Anti-apartheid boycotts and the affective economies of struggle: the case of Aotearoa New Zealand1

¹ I am grateful to Jim McKay and Murray Phillips for comments on earlier versions of this essay, to the participants in the Crossing Boundaries: Boycotts, Sport and Political Goals panel at the ‘To Remember is To Resist’ conference in Toronto, May 2008, and especially to Roy McCree for his commentary in that session. They bear no responsibilities for any remaining shortcomings.

Abstract

One of the major manifestations of sport-centred activist political struggles in the latter half of the twentieth century centred on the demand for the sporting and broader cultural, social, economic and political isolation of South Africa during the apartheid era. The struggle saw apartheid-endorsed South African sports organizations expelled from international bodies beginning in the 1950s, with the South African National Olympic Committee being the only one ever to be expelled from the IOC. The sports boycott was one of the major successes of the international anti-apartheid campaign, yet the existing literature on boycotts is only marginally relevant to cultural (including sports) boycotts. Furthermore, the existing literature dealing with sports boycotts, with its focus on the multilateral politics of Olympic boycotts, is of minimal use in explaining mass activist campaigns such as the anti-apartheid movement. This essay centres on the campaign against the 1981 South African rugby tour of Aotearoa New Zealand to explore the multiple significances of sport in the target (South Africa) and sender (Aotearoa New Zealand) states, and the character of the mass movement to argue that the cultural significance of both sport and the politics of ‘race’ and colonialism are vital to an effective understanding of mass movement supported bilateral cultural boycotts.

Notes

¹ I am grateful to Jim McKay and Murray Phillips for comments on earlier versions of this essay, to the participants in the Crossing Boundaries: Boycotts, Sport and Political Goals panel at the ‘To Remember is To Resist’ conference in Toronto, May 2008, and especially to Roy McCree for his commentary in that session. They bear no responsibilities for any remaining shortcomings.

² See Chapple, 1981: The Tour; Morris, With All Our Strength; and Walker and Beach, 56 Days.

³ The Gleneagles Agreement on Sporting Contacts with South Africa, 1977, Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, Gleneagles, Scotland, June 1977, http://www.thecommonwealth.org/files/211690/FileName/GleneaglesAgreement.pdf.

⁴ New Zealand Police, Operation Rugby, Appendix W. For an analysis of one violent response to the 3 July protests, see MacLean, ‘Competing Fandoms’.

⁵ New Zealand Police, Operation Rugby, 25.

⁶ 1973 International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid, United Nations General Assembly 30 November 1973.

⁷ Daoudi and Dajani, Economic Sanctions, 7.

⁸ Barber. ‘Economic Sanctions’.

⁹ Barber and Spicer, ‘Sanctions Against South Africa’; Hayes, Economic Effects; and Jenkins, Effects of Sanctions.

¹⁰ Houlihan, Sport and International Politics.

¹¹ Gerrit Viljoen, South African Minister of Sport, 1983, cited in Booth, The Race Game, 145.

¹² Hayes, Economic Effects of Sanctions.

¹³ This Code of Conduct sought to give teeth to the 1977 Gleneagles Agreement, and was the direct consequence of the New Zealand Government's refusal to intervene in the 1981 tour. The text may be found in Templeton, Human Rights, 299–301.

¹⁴ Although as Jenkins, Effects of Sanctions shows, this is not always so.

¹⁵ Ramsamy, Apartheid, especially 61–83.

¹⁶ Richards, Dancing on Our Bones; and Black and Nauright, Rugby.

¹⁷ Grundlingh, Odendaal and Spies, Beyond the Tryline; and Black and Nauright, Rugby.

¹⁸ McAdam, McCarthy and Zald, Comparative Perspectives.

¹⁹ Stryker, Owens and White, Self, Identity; and Guigni and Passy, Political Altruism?

²⁰ Soule, ‘Situational Effects’.

²¹ Hetherington, Expressions of Identity, 83–100. Note on spelling: Bünd is singular, Bünde are plural.

²² Turner, The Ritual Process, 80–119.

²³ The political significance of hope is explored in Zournazi, Hope.

²⁴ Derived from the work of Ferdinand Tönnies, gemeinschaft, often understood as community, is a form of association between individuals shaped by traditional social rules, greater responsibility to the collective than the individual or self, and that carries with it a sense of involuntary membership.

²⁵ Schmalenbach ‘Communion’.

²⁶ Derived from the work of Ferdinand Tönnies, gesellschaft, often understood as society, is a form of association between individuals shaped by modern, rational, impersonal relations, greater responsibility to the self than the collective, and a sense of an active selection of membership.

²⁷ Turner, ‘Frame, Flow and Reflection’; Turner, The Ritual Process, especially 94–130.

²⁸ King and Phillips, ‘A Social Analysis’, especially 12–14.

²⁹ Passy, ‘Political Altruism’, 6,

³⁰ Passy, ‘Political Altruism’, 6, 7.

³¹ The Dominion (Wellington), August 16, 1981.

³² Richards makes recurring references to international work throughout Dancing on Our Bones as important from the outset for HART, see 41–2. See also Walker and Beech, 56 Days, 80–1.

³³ Strategic universalism is ‘a political design and standpoint which recognises human differences but elects to try to find bases for coalition in organising for remedies to problems seen to impact on people across human differences’. It is not oppositional to tactical essentialism where there may be a need to organize around a central antagonism, such as ‘race’ or ethnicity. The anti-tour campaign relied on both strategic universalism and tactical essentialism in building itself, as will be discussed below in an assessment of the boycott tactic. Alleyne, Radicals Against Race, 176–7.

³⁴ Evans, ‘The Maori Strategy’, 16.

³⁵ The Dominion (Wellington), September 10, 1981.

³⁶ Koopmans, ‘Better Off Doing Good’.

³⁷ Richards, Dancing On Our Bones, 245.

³⁸ Louw with Cameron-Dow, For the Love of Rugby, 90.

³⁹ New Zealand Herald, November 14, 1995.