History of Sport: South Africa emerges from its dark past

The tail end of 2008 saw the South African cricket team secure an historic series victory over Australia – the first visiting side to take a series in Australia for 16 years. As the last glowing embers of the year died out, so too did the final legacy of an era of institutionalised racism in South Africa. The second, series-clinching test in Melbourne featured an innings of 166 from JP Duminy, three wickets from the bowling of Makhaya Ntini, and the match-winning runs stroked off the bat of devout Muslim Hashim Amla.

These were achievements that not only propelled South Africa to the summit of world cricket, but spoke for generations of Indian and black sportsmen that had languished for decades in a divided and bigoted nation; prohibited by legalised racism from even representing their country. Where the South African rugby side had led so symbolically in the 1995 World Cup, the cricket team had now followed, presenting a successful and truly unified front in the wake of apartheid.

South Africa’s sporting heritage is tarnished by the country’s dark history. For many years the nation, officially believing in a natural supremacy of whites, forbade multiracial sports. For decades South African sports teams were the exclusive preserve of the white man; any sportsman who wasn’t ‘pure’ white was forced to play in the ‘coloured leagues’. Domestic political policy was such that overseas teams, by virtue of their having players of diverse races, were prevented from touring the country.

The 1948 South African elections saw the main Afrikaner National Party (NP) take power under the stewardship of Daniel Francois Malan. Apartheid policies, designed to classify individuals by race and prohibit racial groups from mixing geographically, socially, and professionally, began to be implemented. The ultimate and unashamed goal of the NP from the moment it came to power was to attain a white supremacist nationalist state in South Africa, outlawing miscegenation and enforcing total racial segregation.

Despite the obvious moral insidiousness of successive apartheid regimes, and the increasing international condemnation with which the system met, apartheid maintained its ugly grip on South Africa for over 40 years. In fact international opprobrium was for a long time just empty words; the world’s most influential figures paying lip-service to virtue while turning a blind eye to vice.

It wasn’t until 1990, the lifting of the government ban on anti-apartheid organisations, and the release of Nelson Mandela, the leader of the anti-apartheid Africa National Congress (ANC) imprisoned for 27 years for political activism, that any real end of apartheid could be countenanced. Yet it was through sport – the plight of a handful of individuals and a string of momentous events thrust into the international limelight that a sporting platform affords – that South Africa experienced many of its key, era-defining moments.

South Africa’s gradual ostracism from global sport began in the 1950s. Curiously, it was the International Table Tennis Federation that took the first step, severing its ties with the all-white South African Table Tennis Union, preferring the non-racial South African Table Tennis Board. The apartheid government simply responded by voiding the passports of the Board’s players, ensuring they couldn’t play internationally.

A non-racial administrative body, the South African Sports Association (SASA), was set up in 1959 and, after three years of fruitless attempts at collaboration with white sports organisations, it began to agitate for South Africa’s exclusion from world sport on a much larger scale. In 1962 the SACA approached the International Olympic Committee (IOC) pleading for its own country’s expulsion from the Olympic Games. The nation duly received a caution from the IOC, bringing about changes, although only nominal, and the formation of the South African Non-Racial Olympic Committee. However, it soon became clear that South Africa had no intention of desisting from its policy of segregation in sport and the IOC proceeded to bar the country from the 1964 Games in Tokyo.

Despite pledging to select a multi-racial team for the 1968 Games in Mexico City, South Africa’s invitation was again rescinded after pressure was brought on the IOC from other African nations threatening to boycott the Games. In 1970 the IOC took the step of officially expelling South Africa from the Olympic movement.

The apartheid bureaucracy devised a classification system that split the population into four sectors: Black, White, Indian and Coloured. Crude, demeaning and often arbitrary criteria and tests were employed to enforce the classifications. Peter Oborne recounts in his book, Basil D’Oliveira. Cricket and Conspiracy: The Untold Story, how would-be-cricketers were forced to undergo ‘the pencil test’, a humiliating process whereby a pencil was placed in the player’s hair: if it fell out, the player was deemed to be Coloured, but if it stayed put he was judged to be Black and was therefore denied the right to play in certain leagues.

Apartheid enforcers fatuously pointed to South African sports teams as justifications of racial segregation, rather than as glaring and unjust symptoms of it. Much in the same way as the Nazis believed in the physical superiority of the Aryan race, apartheid authorities maintained a convenient belief in the innate inferiority of the black man. South Africa had been selecting exclusively white Test cricket teams since 1889 and would only play against England, Australia and New Zealand. As Oborne put it: “For years there was a conspiracy of silence about black cricket. It suited the white authorities to believe that the blacks did not play the game. If the evidence was thrust before their eyes, they simply insisted that it was played at an abysmally low level.”
Basil D’Oliveira was a non-white cricketer who would shatter that illusion. His is a story that yokes the worlds of politics and sport together; proof that sport and sportsmen have the power to puncture ideological systems that seem ingrained in the fabric of society.

D’Oliveira was an exceptional South African cricketer. Growing up in the Bo Kaap region of Cape Town in the 1930s and 40s, D’Oliveira’s cricketing talent was reaching its pinnacle at almost exactly the same time as segregation in sport became law rather than simply custom. As Bree Bulbulia, the chairman of selectors of the South African “non-white” team of 1958 puts it: “During that period eight or nine non-white players would have made the South Africa side on merit.”

D’Oliveira was the best of the lot. Doomed to play in the ‘Coloured leagues’ while he plied his trade as a printer, D’Oliveira is said to have scored over 80 centuries in the segregated backwaters of Cape Town cricket, where pitch conditions were rarely anything other than dire, and once scored 200 in an hour.

Revered English cricket commentator John Arlott played a pivotal role in bringing D’Oliveira to England. Arlott had toured South Africa with the England team in 1948 and 1949. Horrified by what he perceived as casual and unapologetic cruelty inflicted on South African blacks, Arlott became a sworn opponent of apartheid, pledging never again to commentate in the country while the system was still in place.

A proposed West Indian tour of South Africa  - to play a ‘coloured’ South African side featuring D’Oliveira - was cancelled following pressure from within the South African black community, the majority of which didn’t want the country’s apartheid regime to gain credibility from such a high profile sports event. D’Oliveira was prostrate and knew his sporting future in South Africa was over. He began to write letters to Arlott in England, pleading with him to find him a team to play for there. “There is so much at stake for non-white sport in South Africa that I am quite prepared to face anything,” D’Oliveira wrote in one of his letters. Arlott believed him and did all he could to bring him to England, eventually securing him a professional berth at Middleton, a club side in the Lancashire league.

D’Oliveira arrived in England in 1960 and set about establishing himself, not without the sizeable travails of culture shock. By 1964 he had become a British citizen and had joined Worcestershire, a first-class county side, and in 1967 he was named as one of the Wisden cricketers of the year, one of the highest honours in professional cricket. By then D’Oliveira was playing cricket on the world stage; through hard graft, sheer talent, and a necessary fragment of deception concerning his true age, he had become a regular in the England Test side. D’Oliveira’s rise was completely improbable and was followed with avid interest by legions of people back home in South Africa.By his own admission D’Oliveira did not have a good tour of the West Indies in 1968. Nigh on lionised by the Caribbean people as a champion for multi-racial sport, D’Oliveira allowed himself to over-indulge in the West Indians’ considerable hospitality. An England tour of South Africa loomed at the end of the year and D’Oliveira’s selection would have huge consequences for world politics.

Balthazar Johannes Vorster had succeeded Dr Henrik Verwoerd as South African prime minister in 1966. Vorster seemed a much more pragmatic leader than the rabidly idealistic Verwoerd. Indeed, Vorster saw his task as simply maintaining apartheid rather than driving it forward. In 1967 Vorster announced that South Africa would relax its policy on segregated sports, apparently opening the door to D’Oliveira’s potential return the following year. However, as Oborne explains, “Vorster was playing a long, sophisticated game. He was eager to generate international goodwill by creating the impression that D’Oliveira would be welcome. But he was anxious not to risk the domestic opprobrium that would come his way if D’Oliveira entered the country. Vorster’s policy from the beginning of 1967 was at bottom an attempt to reconcile these two contradictory objectives.”

D’Oliveira’s poor form in the West Indies was a great relief to Vorster et al. Nevertheless, the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) selecting committee, the influential governing body of English cricket, persisted with D’Oliveira for the summer series in England against Australia. From that point on desperate machinations were put in place to ensure D’Oliveira didn’t tour.

Vorster and Arthur Coy, the South African Cricket Association secretary, planned to offer D’Oliveira a bribe, ostensibly an enormously lucrative contract to coach quietly in South Africa, not to take up his place, should he be offered it, on the tour at the end of 1968. Meanwhile, through secret channels, Vorster was making certain members of the MCC selection committee fully aware that should he be selected, the tour would not proceed.

D’Oliveira recovered his form in the Australia series, scoring a magnificent 158 in the final Test, a performance that seemed certain to cement his place in the side to tour South Africa. On 28th August 1968 the 16-man tour party for South Africa was named, a squad that excluded D'Oliveira. Conspiracy theories abound about what went on in the marathon six-hour selection meeting. Needless to say, few believed the words of chairman of selectors Doug Insole when he said: “I think we have got rather better than him in the side”. A dignified D'Oliveira declined to say anything other than admitting his exclusion was “a bitter disappointment”. A leading South African journalist, Louis Duffus, reported that the news was received with “a national sigh of relief”.

Writing in The Guardian newspaper on 22nd October 1968, Arlott articulated the gravity of the MCC’s decision to omit D’Oliveira from the touring party: “MCC have never made a sadder, more dramatic, or potentially more damaging decision than in omitting d'Oliveira (sic) from their team to tour South Africa.” Arlott went on to state the case for D’Oliveira on cricketing grounds (“he was top of the English batting averages in the series against Australia just completed, and second in the bowling”), before launching a withering attack on the then governing body of English cricket: “In the first place, no one of open mind will believe that he was left out for valid cricket reasons: there are figures and performances less than a week old - including a century yesterday - to refute such an argument. This may prove, perhaps to the surprise of MCC, far more than a sporting matter. It could have such repercussions on British relations with the coloured races of the world that the cancellation of a cricket tour would seem a trifling matter compared with an apparent British acceptance of apartheid. This was a case where justice had to be seen to be done.”

He continued: “Secondly, within a few years, the British-born children of West Indian, Indian, Pakistani and African immigrants will be worth places in English county and national teams. It seems hard to discourage them now, for, however the MCC's case may be argued, the club's ultimate decision must be a complete deterrent to any young coloured cricketer in this country. The final thought on it, however, must be one of sadness and that in the selection the MCC have stirred forces - for both good and evil - whose powers they do not truly comprehend.”

Just three weeks later, following furore in sections of the British media, D’Oliveira was brought into the squad after a withdrawal through injury. The next day, on 17th September, an angry Vorster declared South Africa’s position: “We are not prepared to receive a team thrust upon us by people whose interests are not in the game but to gain certain political objectives which they do not even attempt to hide. The MCC team is not the team of the MCC but of the anti-apartheid movement.”

A week later the MCC cancelled the tour. England did not play another official Test match against South Africa until 1994 and the episode sparked a mass international shunning of South African sports.
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.

As both internal strife and international outrage mounted, new president F.W. de Klerk declared in 1990 that he would lift the ban on the ANC and other anti-apartheid groups, as well as repealing the censorship of the press. More significantly, De Klerk announced that, along with other prisoners convicted of non-common-law crimes, ANC leader Nelson Mandela would be released from prison.

To unbridled joy Mandela was released on 11th February 1990. He immediately declared a redoubling of efforts against apartheid but affirmed his commitment to peace and democracy. By 1991 de Klerk’s government had repealed all apartheid laws and in May 1994 Mandela was sworn in as president after the first non-racial democratic election had resulted in an overwhelming majority for the ANC.

In the midst of the tension, in June 1988, the IOC adopted a declaration against apartheid in sport – reinforcing the UN’s rigorous stance on apartheid sports.

Following the legal end of apartheid in 1991, the European Community was quick to lift its boycott on South African sports. But it wasn’t until 1995, and the newly-unified nation’s hosting of the Rugby World Cup, that South Africa would undergo its supreme moment of sporting catharsis.

It was perhaps fitting that South Africa’s ultimate unifying, redemptive moment would come in a sporting competition that the nation had helped to create.

Indeed, South Africa had been instrumental in the creation of the Rugby World Cup in 1985. Still in the midst of apartheid and the global sporting boycott, the nation’s rugby union had the casting vote at an International Rugby Board (IRB) summit in Paris. England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland opposed the World Cup concept, but France, New Zealand and Australia were in favour. South Africa’s crucial vote went in favour of an event that the country would be banned from participating in until 1995.

Playing under the ‘one team, one nation’ mantra, fate seemed to sweep South Africa to the final where they were to face New Zealand in Johannesburg. Concerted efforts had been made to foster a feeling of the ‘rainbow nation’ during the tournament. Some sceptics pointed to the inclusion of Chester Williams, the one black player in the South African team of 1995, as a post-apartheid publicity stunt. But Williams had won his place on merit as he proved throughout the tournament, tormenting opposition defences, notably scoring four tries in the quarter-final against Western Samoa.

A defensive game saw South Africa edge out New Zealand in extra-time through a drop goal by Joel Stransky, but the game was one of the most poignant ever played in the sport. As the teams lined up on the pitch moments before kick-off, newly elected and visibly frail President Nelson Mandela greeted the players dressed in a replica of Springbok captain Francois Pienaar’s jersey. The symbolism was immense and was lost on not one of the players, 63,000 spectators in the ground, nor the millions watching around the world.

The New Zealand captain that day, Sean Fitzpatrick, recalls the feeling of being up against an entire, unified nation rather than just 15 players: “To see him walking into the stadium with Francois’ jersey on, and to hear 72,000 people start chanting Mandela, Mandela…. Then there’s 15 of us there looking, thinking ‘God, how are we ever going to beat these buggers!’”

South Africa scrum-half Joost van der Westhuizen remembers: “I think the best thing was to see him in a Springbok jersey, that was the best thing for us – it was a total surprise. Then we realised that the whole country is behind us, and for this man to wear a Springbok jersey was a sign, not just for us, but for the whole of South Africa, that we have to unite, and we have to unite today.”

Francois Pienaar, the Springbok captain, was rendered almost inarticulate by the emotion of the event. He says: “What happened was Nelson Mandela said ‘thank you very much for what you've done for South Africa’ but I said ‘thank you for what you've done’. I almost felt like hugging him but it wasn't appropriate, I guess. Then I lifted the trophy which was unbelievable. I can't describe the feeling as I wouldn't do it justice.”

For Mandela to appear in the Springbok jersey was the ultimate gesture of forgiveness and unification. South African rugby had adopted the springbok as its mascot and centrepiece of its logo in 1906. It subsequently became the emblem of the ruling National Party during apartheid. At the decree of the new ANC government every other national sports team switched its emblem to the protea flower from 1994, but, after a personal intervention from Mandela, the rugby team was allowed to continue its use of the springbok alongside the protea flower – a gesture of goodwill to the largely white, Afrikaner rugby fans.

Tokyo Sexwale, a former anti-apartheid activist and premier of Guateng Province in South Africa, went some way to explaining the feelings of the newly-unified nation: “Only Mandela could wear an enemy (Springbok) jersey. Only Mandela would go down there and be associated with the Springboks. The liberation struggle of our people was not just about liberating blacks from bondage, but more so it was about liberating white people from fear. And there it was. Fear melting away. People were shouting, ‘Nelson! Nelson!’ And who were these people, these rugby crowds? They were our jailers, our oppressors; the people guarding the borders, the police stations. But it was, ‘Nelson! Nelson!’ We stood there and we didn’t know what to say.”

He added, “As president of the country, he could have just ended up in the box and given them the cup. But to stand with them, to move his hands in the air, to wear that jersey, to have that cup, to lift the cup for them, and to greet the people… you sat there and you knew that it was worthwhile. All the years underground, in the trenches, denial, self-denial, away from home, prison: it was worth it. For, truly, that day, we supped with the gods.”

It was truly a watershed moment in South Africa’s history, and one that is soon set to receive the silver screen treatment – Morgan Freeman is due to play the role of Nelson Mandela as John Carlin’s 2008 book ’Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation’ is translated onto film this year.

Some 12 years later in 2007 the Springboks would once again triumph in the Rugby World Cup. The tournament victory in France was crowned by the achievements of South Africa’s black winger Bryan Habana. Habana scored a record-equalling eight tries and was later named the 2007 IRB player of the year.

The turn of the millennium saw a 69-year old Basil D’Oliveira return to the Newlands stadium in Cape Town for a ceremony honouring the 10 greatest South African cricketers of the century. It was the first time he had ever set foot on the field of his hometown ground but he was welcomed with a rapturous reception. 

This article is part of SportsPro's History of Sport series. Click below for the other features in the series:

History of Sport: Yankee Stadium
History of Sport: Sail of the Century
History of Sport: The Munich Air Disaster

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