Around the same time as the D’Oliveira affair, another sports-driven, anti-apartheid campaign was gathering pace. A racially-selected New Zealand rugby team had toured South Africa for many years but, by 1967, opposition to the decision to exclude all Maori players had grown fierce. The 1967 New Zealand tour was cancelled as a result.

However, there was no official ban in New Zealand on touring or competing with South Africa and in 1969 the anti-apartheid organisation Halt All Racist Tours (HART) was set up, chiefly to protest about the proposed 1970 tour of South Africa. Vorster, in the same position he had found himself with the D’Oliveira affair – determined not to rile his hard-line supporters yet also fairly desperate to appease international anger – as a sop to the protesters decreed that on future New Zealand visits, Maori players would be allowed to tour as ‘honorary whites’. The 1970 tour went ahead as planned but HART was by no means disbanded. Indeed, by the time of the proposed 1973 tour of the Springbok team to New Zealand, HART promised a campaign of civil disruption should the series go ahead. New Zealand prime minister Norman Kirk had no choice but to cancel the tour.

However the true defining moments for HART were to come during the 1976 New Zealand tour of South Africa and the 1981 South African tour of New Zealand – tours that both went ahead. Newly-elected New Zealand prime minister Robert Muldoon refused to cancel the 1976 tour despite being about to put his name to the Gleneagles Agreement that would see all Commonwealth nations shun South African sport. The IOC’s decision not to ban New Zealand from that year’s Olympics as a consequence of their continued involvement with South Africa provoked a boycott by 21 African nations of the 1976 Montreal Games.

The 1981 Springbok tour of New Zealand saw thousands of New Zealanders protest; invading pitches, dive-bombing games in light aircraft, and eventually forcing the tour’s cancellation.

Of course, there were plenty of controversial dissenters from the international boycott. The International Rugby Board (IRB) did not impose any sanctions on South Africa’s rugby side and the country’s union was allowed to keep its membership of the organisation. The Gleneagles Agreement of 1977, wherein all Commonwealth presidents and prime ministers agreed to discourage their sportsmen from competing with sportsmen, teams and organisations from South Africa, failed to place a complete embargo on rugby tours of South Africa. Tours by the British Lions and France in 1980, Ireland in 1981 and England in 1984 were all mired in controversy, as well as the several tours to and from New Zealand.

Despite the ICC’s moratorium on tours to South Africa, the 1980s saw several ‘rebel tours’, in many cases funded and promoted by the South African government, draw ire from their respective federations and the international community. English teams toured in 1982 and 1990, led by Graham Gooch and Mike Gatting respectively, and featured players close to the end of their careers. Nevertheless the touring players were subsequently banned from international cricket for three years.

Sides featuring Test players from both Australia and Sri Lanka also toured the country on a handful of occasions in the 1980s. Interestingly, so too did a side comprising West Indian international players. The teams that toured South Africa in 1982/83 and 1983/84 were made up of players either on the fringes of the great West Indian side of that decade, or in the twilight of their careers. Each player received around US$100,000 for playing in South Africa in what was a huge (and hugely hypocritical) South African public relations exercise. The participants received a life ban from Caribbean cricket in 1983 for colluding with the apartheid regime, though many reported an hospitable reception from both blacks and whites alike in South Africa. It was one of the few occasions when whites and blacks had been able, even encouraged, to play sport together in South Africa and the two West Indian tours are believed by some to have soothed, however momentarily, relations between the races.

A total of 23 Formula One Grands Prix were held in the country between 1962 and 1993. Indeed the sport was one of the last to shun South Africa in 1985. The build-up was peppered with protests but that year’s race at the Kyalami circuit went ahead as usual, although the Finnish, Swedish, Brazilian and French governments had all put pressure on their drivers and teams to boycott the event. In the end only the French Renault and Ligier teams withdrew, in solidarity with their government’s ban on sporting events in South Africa. Frenchman Alain Prost, that year’s Formula One world champion, did race at the event.

The race had been sponsored for many years by The Citizen newspaper, a staunch supporter of the South African government and it was reported that Formula One personnel were issued with special cards to record their entry into South Africa, thereby avoiding South African passport stamps that would have jeopardised their future entry into countries officially apposed to the South African regime.

At the sponsors’ request, many of the teams removed logos from the cars; international corporations not wishing to lend credibility to apartheid, even if the Federation Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA) apparently would. Autosport columnist Nigel Roebuck articulated the feelings of many motorsport enthusiasts when he wrote at the time: “It is the hypocrisy of it that I can’t stomach. It is the selective morality, the careful removal at Kyalami of certain sponsors’ names from the cars - despite the fact that their products are readily available down the road, widely advertised beyond the TV cameras’ reach.”

Having previously declared itself (spuriously) powerless to call off the South African Grand Prix, following the 1985 race and the ensuing controversy, the FIA finally sanctioned the cancellation of future racing in South Africa.

Just over a month later, on 10th December 1985, the UN General Assembly adopted the Convention Against Apartheid in Sports. A list of sportspeople who had competed in South Africa since 1981 was published and continually updated. No official sanctions were placed on the listed athletes but the sustained international pressure appeared to work as a string of prominent sportspeople came forward to vow not to compete in the country until racial segregation was completely outlawed.

The 1980s saw South Africa gripped by brutal civil war. Violent ANC-driven protests were met with ruthless government suppression. An official state of emergency was declared in 1985 and persisted until 1990. Police and soldiers patrolled the streets for four years. Death tolls mounted on both sides. Many of those detained by the government were interrogated and tortured while anti-government activists were known to use the ‘necklace method’ of execution (people burnt alive by a flaming tyre around their neck) on Africans suspected of supporting apartheid. The government banned television cameras from filming ‘unrest zones’, usually the townships that housed the black population.