Games and Sporting Events in History

Organisations, Performances and Impact

Annette R. Hofmann, Gerald Gems, Maureen Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780367023928
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134819935
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Games and Sporting Events in History offers a broad global perspective on sports and games in Europe, North America, Africa, and Asia. A diverse set of topics covers education, medicine, therapy, body culture, gender, race, cross cultural flow, and political issues from the late nineteenth century throughout the twentieth century, offering new insights into previously little researched areas of scholarship relating to physical activity and sport. Such works take a new look at old issues with continued relevance to current works. The use of sports as a political tool are prominent in studies persistent to national and international relations; while other investigations cover the sociocultural discourse of the past relative to bodies and physical performances that continue to resonate in modern times. This book was previously published as a special issue of the International Journal of the History of Sport.

Revisiting (and Revising?) Sports Boycotts: From Rugby against South Africa to Soccer in Israel

Malcolm MacLean

School of Sport & Exercise, University of Gloucestershire, Gloucestershire, UK

For the first time in nearly 30 years, 2013 saw increasing public awareness of calls for a comprehensive boycott of and sanctions on a state based on questions of an ‘entrenched system of racial discrimination’. The call to boycott South African sport emerged in the 1950s as the apartheid state was developing and refining its comprehensive and systematic legal form amid growing international pressure for decolonisation. This is a different social and political context than the call 50 years later by Palestinian civil society for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel. This paper draws on analyses of international anti-apartheid movements’ campaigns against sporting contact with South Africa and the BDS call for the isolation of the Israeli state to propose a theory of sports boycotts. It looks at the anti-apartheid campaigns to consider ways in which the BDS campaign has an impact on existing historical understandings of cultural boycotts as a tactical and strategic campaign tool.

Boycotts and related forms of political pressure have been a recurring element in the analyses of sport in international relations and international relations in sport. This paper does three things. First, it revisits the anti-apartheid sports campaign to consider its form and character. This will inform a wider discussion of boycotts, embargoes and sanctions as political tactics and explore what it is about the characteristics of international sport that makes sports sanctions distinctive. Finally, a nascent theory of sports boycotts will be assessed through the campaign targeting the 2013 UEFA U-21 tournament to explore the extent to which we need to review or revise our analyses of bilateral sports boycotts in particular and cultural boycotts more generally.

The focus in the sports boycotts literature on the Olympic boycotts of 1980 and 1984 emphasising multilateral sports boycotts obscures key aspects of sport in international relations, diverts attention away from the global distinctiveness of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) as a sports body and downplays the significance of differences between the organisation of Olympic Games and other forms of international sports events. The paradox of the Cold War focus on the 1980 and 1984 Olympic boycotts is that the 1976 Montreal boycott was part of the only time an international sports boycott was successful in achieving its long-term goals – the ending of South African apartheid. Although not the most significant factor in the collapse of apartheid, the sports boycott was responsible for a series of significant blows against the cultural security of apartheid’s dominant groups. Analysis of the anti-apartheid boycott movement has tailed off in recent years, in part because there is only so much we can say about sports boycotts, in part because South African history is developing new areas of analysis focussing on the country’s sporting past and physical culture, and in part because there have been other pressing issues to explore.

The relevance and significance of sports boycotts changed in 2012/2013 with the intensification of action in support of a 2011 call from within Palestinian civil society for the relocation of the 2013 UEFA Under-21 championships to be held in Israel. This campaign invoked as one of its predecessors the anti-apartheid campaign’s call between the mid-1950s and 1992 for the isolation of South Africa. Other calls for sports and wider boycotts in the previous 20 years had been limited or, as we have seen in the recent call for LGBT athletes to boycott the Sochi Olympics over Russia’s recent anti-gay legislation, centred on individual athletes rather than sport systems. Public discussion of boycotts and similar kinds of pressure on states has been dominated by state-sponsored comprehensive sanctions activity, such as those directed at Iraq and Iran, or the so-called smart or targeted sanctions directed at members of the political elites in places such as Zimbabwe and Syria. Unlike state-sponsored action, this recent call for a cultural boycott of the Israeli state was a campaign grounded in the civil society networks of those peoples who are the subject of close and restrictive state control. There seem to be significant parallels with the South African case. The explicit invocation of the anti-apartheid campaign and its role as the most high profile of the bilateral boycotts campaigns means that the time is right to begin to revisit and review our analyses of sports boycotts.

While many may feel uncomfortable with calls for a boycott of Israel and the application to Israel of the apartheid label¹ given the UN’s 1973 definition of apartheid as ‘inhuman acts for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group and systematically oppressing them’,² we must also be wary of falling into the trap of equating apartheid with the South African situation only or reifying the South African system. Israel’s actions are contested in international law. The International Court of Justice in 2004 issued an Advisory Opinion that the Separation Wall Israel is building across the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) is in violation of international law, while elsewhere it has been argued that Israel’s support for the West Bank settlement building programme is also in violation.³ Defenders of Israel point, in response, to alleged violations of international law by neighbouring states and assert Israel’s compliance with UN resolutions. The issue is not the legitimacy of either stance; the situation is hotly contested and advocates of the boycott can point to important critiques of the situation they are seeking to address. These questions of the validity of charges against Israel are secondary to the fact of the Campaign for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) and the focus of this paper: how we might make sense of bilateral and multilateral sports, and by implication cultural, boycotts in the light of this 2013 campaign.

Boycotting (South African) Apartheid Sport

The boycott campaign was one of the principal tools that the anti-apartheid movement had in its toolkit to dismantle the White South African government’s systematic racial classification and oppression. In discussions of anti-apartheid campaigns, it is common to identify 1959 as the year that the boycott movement came together into coordinated international activism. There had been boycott events before 1959; the All Africa People’s Conference in 1958 called for a boycott of South African goods and during the mid-1950s the White governing body of table tennis had been expelled from the international federation (IF). It was the formation of the Boycott Movement Committee drawing together representatives of anti-apartheid groups from South Africa and the UK in London in December 1959 that marked a significant new level of coordination in the campaign coinciding with an emerging activist campaign in New Zealand focussing on the 1960 rugby tour of South Africa under the slogan ‘No Maoris, No Tour’. This campaign laid the base for one of the most sustained elements of the sports boycott – the movement to stop rugby union and other sports contact between New Zealand and South Africa that lasted until the mid-1980s.⁴

The situation of South African sport under apartheid was complex. Although it was possible to point to systematic racial discrimination in South Africa from the time of earliest colonisation and the emergence of social practices from around the time of World War I that embedded that discrimination in legal and quasi-legal practice, the situation changed with the election in 1948 of a government led by the conservative Reformed National Party, replacing the more liberal New Democratic Party. Liberal is a relative term here; Jan Smuts, the Party’s leader defeated in the 1948 election, actively supported segregation, arguing in 1929 that:

The old practice mixed up black with white in the same institutions, and nothing else was possible after the native institutions and traditions had been carelessly or deliberately destroyed. But in the new plan there will be what is called in South Africa ‘segregation’; two separate institutions for the two elements of the population living in their own separate areas. Separate institutions involve territorial segregation of the white and black. If they live mixed together it is not practicable to sort them out under separate institutions of their own. Institutional segregation carries with it territorial segregation.⁵

Where Smuts’ government differed significantly from the incoming government was its support for the view that Black South Africans should be considered and treated as permanent residents of a White-dominated South Africa, not as guest workers whose real home lay in the reserves. Although this difference anticipated the political distinctions to emerge with the formalisation of the Bantustan policy, the basic legal and therefore systemic elements of apartheid developed in the first few years of National Party rule; alongside key legislation including the Population Registration Act (1950) that required all residents to be registered as one of four racial groups, the various Pass Laws Acts (1952 and thereafter), the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act (1949) and the Immorality Act (1950) and the Bantu Education Act (1953), the principal laws affecting sport were the Group Areas Act (1950) and the Reservation of Separate Amenities Act (1953).

These latter two pieces of legislation and the regulations and case law that flowed from them, along with several other Acts of Parliament including the Coloured Persons Communal Reserves Act (1961), divided the country into regions designated for occupation and use by the four identified ‘racial’ groups – White, Black, Indian and Coloured, where Coloured encapsulated most non-Indian Asians, people of mixed race descent and otherwise acted as a ‘miscellaneous’ category. This division overwhelmingly favoured the White group, 24% of the population who controlled 86% of the land, and the best land at that. Despite being popularly seen, externally, as a National Party programme, this legislation formalised the practice of territorial segregation Smuts had envisaged in 1929. By 1954 this separation then was both spatial – the Group Areas Act – and could be enforced in relation to individual structures, services and related facilities – the Reservation of Separate Amenities Act.

The effect of these developments on sport was profound, preventing informal or ‘pick-up’ games, while allowing ‘interracial’ sport between members of organised teams and leagues where a permit had been issued. At times this legislation led to moments of absurdity if they were not so offensive, such as the awards ceremony at the 1963 Natal Open golf championship, which was won by the Indian Sewsunker ‘Papwa’ Sewgolum. Sewgolum had been allowed to play, but the permit did not allow him access to the club house; the trophy was handed to him through a window and the South African Broadcasting Corporation suspended its news reporting of the tournament because its rules did not allow it to cover ‘mixed’ sport.

In the initial stages of the post-war era as organised international opposition began to emerge, the focus was on these exclusionary mechanisms that prevented ‘mixed sport’.⁶ Visiting sports teams habitually excluded athletes of colour from their teams, hence the campaign in New Zealand in 1960 around the slogan ‘No Maoris, No Tour’, while it was the controversy over the selection of the former South African ‘Coloured’ Basil D’Olivera as a member of the MCC (English) cricket team to tour South Africa in 1968 that was one of the crucial factors in South Africa’s isolation from international cricket.⁷ The international campaign for a sports boycott operated on two principal fronts, one focussed on multilateral sports settings with an emphasis on the Olympic Games and the second centred on bilateral sports contacts. While the initial emphasis of the campaign, as seen for instance in New Zealand in 1960, was to oppose discriminatory sports practices, towards the latter half of the 1960s this position shifted to one where anti-apartheid groups opposed the apartheid system, not just its effects on sport, invoking Hassan Howa’s (who became leader in the late 1970s of the South African Council on Sport) statement that there could ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Series Editors’ Foreword
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Revisiting (and Revising?) Sports Boycotts: From Rugby against South Africa to Soccer in Israel
• 2. Re-Entering the Sporting World: China’s Sponsorship of the 1963 Games of the New Emerging Forces (GANEFO)
• 3. Opening a Window on Early Twentieth-Century School Sport in Cape Town Society
• 4. On the Margins: Therapeutic Massage, Physical Education and Physical Therapy Defining a Profession
• 5. Discourses on the Production of the Athletic Lean Body in Central Europe around 1900
• 6. Women Boxers: Actresses to Athletes – The Role of Vaudeville in Early Women’s Boxing in the USA
• 7. British Cultural Influence and Japan: Elizabeth Phillips Hughes’s Visit for Educational Research in 1901–1902
• Index