South Africa, to participate in a cricket test series between England and South Africa in 1966. In this very year the Department of Sport and Recreation was established to influence the practice of sport in the country.
In 1973 the South African Council of Sport (SACOS) was formed in the country and with SANROC it campaigned for the total isolation of South African sport. The slogan
‘no normal sport in an abnormal society’ became a catchphrase in the fight against non- racial sport. A policy of ‘multinationalism’26 was introduced in 1976, which led to
‘sports autonomy’ in 1979, whereby, in a vain attempt to depoliticise sport; the Government began to remove restrictions on the practice and organisation of sport.
Individual sports bodies were now allowed to choose for themselves their own structure.
In 1975 the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution on apartheid in sport. It called on all sports organisations to espouse the Olympic principle of non-discrimination. In 1977 the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting adopted the Gleneagles Agreement, which accepted that each of their governments strongly opposed apartheid by withholding any form of support for, and by “taking every practical step to discourage contact or competition by their nationals with sporting organisations, teams or sportsmen from South Africa or from any other country where sports are organised on the basis of race, colour or ethnic origin” (Hutchinson & Jones, 1988, p. 263).
25 Basil D’Oliveira was an outstanding South African all–rounder, who could never hope to play representative cricket for his country of birth because he was Coloured. He left South Africa in 1960 and played in English county cricket and he was first selected for English Test matches in 1966 (Corrigall, 1971).
26 Multinationalism was a grand political scheme that divided South Africa into black ‘nations’, each with its own territory and responsibility for some of its own affairs, including sport. It allowed black sportspersons to compete against white South Africans in so-called ‘open international events’. Multinational sport was a minimalist approach to apartheid reform (Booth, 2003).
29 Using sport as a means of isolating white South African players was an extremely effective psychological weapon in the anti-apartheid struggle, and terminating the rebel cricket tour was a significant landmark in showing opposition to apartheid. In November 1990 a broad coalition of opposition sporting organisations decided in Harare that the sports boycott must remain in place until apartheid was abolished. An interim body, the National Olympic Committee of South Africa27, under the leadership of Sam Ramsamy, was responsible of managing the process for the readmission of South Africa to international competition. In July 1991 the International Olympic Committee recognised NOCSA as the only controlling body for Olympic Sport and readmitted South Africa to the Olympic Games.
The isolation of cricket ended in October 1991 when the national team visited India and played at the World Cup in Australia in March 1992. South African sports excelled in international competition, and the national team reached the semi-finals of the Cricket World Cup in 1992, was victorious in the Rugby World Cup in 1995 and 2007, and in the Soccer Africa Cup of Nations in 1996, and at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics where Josiah Thugwane won the Gold Medal in the men’s marathon and Penny Heyns won Gold in the 100m and 200m breaststroke.
However, these successes achieved in sport have not concealed the many challenges facing sportspersons in the post-apartheid era. The allocation and lack of resources the vastly diverse sporting facilities and virtual absence of black players in many national teams are still some of the major issues confronting sports in South Africa today. The political struggle post-apartheid has been about the creation of equal opportunities in South African sport. Its message has been for the right of every South African to play sport and be eligible to represent their country, regardless of colour, race, religion, gender or wealth. Although this is the ideology of sport,28 there are still many challenges and inequalities facing sport in South Africa today.
27 The South African Sports Confederation and Olympic Committee (SASCOC) is the controlling body for all high performance sport and was formed as a Section 21 Company by representatives of all the sports bodies at a general meeting held on 27 November 2004. It now assumes the function of the National Olympic Committee of South Africa (NOCSA).
28 See (Department of Sport and Recreation (DSR), 2005) and (Department of Sport and Recreation (DSR), 1998).
30 In order for South Africa to move forward in the post-Apartheid era, a new policy was needed to unify their sports structure. A quota system was introduced to South African sport as a way of combating racial inequality, whereby sporting teams were required to include a minimum number of black or white people in their team. Furthermore, sporting bodies were required to provide racial demographic data of their sport in order to received national funding. These quotas were not always strictly followed and it brought about a number of contentious issues in sport, including whether it is fair to base selections on race and whether quotas undermine the basic fundamentals of sport.
Burnett (2002) states that these inequalities of South African sporting practices are contextualised when one takes into consideration the lack of resources, class inequalities, ethnocentric backgrounds and political controversies. Many learners still have to negotiate these challenges and inequalities in their pursuit of excellence.
Further, in search of a national identity, participation in elite sports becomes a double- edged sword in challenging and preserving socio-cultural realities and creating new inequalities.
The impact of politics on sport in a divided society created interesting scenarios which challenge the sportsperson in attaining his or her desired goals. Setting the political landscape of sport then and now, provides a contextual grounding in which the biographies of feted sportspersons are now related. The biographies will provide insight regarding the life and identities of the sportspersons as they journey towards sporting achievement in the different eras in which they played sports. The contributing factors that have helped shape these sportspersons will be explored, with a focus on the significant persons, opportunities and conditions that made it possible for them to negotiate their unique social context in order to make the best of their situation and excel against all odds. The dynamic nature of a transforming society will help us to understand the complex issues of societies and how individuals need to engage their spaces to create the opportunities to produce excellence.
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