Eve Fairbanks: Bring Back the Sports Boycott
[Eve Fairbanks is a writer for Newsweek.]
...With the recent exception of American golf, sporting tournaments usually provide little in the way of side fascinations, at least compared to the weirdness smorgasbords that are, say, political campaigns. Discipline is everything, and the imagery is predetermined. In theory, the World Cup constitutes a bazaar of nations, but in reality everything is thoroughly globalized: Nike dictates the fashion, Coke provides the musical jingles, and Europe sets the standard of play. And so the appearance of the insular, mystifying North Korea—its first in a World Cup since 1966—has injected a little delicious bizarreness into all this World Cup uniformity....
In the runup to this first African World Cup, writers have ruminated endlessly over its greater meaning. How can it be substantively African, rather than just a Western event that happened to be held on African soil? (Don't say the vuvuzelas make it African, please.) FIFA—and South Africa—missed an opportunity by failing to ban the North Koreans. Enlightened people love to pooh-pooh cultural boycotts, but a ban would have reflected this part of the continent’s unique ethos and history. South Africa is the single country where a sports boycott did the most to heighten outside awareness of the evils of a regime—and to foment internal restlessness for change.
As apartheid gathered steam through the second half of the last century, South Africa was banned from the Olympics, then international cricket, then international golf, then the rugby World Cups. In the beginning, the rationale for the exclusions was based on the fact that the teams themselves reflected the apartheid regime's core sin: they were all white. But soon sporting bodies were instituting boycotts as a broader comment on the regime’s oppression and violence off the field. FIFA originally suspended South Africa on account of its soccer team’s racial segregation, but it expelled the white-only government for good after the South African police massacred of a group of young black protestors in Soweto in 1976.
Toward the end, the apartheid regime made some gestures at desegregating its sports teams, but the boycotters made it clear the boycotts were bigger than that. The motto of the South African Council on Sport, an independent body advocating nonracialism in sports, was "No normal sport in an abnormal society." Its former president, Joe Ebrahim, explained in a 2007 interview with a German news agency that the sports boycott "focused people's attention on the fact that we couldn't live almost a dual life in terms of which in everyday society we were denied basic rights, we were denied the opportunity to exercise our universal rights and then go and play sport as if it was a normal world." South Africa is sports mad, and the country's exclusion from the rugby World Cups is credited with making obvious to ordinary Afrikaners the isolation their white rule was engendering—and laying a social foundation for political change....
Read entire article at Newsweek
...With the recent exception of American golf, sporting tournaments usually provide little in the way of side fascinations, at least compared to the weirdness smorgasbords that are, say, political campaigns. Discipline is everything, and the imagery is predetermined. In theory, the World Cup constitutes a bazaar of nations, but in reality everything is thoroughly globalized: Nike dictates the fashion, Coke provides the musical jingles, and Europe sets the standard of play. And so the appearance of the insular, mystifying North Korea—its first in a World Cup since 1966—has injected a little delicious bizarreness into all this World Cup uniformity....
In the runup to this first African World Cup, writers have ruminated endlessly over its greater meaning. How can it be substantively African, rather than just a Western event that happened to be held on African soil? (Don't say the vuvuzelas make it African, please.) FIFA—and South Africa—missed an opportunity by failing to ban the North Koreans. Enlightened people love to pooh-pooh cultural boycotts, but a ban would have reflected this part of the continent’s unique ethos and history. South Africa is the single country where a sports boycott did the most to heighten outside awareness of the evils of a regime—and to foment internal restlessness for change.
As apartheid gathered steam through the second half of the last century, South Africa was banned from the Olympics, then international cricket, then international golf, then the rugby World Cups. In the beginning, the rationale for the exclusions was based on the fact that the teams themselves reflected the apartheid regime's core sin: they were all white. But soon sporting bodies were instituting boycotts as a broader comment on the regime’s oppression and violence off the field. FIFA originally suspended South Africa on account of its soccer team’s racial segregation, but it expelled the white-only government for good after the South African police massacred of a group of young black protestors in Soweto in 1976.
Toward the end, the apartheid regime made some gestures at desegregating its sports teams, but the boycotters made it clear the boycotts were bigger than that. The motto of the South African Council on Sport, an independent body advocating nonracialism in sports, was "No normal sport in an abnormal society." Its former president, Joe Ebrahim, explained in a 2007 interview with a German news agency that the sports boycott "focused people's attention on the fact that we couldn't live almost a dual life in terms of which in everyday society we were denied basic rights, we were denied the opportunity to exercise our universal rights and then go and play sport as if it was a normal world." South Africa is sports mad, and the country's exclusion from the rugby World Cups is credited with making obvious to ordinary Afrikaners the isolation their white rule was engendering—and laying a social foundation for political change....