Disentangling Race: Re-Narrating Apartheid Sport?

Abstract

This paper involves a search for interracial entanglements in South African sport and considers how these experiences may be narrated. The paper comprises three sections. The first provides an overview of traditional narratives of apartheid and apartheid sport that focus on race as a perpetual marker of social division. The second section shifts attention to the gaps, blind spots, mistakes, paradoxes, ironies, anomalies, ambiguities and invisibilities in the structures of apartheid that allowed for racial encounters and entanglements. The paper concludes with a discussion about the methodological and political implications of incorporating racial entanglements into narratives of apartheid sport.     

Sport and Racial Discrimination in Colonial Zimbabwe: A Reanalysis

The British colony of Southern Rhodesia, later governed by a white settler minority as unilaterally-independent Rhodesia, practiced racial segregation in many spheres, including education, health care access and political participation. Though racial segregation tended to exist on a less formal level than in Rhodesia's neighbour, apartheid South Africa, segregationist policies were nonetheless invasive and virtually complete in some areas. Sport was a heavily contested sphere, in which pockets of black African autonomy and advancement existed alongside near-complete white domination, largely, but not entirely, free of government intrusion. This article is an effort to develop a working hypothesis of racial discrimination in Rhodesian sport, discrimination that was never as formal or complete as in South Africa but which nonetheless provided a firm foundation for Rhodesia's exclusion from international sporting competition in the 1970s.     

Long Balls in the Dying Moments: Exploring the Decline of South Africa's National Football League, 1970–1977

During the 1970s, a number of prominent British and Irish footballers – the likes of which included Gordon Banks, George Best, Bobby Charlton, Geoff Hurst and Bobby Moore – played as ‘guest players’ on a short-term basis for various clubs in South Africa's National Football League (NFL), a ‘whites-only’ professional league that spanned the period 1959–1977. Coupled with this, NFL clubs from the outset also secured the services of additional foreign players of lesser standing on longer term contracts in an attempt to improve the standard of play. The strategy of importing high-profile ‘guests’ during the 1970s ultimately proved unsuccessful in sustaining the league as it disbanded after the 1977 season. Utilising archival documentation, contemporary media reports and existing football works, this essay aims to establish the reasons behind the NFL's demise. Two particular factors under consideration are the erosion of the league's entertainment value and the deteriorating economic conditions within South Africa at the time. These elements are juxtaposed with additional factors such as the rise in popularity of multiracial football, the resulting drain of sponsorship away from the white professional game, as well as political machinations within South Africa during this period.     

Professional Football in Apartheid South Africa: Leisure,Consumption and Identity in the National Football League, 1959–1977

A growing body of academic and popular literature considers the history of South African football. These and existing publications pay little or no attention to the emergence of white professional football in apartheid South Africa. The National Football League (NFL) challenged the amateur game and introduced professional football to the country. During its 17-year existence, the NFL grew each season with large attendances until its demise in 1977. In addition, the NFL imported a range of international players, invited foreign teams and actively engaged in the political debates in South African sport at the time. The NFL was instrumental in popularising the game across the country for all South Africans. The NFL became the most popular sports entertainment of choice for South Africans during this period. Finally, the NFL actively engaged in a campaign of destroying rival non-racial anti-apartheid leagues while simultaneously co-opting less progressive organisations.     

A philosophy for teaching in this strange place

ABSTRACT

Lecturing can be positively regarded as a practice by which students can be treated with respect in educational processes which grant them freedom to pursue and acquire new knowledge that meets their needs. Lecturing can also be negatively conceived as a practice which others students and positions them as people who deserve to be chided and harangued towards new knowledge. This negative conception is magnified in this strange place where what is taught to overly large classes offensively propagates colonial and apartheid schemata, while failing to advance the development needs of students. My teaching philosophy is a humanistic response to the difficulties of teaching in this strange circumstance.     

The Nature of Leisure in the Manyeleti Game Reserve for Africans,South Africa, 1967–1985

Almost all studies of national parks, game reserves or wilderness areas in Africa have concentrated upon their use by wealthy European or American visitors. The African experience of these spaces has been overlooked. This article focuses on a South African state-run game reserve on the western fringes of the Kruger National Park, which opened in 1967 for the exclusive use of African visitors. The Manyeleti game reserve became one of very few resorts available to black South Africans that could afford to take a holiday during the apartheid period. While initially established to encourage conservationist ideals within the growing black middle class, the game reserve had to adapt to the preferences of its visitors in order to make the project a paying concern. As such, alternative means of enjoying nature began to evolve that ran counter to initial expectations and intentions. This article explores the objectives and ideas of the venture's originators and managers, and then compares those expectations with the actual experiences of the visitors to the game reserve. By being open to both the official and unofficial means of engaging with nature, activities such as eating, drinking and football become as important to the story as the nature trails, film shows and game drives. The article makes use of Michel de Certeau's theory of ‘strategy' and ‘tactics' to argue that while a moralised ideal of Manyeleti was formulated at its genesis, the practicality of running the reserve created a space for urban Africans to temporarily escape many aspects of apartheid oppression. To contextualise this development, Manyeleti is contrasted with the other state-managed holiday resort at Umgababa, 40 km south of Durban.     

Public education and student movements: the Chilean rebellion under a neoliberal experiment

Abstract

Chile is recognized in the educational policy field as one of the first laboratories of neoliberal initiatives. These policies, initiated under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, did not change with the new democratic governments after 1990. This characteristic led international organizations to promote the Chilean policies in different contexts in Latin America and beyond. In 2006, a high school student movement occupied public and private schools, demystifying the outcomes of these policies. A new wave of demonstrations took place in 2011, with a college student leadership that paralyzed a significant amount of universities and schools throughout the country. After both waves of mobilizations, the political system opened the process of policy-making that considered the demands of social movements. In this article, we explore the dynamics between educational policies and social student movements in Chile, and the possibilities of change in favor of public education.     

Ideological alchemy: the transmutation of South African didactics (and fundamental pedagogics) into ‘apartheid education’

In his response to Krüger, Le Grange claims that: (1) the South African discourse of fundamental pedagogics was closely allied with Christian National Education and functioned as a powerful educational doctrine in the service of the South African policy of apartheid education; (2) fundamental pedagogics bracketed political discourse; (3) the connection between fundamental pedagogics and Christianity promoted an authoritarian approach to education; and (4) because didactic pedagogics and fundamental pedagogics were so intimately intertwined, South African didactic thinking also was used to serve and perpetuate the policy of apartheid education. This paper evaluates these claims and concludes that they are untenable in light of the history, nature, and purpose of South African fundamental and didactic pedagogical thinking. In his effort to link fundamental and didactic pedagogical thinking to apartheid education, Le Grange has lost sight of the profound influence of the tradition of European (Dutch/German) Didaktik on didactic thought in South Africa during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.     

Circumventing Apartheid: Racial Politics and the Issue of South Africa's Olympic Participation at the 1984 Los Angeles Games

Behind the shadows of an Olympiad replete with tales of Cold War acrimony and lavish commercial excess, emerges South Africa's bureaucratic attempt to achieve readmission to the Olympic Movement prior to the 1984 Los Angeles Games. In the backdrop of the Reagan administration's conciliatory policy of ‘constructive engagement’ towards Pretoria, the all-white South African National Olympic Committee aspired to cease its two-decade-long sporting isolation in the southern California metropolis. Drawing upon archival materials from the International Olympic Studies Center and public debates in the leading national and sporting newspapers and periodicals of the time, this paper will detail and analyse how International Olympic Committee president Juan Antonio Samaranch was forced to navigate a tight political tightrope over the South African issue. Any concession towards Pretoria would have likely agitated the African-bloc nations – a powerful constituency on the IOC with a proclivity for boycotting Olympic Games – as well as the global-nexus of anti-apartheid groups that vehemently opposed South Africa's participation in Los Angeles.     

School leadership in the Caribbean: perceptions,practices, paradigms

This paper will focus on the shifts in discourses about teacher education and teacher voice within the South African research and policy environment over the last four decades. The alignment of the political and educational agenda in providing resistance to the apartheid system culminated in 1994, the start of the new democracy. The preceding 20 years (1974–1994) were characterised by defiance of the subjugation of teachers’ voices, and the need to find agency amongst teachers. The shifting agenda of the strong teacher union movement during these resistance years and within the post-apartheid 20 years (1994–2014) is the subject of this paper. The attempt to generate a focus on teacher professional quality agendas is presently becoming increasingly challenging. Has the teacher agency agenda produced a disregard for teacher professional development? Are teachers protective of their own inadequacies to enact the transformation for which they campaigned? Are the new educational authorities reverting to yet another form of earlier accountability and performativity regimes to regulate teachers? The paper traces a critical account of these shifting historical trends in activating teacher voice. It argues for ‘deliberative action’ to reassert teacher voice.