Hitting Apartheid for Six? The Politics of the South African Sports Boycott

Abstract

In the political struggle against apartheid, protesters and opponents of the South African regime adopted a range of strategies and tactics, including a boycott of sport. This article analyses and evaluates the effectiveness and significance of the sports boycott that passed through various stages with respect to objectives and goals. Boycotters initially sought to deracialize South African sport. By the early 1980s, the sports boycott was one of a raft of resistance strategies aimed at forcing the South African regime to abandon apartheid; by the end of that decade, supporters advocated the boycott as a strategy to build non-racial democratic sporting structures that would assist the transition to a post-apartheid society. While proponents insist that the boycott contributed directly to the abandonment of apartheid, this article suggests that the contribution was more indirect, that the deracialization of sport in the mid-1970s (under the impetus of the boycott) may have had a greater impact on the discarding of racial ideology in South Africa than commentators have thus far admitted.