Sport And Apartheid

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30406, 3 April 1964, Page 10

Sport And Apartheid

The unexpected invitation to two Maori Rugby representatives to attend the South African Rugby Union’s seventy-fifth anniversary celebrations is good news for those who feel that the brotherhood of sport should include sportsmen of all races. The cynical may suspect that the invitation was extended in the hope of securing New Zealand goodwill for the 1965 South African tour of New Zealand. Even the cynics would concede that this unprecedented gesture, to which the Verwoerd Government must have acquiesced, was a radical change in South Africa’s attitude towards Maoris. It certainly encourages the hope that Maoris will not be excluded from consideration for future All Black teams to visit South Africa.

On the same day as the announcement of this invitation, a cablegram from New York reported an African move to “ bring further pressure to bear on “ South Africa to abandon its policies of racial segre- “ gation ” and to persuade the United Nations to take “ positive and dramatic action The move was made by 34 African nations, which are now seeking Asian support. There is little chance of the Security Council’s recommending economic sanctions against South Africa, and the most the sponsors of the move are likely to achieve is a further resolution of the United Nations condemning apartheid. But hard words break no bones, and South Africa has survived many threats of economic boycott. Economic boycotts, threats of boycotts, and angry resolutions of the United Nations may be self-defeating, if they drive liberal and moderate South Africans into the apartheid camp.

As R. H. T. Thompson says in “ Race and Sport ”, “Sport can provide a context in which distinctions “of race, class, nationality and religion are irrele- “ vant Sport may prove to be the Achilles heel of apartheid.