British Sporting Relations with Apartheid South Africa

The transnational anti-apartheid sport boycott of South Africa represented the most prominent, extended, and controversial anti-racism campaign in the history of sport. Spearheaded by prominent British religious and anti-colonial figures and exiled South Africans, emboldened by communist and Global South support, and legitimised by supranational political bodies such as the United Nations, the Organisation of African Unity, and the Commonwealth, the sport boycott helped propel anti-apartheid out of relative obscurity and struck at the very heart of a cultural practice that served an explicitly ideological function in Afrikaner society.

Britain held a dichotomous, even paradoxical, role as both prosecutor and defender of white South Africa. This book utilises sport as a critical lens for understanding the dynamics and dichotomies of British attitudes towards the apartheid regime. Debates over whether to continue or to cut sporting links with apartheid South Africa proved bitterly divisive. The considerable weight the subject carried and the degree to which it saturated British political and social discourse for four decades speaks to its impact and importance.

British Sporting Relations with Apartheid South Africa represents the first archival-based, historical examination of Britain's sporting relations with South Africa throughout the apartheid era, 1948-1994. Situating the analysis within the shifting multiracial and multicultural landscapes of postcolonial Britain and within global political, cultural, sporting, and ideological debates, the authors trace the origins and evolution of the transnational sport boycott, and examine what inspired Britons to energise anti-apartheid sport campaigns and, in contrast, what drove many others to vehemently oppose them at every turn.