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Pitch Battles: Sport, Racism and Resistance
"There will be a black Springbok over my dead body."
—Dr Danie Craven, President of the South African Rugby Board, 1969
Just a year after the controversial D Oliveira affair, the organised disruption of the all-white 1969/70 South African rugby and cricket tours to Britain represented a significant challenge to apartheid politics. Led by future cabinet minister Peter Hain, the Stop the Seventy Tour campaign brought about the cancellation of both tours, presaging white South Africa's expulsion from the Olympics and the end of apartheid sport altogether.
With his brand of attention-grabbing, direct action sports protest, the 19-year-old Hain emerged as a hero to some and enemy to others. Now, reflecting on these experiences with fifty years of hindsight, Lord Hain, together with South Africa s foremost sports historian and fellow anti-apartheid activist André Odendaal, shows how decades of relentless international and domestic campaigning for equality led to a Springbok team captained by black athlete Siya Kolisi winning the 2019 Rugby World Cup.
Interspersing a wide range of examples with personal testimony, Pitch Battles explores the themes of sport, globalisation and resistance from the deep past to the present day. Published in the same year as the Stop The Tour documentary from acclaimed director Louis Myles, this compelling story of sacrifice, struggle and triumph reveals how sport should never be divorced from politics or society's values.
—Dr Danie Craven, President of the South African Rugby Board, 1969
Just a year after the controversial D Oliveira affair, the organised disruption of the all-white 1969/70 South African rugby and cricket tours to Britain represented a significant challenge to apartheid politics. Led by future cabinet minister Peter Hain, the Stop the Seventy Tour campaign brought about the cancellation of both tours, presaging white South Africa's expulsion from the Olympics and the end of apartheid sport altogether.
With his brand of attention-grabbing, direct action sports protest, the 19-year-old Hain emerged as a hero to some and enemy to others. Now, reflecting on these experiences with fifty years of hindsight, Lord Hain, together with South Africa s foremost sports historian and fellow anti-apartheid activist André Odendaal, shows how decades of relentless international and domestic campaigning for equality led to a Springbok team captained by black athlete Siya Kolisi winning the 2019 Rugby World Cup.
Interspersing a wide range of examples with personal testimony, Pitch Battles explores the themes of sport, globalisation and resistance from the deep past to the present day. Published in the same year as the Stop The Tour documentary from acclaimed director Louis Myles, this compelling story of sacrifice, struggle and triumph reveals how sport should never be divorced from politics or society's values.
- GenresSouth Africa
512 pages, Hardcover
Published December 1, 2020
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January 13, 2021
Is it really 50 years since the disruption of the Springboks Rugby Tour to the UK? Of course, it is. Did the “Stop the Seventies Tour” campaign actually achieve anything of important. Oh yes, it did. It helped to change the world. It took on the challenge of racism in sport – not just rugby and cricket, but the whole gamut – and it made it clear that there was a huge constituency out there that found racism in sport, and the cosying up to racism by the sporting authorities, to be totally unacceptable.
This book is written by two people who were at the heart of that struggle: Peter Hain and Andre Odendaal. Peter achieved fame or notoriety, depending on your viewpoint, because he was the public face of the Stop the Seventies Tour campaign. Andre is from a later generation and was at the heart of the struggle to democratise cricket in South Africa in the 1980s. These are two people who clearly know what they are talking about, and their joint adventure when Peter visited South Africa illegally in 1989 gives the book a certain frisson, to put it mildly.
To understand what happened it is necessary to say something about the political situation in the UK at the end of the 1960s. The ruling class had suffered a deep shock at the 1945 election, but managed to weather that crisis by conceding the Welfare State and the National Health Service. They had also suffered the shock of the Suez Crisis, which accelerated the decline of Empire and the Profumo Affair, which had made the Conservative Party look ridiculous. This is obviously a thumbnail sketch of what happened, but the result was that there was a Labour Government between 1964 and 1970.
In South Africa, the National Party had been elected to power in 1948 and they had begun implementing apartheid. This resulted in widespread opposition, culminating in the Sharpeville Massacre on 21st March 1960, followed by the banning of all legal opposition to the apartheid state. This, in turn, led to the launching of the armed struggle and the arrest of the whole of the ANC leadership, who were put on trial and faced the death sentence. Mandela and the other leaders were imprisoned for life. It was in this atmosphere that the Boycott Movement was founded in 1959, becoming the Anti-Apartheid Movement following the Sharpeville Massacre.
None of this concerned the governing bodies of Cricket (the Marylebone Cricket Club) and Rugby (the Rugby Football Union), nor was it likely to. The governing bodies of these two organisations were made up of retired military men, aristocrats and ex-colonial administrators, and they argued that politics and sport could not mix. The MCC ignored the Basil D’Oliveira affair, where the South African government had intervened to prevent the entry of one of the England team to South Africa because of his colour. Both the RFU and the MCC issued invitations to whites only South African teams to visit the UK in 1969 and 1970 respectively. Their argument was that sport and politics did not mix.
This was the crux of the issue. If you said nothing and did nothing in a dispute between the oppressor and the oppressed, you were taking the side of the oppressor. It was not possible to be neutral about apartheid sport, as the very basis for the selection of the teams was racism not merit. To be a member of a South African team you had to be white. My generation, which had grown up after the war, rejected this, or at least very large numbers of us did. It was quite clear that apartheid was wrong and that playing with apartheid selected teams was therefore also wrong. We gave added offence by not being deferential, and the sports administrators were determined not to give way to a group of long-haired students. It really was a culture war, as it still is. All you have to do is look at the recent events in Washington DC.
Peter and Andre outline all this in meticulous detail giving emphasis to the different roles played by Anti-Apartheid Movement (the solidarity organisation), the South African Non-Racial Olympics Committee (SANROC) which operated in exile and the South African Council on Sport (SACOS) which campaigned for non-racial sport in South Africa. They set out the crucial roles played by Dennis Brutus, Sam Ramsamy and Chris de Broglio in the international campaign, and the incredible bravery of people like Hassan Hawa and Steve Tshwete inside the country. The intransigents were led by men like Ali Bacher and Danie Craven, who swore that there would only be a black Springbok rugby player over his dead body, and they had the full backing of the apartheid state.
The Rugby tour to the UK was a disaster for the Springboks. They were harassed at every turn and they lost matches. The RFU was forced to cancel matches because the pitches could not be defended. The cricket tour was cancelled. The cricket tour was cancelled. The Conservatives tried to turn this into a “law and order” issue. That possibly won them enough votes in the 1970 election to become the governing party again. This anti-apartheid victory made Peter a hate figure for white South Africa, and he was forbidden to enter the country (not that he had any intention of doing so).
The tactics used spread to Australia and New Zealand. The International Olympics Committee (IOC) banned South Africa from competition. Apartheid sport was slowly isolated. Teams, of course, could and still did visit South Africa. The British Lions in 1974 massacred the Springboks, and that was only five years after the 1969 fiasco. Also, visits by official teams dried up. Mercenary teams had to be bought in, such as Mike Gatting’s infamous 1989 tour, which provoked huge demonstrations in South Africa (and was the reason for Peter’s clandestine visit that year). This cost the regime a huge amount of money and only brought more opprobrium down on their heads.
The scope of this book is enormous. It takes us back to the introduction of sports by the British colonisers in the nineteenth century and forward to the progress in deracialising sport in the new democratic South Africa. It shows us how sport became a weapon in the struggle against apartheid. It ends with Siya Kolisi bringing home the Rugby World Cup in 2019. Danie Craven said that there would be a black Springbok over his dead body. Siya Kolisi was the captain of the victorious Springboks team.
Peter and Andre are quite clear that we still have a long way to go in removing racism from sport, but we proved that Black Lives Matter, long before anyone thought of the phrase. Colin Kaepernick and taking the knee is directly linked to what happened in 1969-1970. This was a battle that we won.
[David Kenvyn was an anti-apartheid activist from 1968-1994, and was chair of the London Anti-Apartheid Committee from 1982-1988. He also attended the 2nd Brussels Conference on Namibia in 1986, the 1st ANC International Conference at Arusha in Tanzania in 1987, took part in the Nelson Mandela Freedom March in 1988 and attended the 2nd ANC International Conference in Johannesburg in 1993. He was volunteer at the ANC Regional Office in Johannesburg during the 1994 election.]
This book is written by two people who were at the heart of that struggle: Peter Hain and Andre Odendaal. Peter achieved fame or notoriety, depending on your viewpoint, because he was the public face of the Stop the Seventies Tour campaign. Andre is from a later generation and was at the heart of the struggle to democratise cricket in South Africa in the 1980s. These are two people who clearly know what they are talking about, and their joint adventure when Peter visited South Africa illegally in 1989 gives the book a certain frisson, to put it mildly.
To understand what happened it is necessary to say something about the political situation in the UK at the end of the 1960s. The ruling class had suffered a deep shock at the 1945 election, but managed to weather that crisis by conceding the Welfare State and the National Health Service. They had also suffered the shock of the Suez Crisis, which accelerated the decline of Empire and the Profumo Affair, which had made the Conservative Party look ridiculous. This is obviously a thumbnail sketch of what happened, but the result was that there was a Labour Government between 1964 and 1970.
In South Africa, the National Party had been elected to power in 1948 and they had begun implementing apartheid. This resulted in widespread opposition, culminating in the Sharpeville Massacre on 21st March 1960, followed by the banning of all legal opposition to the apartheid state. This, in turn, led to the launching of the armed struggle and the arrest of the whole of the ANC leadership, who were put on trial and faced the death sentence. Mandela and the other leaders were imprisoned for life. It was in this atmosphere that the Boycott Movement was founded in 1959, becoming the Anti-Apartheid Movement following the Sharpeville Massacre.
None of this concerned the governing bodies of Cricket (the Marylebone Cricket Club) and Rugby (the Rugby Football Union), nor was it likely to. The governing bodies of these two organisations were made up of retired military men, aristocrats and ex-colonial administrators, and they argued that politics and sport could not mix. The MCC ignored the Basil D’Oliveira affair, where the South African government had intervened to prevent the entry of one of the England team to South Africa because of his colour. Both the RFU and the MCC issued invitations to whites only South African teams to visit the UK in 1969 and 1970 respectively. Their argument was that sport and politics did not mix.
This was the crux of the issue. If you said nothing and did nothing in a dispute between the oppressor and the oppressed, you were taking the side of the oppressor. It was not possible to be neutral about apartheid sport, as the very basis for the selection of the teams was racism not merit. To be a member of a South African team you had to be white. My generation, which had grown up after the war, rejected this, or at least very large numbers of us did. It was quite clear that apartheid was wrong and that playing with apartheid selected teams was therefore also wrong. We gave added offence by not being deferential, and the sports administrators were determined not to give way to a group of long-haired students. It really was a culture war, as it still is. All you have to do is look at the recent events in Washington DC.
Peter and Andre outline all this in meticulous detail giving emphasis to the different roles played by Anti-Apartheid Movement (the solidarity organisation), the South African Non-Racial Olympics Committee (SANROC) which operated in exile and the South African Council on Sport (SACOS) which campaigned for non-racial sport in South Africa. They set out the crucial roles played by Dennis Brutus, Sam Ramsamy and Chris de Broglio in the international campaign, and the incredible bravery of people like Hassan Hawa and Steve Tshwete inside the country. The intransigents were led by men like Ali Bacher and Danie Craven, who swore that there would only be a black Springbok rugby player over his dead body, and they had the full backing of the apartheid state.
The Rugby tour to the UK was a disaster for the Springboks. They were harassed at every turn and they lost matches. The RFU was forced to cancel matches because the pitches could not be defended. The cricket tour was cancelled. The cricket tour was cancelled. The Conservatives tried to turn this into a “law and order” issue. That possibly won them enough votes in the 1970 election to become the governing party again. This anti-apartheid victory made Peter a hate figure for white South Africa, and he was forbidden to enter the country (not that he had any intention of doing so).
The tactics used spread to Australia and New Zealand. The International Olympics Committee (IOC) banned South Africa from competition. Apartheid sport was slowly isolated. Teams, of course, could and still did visit South Africa. The British Lions in 1974 massacred the Springboks, and that was only five years after the 1969 fiasco. Also, visits by official teams dried up. Mercenary teams had to be bought in, such as Mike Gatting’s infamous 1989 tour, which provoked huge demonstrations in South Africa (and was the reason for Peter’s clandestine visit that year). This cost the regime a huge amount of money and only brought more opprobrium down on their heads.
The scope of this book is enormous. It takes us back to the introduction of sports by the British colonisers in the nineteenth century and forward to the progress in deracialising sport in the new democratic South Africa. It shows us how sport became a weapon in the struggle against apartheid. It ends with Siya Kolisi bringing home the Rugby World Cup in 2019. Danie Craven said that there would be a black Springbok over his dead body. Siya Kolisi was the captain of the victorious Springboks team.
Peter and Andre are quite clear that we still have a long way to go in removing racism from sport, but we proved that Black Lives Matter, long before anyone thought of the phrase. Colin Kaepernick and taking the knee is directly linked to what happened in 1969-1970. This was a battle that we won.
[David Kenvyn was an anti-apartheid activist from 1968-1994, and was chair of the London Anti-Apartheid Committee from 1982-1988. He also attended the 2nd Brussels Conference on Namibia in 1986, the 1st ANC International Conference at Arusha in Tanzania in 1987, took part in the Nelson Mandela Freedom March in 1988 and attended the 2nd ANC International Conference in Johannesburg in 1993. He was volunteer at the ANC Regional Office in Johannesburg during the 1994 election.]
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