Nutmeg Radio

As we countdown to the first World Cup to be played on African soil, Nutmeg Radio will feature a series of articles on football in South Africa.  South Africa’s rich and unique past is filled with powerful anecdotes laced with struggle, inspiration, success and failure. Over the years, international coverage on South Africa has focused on politics, particularly South Africa’s apartheid past and the obstacles that the country has faced as it moved out of apartheid towards the creation of “A New South Africa”.  Sport in South Africa, however, has always been a fascinating subplot of South African society, largely due to the unique role of sport in the country.  Delving into sport in South Africa presents a wonderful and unique opportunity to tell many of the stories that we’ve heard about the country through the lens of sport, and will hopefully allow you to learn about what is without question a powerful undercurrent of South African history and society.

Part I will begin to set the backdrop for the series.  The difficulty in starting the series is determining the right place to start.  If this was a novel, I would probably select the moment when soccer was introduced to what is now the Republic of South Africa to begin the series.  But this is no novel.  So I’ll begin in 1948, the year the world was introduced to apartheid as defined in the South African context.  That gives us roughly sixty-one years to cover.  Alright, we won’t cover all sixty-one, but my goal is to give you a truncated version.

Here we go …

In 1948, the National Party (also known as the Nationalist Party or NP) came into power in South Africa.  The NP was supported primarily by Afrikaners, who are white South Africans of Dutch, German, and French Huguenot descent.   Afrikaner nationalists focused on maintaining their Afrikaans identity and way of life distinct from those white South Africans of British descent as well as from black South Africans.  For future reference throughout this series, historically, the use of “black” as a term of reference to people in South Africa is not as straight-forward as blackness in many other parts of the world.  In South Africa, blackness often referred to a broader category of oppressed people under apartheid, namely, Africans, Indians and Coloureds.

As a primary method of maintaining Afrikaner identity, the NP began strictly institutionalizing a doctrine of racial separation, which mandated that the four racial groups – white, Coloured, Indian, and African – live and develop separately and independently from one another.  Each group would have its own facilities, its own land, an as the policy was developed its own form of government.  Preserving the purity of the races, particularly the Afrikaner people, was a priority for the NP.   As far as sport was concerned, the institutionalization of separation policies provided the framework for different sports to develop in isolation.  When you look at how South Africa’s most popular sports – football, rugby, and cricket – have developed, and their alignment with certain communities, from level of interest to participation, most of these realities in many ways have their roots in apartheid policy.

We’ll explore this a bit more in Part II, but that’s all you get for now.

The South Africa Series:  Part  … |  II |  III |  IV