Sport And Apartheid South Africa

As athletes of today grapple with how to use their public platforms to fight for activist causes, Sport and Apartheid South Africa: Histories of Politics, Power, and Protest examines a set of longer histories of sport, ‘race’, and activism. The book seeks to uncover and understand new historical aspects of apartheid and sport, challenge myths, and rethink dominant narratives. It examines the subject of racially segregated sport in South Africa from national and transnational perspectives, asking questions about how athletes and administrators, transnational anti-apartheid groups and activists, and politicians around the world interpreted and internalized racial segregation in South Africa. By connecting the local to the global, this book illuminates the ways in which apartheid sport animated national and international debates, ranging from racism and human rights to Cold War politics and post-colonialism. Sport and Apartheid South Africa is a significant new contribution to the study of race and politics in sport and will be a great resource for academics, researchers, and advanced students of History, Politics, International Relations, Sociology, and Political Geography. The chapters in this book were originally published in The International Journal of the History of Sport.

1999 North American Society for Sports History Book of the Year Douglas Booth looks at the role of sport in the fostering of a new national identity in South Africa. He analyzes the effect of the 30-year sport boycott but concludes that sport will never unite South Africans except in the most fleeting and superficial manner.

The meanings attached to sports in South African societies, past and present, are explored in this book, which focuses particularly on the part played by the prominent team sports of rugby, soccer and cricket in the creation of social divisions and unities over the course of South African history. In the past, only white South Africans could represent "South Africa" in international sport. Now, formerly white-dominated sports have been promoted as unifying forces for a nation in the process of forging a new national identity. The book considers the history and changing meanings attached to particular sports in the old and new South Africas, and how sport is being used and abused today.

Marion Keim maintains that through properly organized sport South Africans can learn to play together with respect, learn to all be on the same team and in the process contribute to the building of a new South Africa.

In recent years the interest in the patterns and policies of South African sport has grown. This book examines the increasingly complex issue of race, class and sport in the context of South African social relations. The author disputes evaluations made purely on the question of race, maintaining that it is important to examine the complex interaction between racial and class dynamics as a background for understanding the South African way of life. The book demonstrates that sport must be understood in the context of the ensemble of social relations characterizing the South African social formation.

This book represents the point of view of the modern non-racial sports movement within South Africa, describes the historical and social context of the movement and gives reasons for its continuing vitality.

Conventional historical and political analyses of South Africa have frequently neglected the vital role of sport in general, and rugby in particular. This book fills the gap through a critical interpretation of rugby's role in the development of white society, its role in shaping significant social divisions, and its centrality to the apartheid era "power elite".