‘Here come “Chelsea” of Sweden’:Djurgården football club on tour in apartheid South Africa

In this article we argue that while apartheid, boycotts and South African sport have received significant coverage and focus, this has primarily been restricted to Britain and former white colonies of the Commonwealth such as Australia and New Zealand. In addition, sports such as cricket and rugby receive most attention. We argue that it is useful to consider other countries and sports engaged in apartheid South Africa. We consider Swedish engagement with apartheid South Africa and focus the case study of our analysis on the tour by champions Djurgården to the country in 1955. The tourists received favourable and widespread support in South Africa and Sweden. Yet towards the end of the tour sections of the Swedish press asked critical and probing questions of the club's tour to South Africa. We contend that the tour can be viewed as naïve and apolitical and in a similar vein to the organization of Swedish sports at that time. Only after the intensification of suppression of opposition to apartheid in South Africa from the 1960s onwards do we see a change in stance on the part of Swedish sports authorities. © 2013 © 2013 The British Society of Sports History.

Soccer, South Africa and celebrity status:Mark Fish, popular culture and the post-apartheid state

The rise of celebrity culture is a theme that has attracted a significant amount of attention within both mainstream sociology and cultural studies in more recent times. Ensuing debate has identified contemporary sports figures as an important facet of the celebrity‐media nexus and as possible signifiers of cultural change. In this paper we take one particular sports celebrity, South African soccer star Mark Fish, and evaluate his image in relation to debates surrounding sport, politics and the post‐apartheid state. We argue that because Fish appears to enjoy all the benefits of celebrity status (within his home country at least), an analysis of his career and identity provide a useful means by which to think about the changing political and nationalistic values within South African society.

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. © 2013 Taylor and Francis.

Perspective Transformation Theory and the Donald Woods Experience: From Racist to Anti-Apartheid Activist

This paper chronicles White South African journalist Donald Woods’ life (1933-2001) as he transformed from holding racist beliefs that Blacks were “people who were there to be your servants,” to becoming one of his country’s leading anti-apartheid activists. Adult learning and development via perspective transformation theory are explored.

Reckoning With Apartheid: The Conundrum of Working Through the Past, An Introduction

From April 26-29, 1994, South Africa held its first universal, democratic elections. Witnessed by the world, South Africans of all races waited patiently in line to cast their ballots, signaling the official and symbolic birth of the “new” South Africa. The subsequent years, marked initially with euphoric hopes for racial healing enabled by institutional processes such as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), have instead, most recently, inspired deep concern about epidemic levels of HIV/AIDS, violent crime, state corruption, and unbridled market reforms directed at everything from property to bodies to babies. Now, seemingly beleaguered state officials deploy the mantra “TINA” (There Is No Alternative [to neoliberal development]) to fend off criticism of growing income and wealth disparities. To coincide, more or less, with the anniversary of 1994—less to commemorate than to signal something about the trajectory of the past twenty years—we are proposing an interdisciplinary, special theme section of Comparative Studies in South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East (CSSAAME) entitled “The Haunted Present: Reckoning After Apartheid” (tentative title). The special theme section is framed around questions of reckoning in the double sense of both a moral and practical accounting for historical injury alongside the challenges and failures of the no-longer “new” South Africa. Against accounts depicting the liberation era as non-violent and peaceable, more nuanced analysis we argue suggests not only that South Africa’s “revolution” was marked by both collective and individual violence—on the part of the state and the liberation movements—but that reckoning with the present demands of scholars, the media, and cultural commentators that they begin to grapple more fully with the dimensions and different figurations of South Africa’s violent colonial history. Indeed, violence and reckoning appear as two central forces in contemporary South African political, economic, and social life. In response, we are driven to pose the following questions: In the post-apartheid period, what forms of (individual, structural) violence have come to bear on South African life? How does this violence reckon with apartheid and its legacies? Does it in fact reckon with the past? How can we or should we think about violence as a response to the (failed?) reckoning of state initiatives like the TRC? What has enabled or enables aesthetic forms—literature, photography, plastic arts, and other modes of expressive culture—to respond to the difficulties of South Africa’s ongoing transition? What, in fact, would a practice or ethic of reckoning defined in the following way look like? ˈrekəniNG/ noun: • the action or process of calculating or estimating something: last year was not, by any reckoning, a particularly good one; the system of time reckoning in Babylon • a person’s view, opinion, or judgment: by ancient reckoning, bacteria are plants • archaic, a bill or account, or its settlement • the avenging or punishing of past mistakes or misdeeds: the fear of being brought to reckoning there will be a terrible reckoning (Oxford English Dictionary) Looking back on the period, just before 1994, is sobering indeed. At the time, many saw in the energies and courage of those fighting for liberation the possibilities of a post-racial, post-conflict society. Yet as much as the new was ushered in, old apartheid forms lingered. Recalling Nadine Gordimer’s invocation of Gramsci’s “morbid symptoms” more and more it seems “the old is dying and the new cannot be born” (Gramsci cited in Gordimer 1982). And even as the new began to emerge other forces—both internal and external to South Africa—redefined the conditions for transformation. The so-called “new” South Africa, as Jennifer Wenzel has argued, was really more than anything “the changing face of old oppressions” (Wenzel 2009:159). The implications for our special theme section of CSSAAME are many. We begin by exploring the gender, race, and class dimensions of contemporary South African life by way of its literatures, histories, and politics, its reversion to custom, the claims of ancestors on the living, in brief, the various cultural expressive modes in which contemporary South Africa reckons with its past and in so doing accounts, day by day, for the ways in which the present can be lived, pragmatically. This moves us some distance from the exercise in “truth and reconciliation” of the earlier post-transition years to consider more fully the nature of post-conflict, the suturing of old enmities in the present, and the ways of resolving those lingering suspicions both ordinary and the stuff of the dark night of the soul (Nelson 2009:xv).

Reckoning With Apartheid: The Conundrum of Working Through the Past

From April 26-29, 1994, South Africa held its first universal, democratic elections. Witnessed by the world, South Africans of all races waited patiently in line to cast their ballots, signaling the official and symbolic birth of the “new” South Africa. The subsequent years, marked initially with euphoric hopes for racial healing enabled by institutional processes such as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), have instead, most recently, inspired deep concern about epidemic levels of HIV/AIDS, violent crime, state corruption, and unbridled market reforms directed at everything from property to bodies to babies. Now, seemingly beleaguered state officials deploy the mantra “TINA” (There Is No Alternative [to neoliberal development]) to fend off criticism of growing income and wealth disparities. To coincide, more or less, with the anniversary of 1994—less to commemorate than to signal something about the trajectory of the past twenty years—we are proposing an interdisciplinary, special theme section of Comparative Studies in South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East (CSSAAME) entitled “The Haunted Present: Reckoning After Apartheid” (tentative title). The special theme section is framed around questions of reckoning in the double sense of both a moral and practical accounting for historical injury alongside the challenges and failures of the no-longer “new” South Africa. Against accounts depicting the liberation era as non-violent and peaceable, more nuanced analysis we argue suggests not only that South Africa’s “revolution” was marked by both collective and individual violence—on the part of the state and the liberation movements—but that reckoning with the present demands of scholars, the media, and cultural commentators that they begin to grapple more fully with the dimensions and different figurations of South Africa’s violent colonial history. Indeed, violence and reckoning appear as two central forces in contemporary South African political, economic, and social life. In response, we are driven to pose the following questions: In the post-apartheid period, what forms of (individual, structural) violence have come to bear on South African life? How does this violence reckon with apartheid and its legacies? Does it in fact reckon with the past? How can we or should we think about violence as a response to the (failed?) reckoning of state initiatives like the TRC? What has enabled or enables aesthetic forms—literature, photography, plastic arts, and other modes of expressive culture—to respond to the difficulties of South Africa’s ongoing transition? What, in fact, would a practice or ethic of reckoning defined in the following way look like? ˈrekəniNG/ noun: • the action or process of calculating or estimating something: last year was not, by any reckoning, a particularly good one; the system of time reckoning in Babylon • a person’s view, opinion, or judgment: by ancient reckoning, bacteria are plants • archaic, a bill or account, or its settlement • the avenging or punishing of past mistakes or misdeeds: the fear of being brought to reckoning there will be a terrible reckoning (Oxford English Dictionary) Looking back on the period, just before 1994, is sobering indeed. At the time, many saw in the energies and courage of those fighting for liberation the possibilities of a post-racial, post-conflict society. Yet as much as the new was ushered in, old apartheid forms lingered. Recalling Nadine Gordimer’s invocation of Gramsci’s “morbid symptoms” more and more it seems “the old is dying and the new cannot be born” (Gramsci cited in Gordimer 1982). And even as the new began to emerge other forces—both internal and external to South Africa—redefined the conditions for transformation. The so-called “new” South Africa, as Jennifer Wenzel has argued, was really more than anything “the changing face of old oppressions” (Wenzel 2009:159). The implications for our special theme section of CSSAAME are many. We begin by exploring the gender, race, and class dimensions of contemporary South African life by way of its literatures, histories, and politics, its reversion to custom, the claims of ancestors on the living, in brief, the various cultural expressive modes in which contemporary South Africa reckons with its past and in so doing accounts, day by day, for the ways in which the present can be lived, pragmatically. This moves us some distance from the exercise in “truth and reconciliation” of the earlier post-transition years to consider more fully the nature of post-conflict, the suturing of old enmities in the present, and the ways of resolving those lingering suspicions both ordinary and the stuff of the dark night of the soul (Nelson 2009:xv).

Queering Apartheid: The National Party’s 1987 ‘Gay Rights’ Election Campaign in Hillbrow

This article investigates the anomaly in apartheid history of the ruling National Party's (NP) fielding a ‘pro-gay rights’ candidate in the Hillbrow constituency during the 1987 whites-only election in South Africa. The NP was aided in its Hillbrow campaign by the gay magazine Exit, which encouraged its readership to ‘vote gay’ in the election and published a list of candidates who were favourable to gay rights in South Africa. The Hillbrow campaign is intelligible when the intersections between race and sexuality are analysed and the discourses wielded by the NP and Exit are spatially and historically situated. The Hillbrow/Exit gay rights campaign articulated discourses about the reform of apartheid in white self-interest and conflated white minority and gay minority rights, thereby contributing to the NP's justification for apartheid. The NP candidate's defeat of the incumbent Progressive Federal Party (PFP) MP for Hillbrow, Alf Widman, was trumpeted by Exit as a powerful victory and advance for gay rights in South Africa, but the result provoked a sharp backlash among many white gay men and lesbian women who organised to openly identify with the liberation movement. The Exit/Hillbrow campaign problematises the singular assumptions that are often made about race and sexuality in apartheid South Africa, and illustrates how political, social and economic crisis can provoke reconfigurations of identities vis-à-vis the status quo.

‘Every Coward’s Choice’? Political Objection to Military Service in Apartheid South Africa as Sexual Citizenship

Sexuality was articulated by the apartheid state as a means of disciplining the white population and marginalizing white opponents of apartheid. As such, homophobia was a recurrent feature of political and legal discourse. The End Conscription Campaign (ECC) opposed compulsory conscription for all white men in the apartheid era South African Defence Force (SADF). Its challenge was a potentially radical and profoundly destabilizing one and it articulated a competing definition of citizenship to that offered by the state. The pro‐ and anti‐conscription discourse was inherently gendered and overtly sexualized. The South African government regularly associated men who objected to military service with effeminacy, cowardice and sexual ‘deviance’. The case of Dr Ivan Toms' objection, a gay objector who wished to cite his sexuality as a primary motivation for his objection, reveals the unwillingness of the ECC to engage in sexual politics. Using Shane Phelan's and Zygmunt Bauman's concept of friends, enemies and strangers, this paper investigates the construction of both white gay men and white people who opposed apartheid as ‘strangers’ and suggests that the deployment of homophobia by the state was a stigmatizing discourse aimed at purging the ECC's political message from the public realm. In this context the ECC adopted an assimilatory discursive strategy, whereby they attempted to be ‘respectable whites’, negotiating over shared republican territory. This populist strategy, arguably safer in the short term, avoided issues of sexuality and the fundamental conflation of sexuality and citizenship in apartheid South Africa. The ECC thus circumscribed its radical and deconstructive political potential and did not offer a ‘radical democratic’ message in opposition to apartheid.

The Masculine State in Crisis: War Resistance in Apartheid South Africa

External and internal forces threatened the apartheid state in the 1980s. The refusal to perform compulsory military service by individual white men and the increasing number of white South Africans who criticized the role of the military and apartheid governance had the potential to destabilize the gendered binaries on which white social order and Nationalist rule rested. The state constituted itself as a heterosexual, masculine entity in crisis and deployed a number of gendered discourses in an effort to isolate and negate objectors to military service. The state articulated a nationalist discourse that defined the white community in virile, masculine, and heroic terms. Conversely, “feminine” weakness, cowardice, and compromise were scorned. Objectors, as “strangers” in the public realm, were most vulnerable to homophobic stigmatization from the state and its supporters

Masculinities and Narrating the Past: Experiences of Researching White men who Refused to Serve in the Apartheid Army

This article reflexively analyses the construction of identity and the representation of the past in qualitative interviews with white men who refused to serve in the apartheid-era South African Defence Force (SADF). The contribution that white male objectors made to the anti-apartheid struggle occupies an ambivalent and increasingly forgotten aspect of South African liberation history. In a reflexive research story, I argue that the gendered, sexual and raced subjectivities of the researcher and researched are central to the joint construction of meaning in the interview and in the creation of self-narratives. The article also analyses how the narratives of white men's involvement in resisting apartheid are defined by their perceived position and wider power struggles in contemporary South Africa.

L'Afrique du Sud post-apartheid : le temps de la reconstruction, des réformes et des mutations à travers le Globe and Mail de Toronto et le Times de Londres (1994-2004)

La décennie 1994-2004 est d’une importance majeure pour l’Afrique du Sud nouvellement démocratique. Au cours de cette période, le pays jette les bases de sa reconstruction à travers la mise en place de réformes politiques, économiques et sociales afin de combattre les méfaits de quarante années d’apartheid et de poser les jalons de son développement. Dans ce contexte, les médias internationaux ont porté une attention particulière à ces nombreux changements, plus spécifiquement la presse écrite canadienne et britannique, en particulier le Globe and Mail et le Times. Notre mémoire s’intéresse donc au traitement fait par ces deux quotidiens, l’un torontois l’autre londonien, de la reconstruction sud-africaine et ce, à travers l’analyse de thèmes précis et de ses réformes marquantes. Il sera plus spécifiquement question des réformes politiques et constitutionnelles avec la figure de Nelson Mandela, héros de la lutte contre l’apartheid, père de la « nation arc-en-ciel » ainsi que celle de son successeur à la présidence sud-africaine en 1999, Thabo Mbéki. Aussi, la Commission Vérité et Réconciliation et la nouvelle Constitution, toutes deux mises en place durant l’année 1996 sont majeures puisqu’elles dictent la nouvelle identité donnée au pays. Les réformes socioéconomiques de la reconstruction ont également attirés l’attention de nos deux journaux. Particulièrement, nous analyserons les points de vue de ceux-ci concernant le Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) ainsi que de la « discrimination positive » et du Black Economic Empowerment (BEE), deux mesures censées contribuer à l’amélioration de la qualité de vie de la population et à effacer les profondes inégalités socioéconomiques léguées par l’apartheid. Or, cet espoir d’une vie meilleure laisse rapidement place à un désenchantement. La forte criminalité et la dramatique explosion du VIH-sida dans une nouvelle Afrique du Sud qui cherche à se reconstruire a beaucoup retenu l’attention du Globe and Mail et du Times. Ces deux défis de taille s’avèrent être l’envers de la médaille du miracle sud-africain et ne manquent pas d’attirer l’attention des deux journaux, mettant clairement en évidence les « ratés » socioéconomiques » de la reconstruction.

Humanitarianism or self-serving hypocrisy? : the provision of aid to South Africa under the Hawke-Keating and Howard governments

General perceptions of foreign aid commonly engender images of humanitarianism and altruism, whereby the humanitarian needs of the recipient of development assistance are of the utmost priority of the aid donor. However, the Australian governments led by Hawke, Keating and Howard often gave humanitarianism a low emphasis, frequently placing Australia’s own foreign policy and economic concerns at the forefront of aid allocation – often unashamedly. This self-interest met through aid meant that most was provided to Australia’s regional neighbourhood, neglecting some of the poorest, most struggling states, including South Africa. Other issues and events, including the Cold War, apartheid, terrorism and HIV/AIDS also affected Australia’s aid policy; mostly, they were used as excuses to limit aid to states like South Africa.