Matthew P Llewellyn & Toby C Rider. South African Historical Journal. Volume 72, Issue 2, June 2020.
In July 1966, the South African Non-Racial Olympic Committee (SANROC) re-emerged in exile in London. The arrival of Dennis Brutus, the coloured Rhodesian-born activist, poet, and educator, into the British capital provided the stimulus to renew calls for the exclusion of apartheid South Africa from international sport. In the years 1966-1970 that marked Brutus’s exile in Britain, SANROC elevated apartheid sport to the world’s attention. As this paper contends, SANROC’s success in discouraging foreign contact and competition with racialist sporting organisations, teams, or individuals from South Africa rested largely on Brutus’s ability to position himself at the nexus of an emergent human rights discourse that dominated the agendas of state institutions and international organisations throughout the 1960s. Brutus skilfully tethered the issue of racism in South African sport to broader discussions of human rights. SANROC’s anti-apartheid activism, however broad its transnational horizons, must also be read in its national context. As this paper will further contend, a deeper comprehension of the political and racial climate of 1960s Britain is central to understanding Brutus and SANROC’s experiences in exile in the years 1966-1970.
During the early 1960s the city of London emerged as a major intellectual, diplomatic, cultural, and financial node in the transnational anti-apartheid network. The exiled African National Congress (ANC) and the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) both held diplomatic missions in London in the years after Sharpeville and Rivonia. Pretoria’s sustained military and legislative efforts to crush the internal resistance movement stimulated a wave of political exile in the early 1960s. The threat of violence, coercion by the government banning orders, or a desire to contribute to the struggle prompted thousands of South African dissidents to flee South Africa either clandestinely or on one-way exit permits. While African countries, most notably in this period Tanzania, hosted the majority of black political exiles, some (predominately white) exiles sought refuge in Britain. The influx of South African exiles – drawn from diverse ideological, ethnic, political, and religious streams, with first-hand experience of life under the heel of apartheid – into the British capital positioned London as the central nexus of an increasingly global anti-apartheid cause. The centrality of London in global finance and politics, its colonial legacy, and its strong tradition of civic anti-colonialism, made it an ideal base from which to conduct propaganda campaigns against Pretoria, lobby foreign governments for technical and material assistance, and link up with the liberation, religious, labour, student, and leftist strands of the anti-apartheid caucus.
With the dramatic visual images of police brutality at Sharpeville still resonating fresh in the minds of the British public, the influx of South African political exiles during the early 1960s stimulated the growth of anti-apartheid activism within Britain. Although a number of British-based groups, such as the Africa Bureau and the Movement for Colonial Freedom, had laid an intellectual and organisational base for the fight against Pretoria in the 1950s, the transformation of Canon John Collins’ International Defence and Aid Fund (IDAF), formerly the British Defence and Aid Fund for Southern Africa, and the establishment of the British Anti-Apartheid Movement (AAM) moved the solidarity struggle into the wider public sphere. Coordinating its boycotts and protests in solidarity with internal opposition groups within South Africa, the AAM and IDAF joined with established anti-colonial pressure groups in Britain to publicise and protest the growing fanaticism and brutality of the apartheid state. And, from their respective headquarters in the city of London, they further consolidated the British capital’s place within the crucible of the global anti-apartheid struggle.
Decolonisation, nonalignment, and Cold War strategic interests shaped the post-war international response to the apartheid regime in South Africa. Successive post-WWII British governments toed an inconsistent philosophical line as they struggled to align their essential strategic, economic, and diplomatic interests against an obligation to denounce racial injustice and the National Party’s ethnic nationalist agenda. British governments revealed the limitations and inconsistencies of their South African foreign policy. As Hyam and Henshaw contend, British policy towards South Africa was predicated on economic, strategic, cultural, and geopolitical concerns. ‘An ambivalent and paradoxical mixture of containment and cooperation’ ensued, one that witnessed British governments struggling to balance its essential interests against its desire to maintain control of the High Commission Territories, contain the spread of white minority rule into central Africa, and foster diplomatic relations with newly independent African states. Harold Macmillan’s ‘Winds of Change’ speech, and, the election of a Labour Government which ran on a strong anti-apartheid message in 1964, was counterpoised by the fulfilment of an existing Conservative agreement to sell arms to South Africa and the refusal to neither condemn apartheid nor impose sanctions against Pretoria within the United Nations (UN) Security Council.
It is in the cultural and political climate of 1960s Britain – one of growing organisational collaboration and anti-apartheid solidarity on the one hand, and of the paradoxical British policy towards South Africa on the other – that the South African Non-Racial Olympic Committee (SANROC) remerged in exile in London. Founded on 7 October 1962, SANROC positioned itself as the representative of the non-racial South African Olympic movement. Dennis Brutus, the coloured Rhodesian-born activist, poet, and educator, spearheaded SANROC’s efforts to ensure the participation of a representative, non-racial South African Olympic team. The state responded punitively to Brutus’s anti-apartheid activism. His arrest in September 1963 for violating the terms of a banning order and his subsequent imprisonment, forced the suspension of the organisation’s activities. The arrival in July 1966 of Brutus in London, following his release from Robben Island where he served the majority of an 18-month prison sentence, gave fresh impetus to revive SANROC in exile. Brutus reunited with his colleagues in the non-racial sports movement, weightlifters Chris de Broglio and Reg Hulongwane, who had earlier fled apartheid South Africa to escape state intimidation and harassment. Operating out of the basement of De Broglio’s Portman Court Hotel in the Marble Arch district of London’s West End, SANROC waged a collaborative campaign to isolate the controversial apartheid regime from the realm of international sport.
In the years 1966 to 1970 that marked Brutus’s exile in Britain, SANROC elevated apartheid sport to the world’s attention. Its success in discouraging foreign contact and competition with racialist sporting organisations, teams, or individuals from South Africa rested in part on Brutus’s ability to position himself at the nexus of an emergent human rights discourse that dominated the agendas of state institutions and international organisations throughout the 1960s. Brutus skilfully tethered the issue of racism in South African sport to broader discussions of human rights. In his concurrent role as director of IDAF’s World Campaign for the Release of Political Prisoners, Brutus appeared regularly throughout the late 1960s at international forums such as the UN where he articulated the inherent contradiction between apartheid’s institutional white supremacy and sports notions of fair play and non-discrimination as enshrined in the Olympic Charter. Brutus used these platforms as opportunities to foster transnational support for SANROC’s sport-centred lobbying and activist campaigns among independent African and Asian countries in the non-aligned movement, socialist countries, anti-colonial pressure groups, and international organisations.
SANROC’s anti-apartheid activism, however broad its transnational horizons, must also be read in its British national context. A deeper comprehension of the power structures in Britain that either stymied or aided SANROC’s efforts is central to understanding its experiences in exile in the years 1966 to 1970. Brutus and SANROC met a British public bitterly polarised over the nation’s post-imperial identity, plagued with its own domestic insecurities over immigration and race, and adjusting to the social and political conditions of a new multiracial Britain. It met a British government focused on defending its Cold War strategic interests, a British sporting establishment eager to preserve traditional sporting relations, and a clandestine South African security apparatus that deployed subterranean surveillance strategies against its external enemies. Yet, like many political dissidents forced into exile in Britain, Brutus and the SANROC leadership enjoyed the financial and practical support of a domestic anti-apartheid network, one that valued and had previously utilised the sport boycott as part of an increasingly coordinated and coherent strategy against Pretoria. It is here then, at the intersections of these national and transnational contexts, that SANROC’s formative experiences in British exile can be best understood.
Dennis Brutus and the Non-Racial Sport Movement
Born in Salisbury, Rhodesia on 28 November 1924 to South African parents, Brutus grew up in Port Elizabeth, a city that served as a seedbed of resistance politics in the apartheid era. Congress nationalism and later, Pan-Africanism, and Steve Biko’s Black Consciousness credit their vibrant and eclectic roots to the industrial and automotive hub of the Eastern Cape. Port Elizabeth’s black townships also incubated the non-racial sports movement, which Brutus fronted, to challenge the white exclusivity of South African sport. As an English teacher at St Thomas Aquinas High School and later, Paterson High School in Port Elizabeth in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Brutus occupied his time outside of the classroom by overseeing the school’s sports programmes. In this role, he began considering the utility of sport in the struggle against apartheid. Sport might have appeared an unusual, or, at best, peripheral choice for political protest. Brutus, however, like a growing number of critics of the apartheid regime, perceived the importance of sport to the Afrikaner psyche and the role that participation played in bestowing white South Africa with international respectability and legitimacy. Brutus’s administration of non-racial sport at the scholastic, and later the provincial and national levels, inspired him to play a leading role in the establishment of the Coordinating Committee for International Recognition in Sports (CCIRS) in 1955. Frustrated by the intransigence of the all-white ruling bodies of South African sport that imposed a constitutional (or, in many instances, an unspoken ‘gentlemanly’) colour-bar, CCIRS fought for the inclusion of non-racial sporting bodies within the membership ranks of international sport federations. The elimination of racialism in sport, Brutus avowed, had the power to stimulate democratic change across South Africa.
Brutus’s efforts mirrored the broader political struggle for the realisation of a South Africa based on full equality for all people regardless of race. The Congress Alliance’s endorsement of the ‘Freedom Charter’, a founding manifesto of democratic aspirations which Brutus himself played a subsidiary role in drafting, represented a rallying cry for all those opposed to apartheid. Non-racialism challenged the very fabric of apartheid society, one that had been forged upon the idea of racial distinction and separation. Like all areas of social interaction, the engineers of apartheid deemed mixed-race sport anathema. The entire South African sports system had been constructed along segregationist lines. Black sport fragmented into distinct racial (African, Indian, and Coloured), provincial, and sporting units, a multiformity further entrenched beginning in 1956 through official government pronouncements on apartheid sport that proscribed mixed-racial sporting competition and demanded that white and black South Africans organise their sporting activities separately.
The CCIRS’s early campaigns to coordinate the fight against racialism and promote greater unity between the various racial sporting groups initially faltered under the weight of segregation and sectarian tendencies. Undeterred, in 1958 Brutus played a prominent role in establishing the South African Sports Association (SASA), a non-racial, inter-sport organisation formed with the backing of over 70,000 sportsmen and sportswomen from across 20 sporting bodies. The government’s intrusion into sport, an attempt to assert the primacy of the white sports establishment following the submission of applications by the non-racial South African table tennis, soccer, and weightlifting bodies for international recognition, made the unification of black sport an urgent necessity. In his role as SASA secretary, Brutus wrote to the international federations of the various codes of sport exposing the discriminatory realities of sport in South Africa.
Determined to secure the rights of qualified black athletes to represent South Africa in international competitions, Brutus sought international support from sympathetic anti-colonial and anti-apartheid groups in Britain. In some ways, the call to protest the racist nature of South African sport had distinctively British roots. Father Trevor Huddleston, the chief white spokesperson against apartheid, first raised the imaginative notion of using sport as part of a broader cultural boycott of South Africa in the mid-1950s. The destruction of his beloved Sophiatown as part of the Western Areas Removal Scheme and the imposition of Bantu Education convinced Huddleston of the urgent necessity for direct action. Understanding his activism as a function of his Christian faith, he dedicated his public and religious life to condemning an apartheid system that dehumanised, infantilised, and brutalised black South Africans. Through his years spent ministering in the African freehold township of Sophiatown, he witnessed the Afrikaner ‘obsession’ with sport, one which he asserted was ‘unqualified anywhere else in the world’. An international boycott of South African sport, Huddleston therefore opined on the pages of his elegy to Sophiatown, Naught for your Comfort (1956), had the potential to stimulate real democratic change.
Naught for your Comfort had a powerful resonance in Britain, selling over 100,000 copies and elevating Huddleston to ‘international celebrity status’. His subsequent reassignment back to Britain – after his searing indictments of apartheid made him persona non grata in South Africa – led him to pursue the concept of a sporting boycott further. Huddleston, along with fellow radical Christian activist, the Reverend Michael Scott, chaired a June 1956 meeting in the House of Lords with a group of prominent individuals from the fields of sport, arts, and entertainment. The meeting, organised by the Africa Bureau in an effort to bring together those ‘well-informed about the situation in South Africa’, resulted in the release of an ‘Art and Sport Manifesto’ that condemned apartheid as a practice that ‘restricts arbitrarily, even prohibits, the enjoyment and use of human talent’.
Brutus celebrated the Africa Bureau’s success. Writing from his home in Port Elizabeth, he entered into direct correspondence on behalf of SASA with British anti-apartheid sympathisers with the aim of forming a joint campaign to protest the participation of an all-white South African team at the 1958 British Empire and Commonwealth Games in Cardiff. This transnational collaboration culminated in the launch of the British-based ‘Campaign Against Race Discrimination in Sport’ (CARDIS). Canon John Collins became a principal signatory and his humanitarian organisation Christian Action the chief financier of CARDIS. Together, SASA, CARDIS, and the Africa Bureau worked in collaboration on a number of projects. Notably, they successfully forced the abandonment of a proposed all-black West Indian cricket tour of South Africa in 1959 and, the following year, brought the issue of racism in South African sport to the attention of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) during its annual meeting in Rome. In these early collaborative projects, Brutus demonstrated an ability to effectively navigate the difficult relations between the various British anti-apartheid and anti-colonial groups (as best exemplified by the acrimonious relationship between the Reverend Scott and Canon Collins) and coordinate their activities towards a shared objective.
The contours of a transnational anti-apartheid sport movement started to come into view in the early 1960s. It emerged in conjunction with a broader mobilisation of global anti-apartheid activity that permeated across the arenas of culture, politics, consumerism, armaments, and economics during the late 1950s. It formed part of what Håkan Thörn has labelled, a ‘movement of movements’, a space of intersection for a wide range of collective actors from the fields of sport, religion, anti-colonialism, and the labour movement. This emergent stream of collaboration and solidarity provided a significant boost to the domestic non-racial sport movement in Britain. Leader of the South African Liberal party, author, and anti-apartheid activist Alan Paton, a founding patron of SASA, welcomed the growing international condemnation of racist sport. Delivering the keynote address at SASA’s inaugural conference in Durban in 1959, Paton waxed optimistically. ‘One thing should be clear to us all’, he concluded. ‘The colour bar in South African sport may last for some time, but the colour-bar in international sport is doomed.’
Repression and Persecution
In the post-Sharpeville era of heightened legislative repression and the growth of the state security apparatus, SASA’s activities invited governmental suspicion and retaliation. Reflecting the growing paranoia of the state, authorities conflated non-racialism with class struggle and Dennis Brutus and his fellow SASA officials with Communist agitators. From its inception, SASA – as Brutus noted – ‘was born under the watchful eyes of the Special Branch’. SASA’s letter-writing campaigns, propaganda efforts, and transnational collaborations cast greater international scrutiny on the National Party government at the precise moment when the international media broadcasted the horrors of Sharpeville across the globe. In an effort to confront the nationwide protests, marches, and strikes after Sharpeville, the National Party government declared a State of Emergency, banned the ANC and the PAC, and arrested hundreds of activists. As part of the government’s efforts to crush the internal resistance, the SASA leadership came under state surveillance, their homes and offices were raided, and papers seized and never returned. The government denied Brutus a passport, a deliberate move to prevent him from personally exposing the plight of the nation’s black athletes at the meetings of international sport federations. Brutus’s growing involvement in the wider liberation movement aroused heightened government suspicion. The Sharpeville massacre emboldened Brutus. He joined the now underground ANC, clandestinely housed its fugitive leader Nelson Mandela in his home, and played an influential role in the formation of a National Coloured Convention in 1961. The state responded punitively to Brutus’s anti-apartheid activism, issuing a banning order against him in October 1961 for five years under the Suppression of Communism Act.
Forbidden to teach, write, and publish, Brutus battled against the imprisoning effects of his banning orders. In 1962, he enrolled at the University of Witwatersrand to study law. Brutus combined his studies with furtive efforts to further the agenda of the non-racial sports movement. He focused his attention on the IOC, an organisation that proscribed racial discrimination within the ‘Fundamental Principles’ of its guiding constitution, the Olympic Charter. Brutus’s correspondences exposing the racialist nature of apartheid sport failed to provoke the IOC’s moral sensibilities. As a closed, self-recruiting bureaucracy, the IOC initially coalesced in support of the all-white South Africa National Olympic Committee (SANOC). When further appeals fell on deaf ears, Brutus reconfigured SASA into a non-discriminatory rival to SANOC. The formation of the South African Non-Racial Olympic Committee (SANROC) on 7 October 1962 signalled the escalation of the campaign against apartheid sport. Brutus demanded the expulsion of SANOC with a view towards positioning his newly constituted body as the true non-racial representative of the South African Olympic movement. Brutus pledged to attend the October 1963 IOC session in Baden-Baden to formally present his case.
Brutus’s affront to white sporting interests provoked a fierce backlash. He was arrested in July 1963 (in what he labelled a ‘set-up’) at the offices of SANOC for attending a meeting in violation of the terms of a fresh banning order. The growing authoritarianism of the state, as exemplified by the introduction of 90-day detention, persuaded Brutus upon his release to leave South Africa. His destination: the IOC meeting in Baden-Baden, Germany. On 7 August 1963, Brutus crossed the border into Swaziland. During his one-month stay in the British High Commission territory, Brutus procured a Rhodesian passport and a visa in order to facilitate his journey to Germany via Mozambique. Like so many political fugitives who tried to evade the clutches of South African security police, Brutus’s escape was foiled in the remote hinterlands of the British and Portuguese territories – in an incident the British embassy in Pretoria read as ‘collusion’ between Portuguese and South African authorities. Arrested by the Portuguese secret police (PIDE) on the Swaziland-Mozambique border on 13 September for possession of ‘irregular travel documentation’, Brutus was interrogated and later delivered – in contravention of international law – to South African security forces rather than returned to his country of citizenship, Rhodesia. Fearing permanent detention, Brutus fled police custody into the crowded streets of Johannesburg before being shot in the stomach, and re-apprehended.
With the IOC due to address the issue of South African participation in the 1964 Tokyo Olympics at its annual session in Baden-Baden, Brutus’s arrest and shooting sparked an international outcry. ‘He is not some faceless petty offender whose escape happened to fail’, the Rand Daily Mail affirmed. ‘He is the head of an organization which has been working for the elimination of racialism in South African sport.’ The British AAM and other anti-colonial groups seized upon the incident as further evidence of the brutality of the apartheid state. They exhorted the British government to extend consular support to Brutus and, upon his recovery, secure his rightful passage to a British territory. Acknowledging the procedural irregularities concerning Brutus’s return to a ‘third country’, the British Foreign Office directed the case – under the terms of the External Affairs Entrustments – to the Rhodesian government. Britain’s waning influence in Rhodesian political affairs following the 1961 Constitution and the ongoing dissolution of the Central African Federation, cast Brutus’s fate into the hands of a Rhodesian government, whose insistence on white-minority rule as a condition for independence aligned with National Party interests. A diplomatic standoff ensued. After deliberating with South African authorities, the Rhodesian Federal Ministry of External Affairs refused Brutus ‘protection or intervention’ on the grounds that he was a South African resident. South Africa is where he ‘principally resides’ and is ‘most closely connected’, the Federal government defended. Despite Brutus’s protestations that he was born in Salisbury, Rhodesia; that his father, Francis, was born in the British overseas territory of St Helena; and that four prior attempts to secure South African citizenship had been rejected, the British Foreign Office ruled that it had ‘no locus standi‘ in the affair.
The British government’s reticence to formally intervene on Brutus’s behalf – despite its acknowledgment of a ‘strong possibility’ that his claims to British subjecthood were ‘genuine’ – revealed a broader pattern of appeasement and conciliation in Southern African affairs. Diplomatically isolated, Brutus spent over three months in solitary confinement before his 8 January 1964 sentencing. Charged and convicted for violating the terms of his banning order, Brutus served 18 months in prison, including a stay on Robben Island alongside Nelson Mandela and the recently captured leadership of the liberation movement. The barbarism and sadism that Brutus witnessed and experienced in prison – the inspiration for his poetic works Sirens, Knuckles, Boots and Letters to Martha that elevated him as a post-colonial literary figure – drove him into a period of despair, abandonment, and religious dependence. Ironically, as Brutus lay incarcerated, white South African sport suffered its most debilitating blow. Likely influenced by the fallout from Brutus’s capture, shooting, and imprisonment, the IOC voted in January 1964 to withdraw white South Africa’s invitation to compete in the forthcoming Tokyo Olympics.
Victory revived Brutus’s desire to reignite the campaign against apartheid sport following his release from Robben Island in July 1965. House arrest, Special Branch surveillance and intimidation, and the receipt of a fresh five-year banning order temporarily restricted his activist ambitions. Believing that he could no longer safely agitate for change within South Africa and concerned about the welfare of his wife May and their eight children, Brutus successfully applied for a one-way exit permit. Instability in Rhodesia, following Ian Smith’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) from the British Commonwealth in November 1965, presented Brutus with a legal pathway to Britain. With its former colony descending into a violent conflict, the British government extended ‘concessionary’ visas to Rhodesian passport holders. After finally acknowledging the legitimacy of Brutus’s claims to Rhodesian citizenship, the British government granted Brutus and his family entry to Britain on 30 July 1966. From his new home in London, Brutus set out to revive SANROC’s activities in exile.
SANROC in Exile
Dennis Brutus’s appearance in a 1 August 1966 press conference held in the Pen and Wig Club near Fleet Street, London, marked the revival of SANROC in exile. London functioned as an ideal strategic location from where SANROC could contribute to the external struggle against Pretoria. Home to both a highly politicised and growing South African exile community and an array of sympathetic liberation, religious, anti-colonial, and civil society organisations, London provided Brutus with an extensive solidarity network to call upon for support. London also resided at the centre of the imperial sporting world. Lords, Twickenham, Wembley, and Wimbledon, the ancestral homes of world cricket, rugby union, association football, and tennis, stood in the British capital. SANROC’s close proximity brought the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC), the English Rugby Football Union (RFU), the English Football Association, and the All England Lawn Tennis Club within immediate reach. Britain’s historic role in the creation and global diffusion of modern sport, as well as weighted voting systems favouring ‘established’ (white) nations, gave these British sporting associations significant influence within the boardrooms of international sporting federations and a powerful voice in determining South Africa’s future participation.
Exile in London further positioned SANROC within the nexus of a nascent transnational sports boycott movement. The establishment of the AAM in 1960, the result of an intensification of anti-apartheid activity in Britain following the ANC’s calls for a consumer boycott of South African products and the Sharpeville massacre, elevated the strategic importance of sport within the transnational anti-apartheid agenda. From its inception, AAM devised campaigns to protest the appearance of South African sports teams on British shores. The enormous post-WWII popularity and visibility of sport in an age of television made British sporting arenas the perfect venues from which to publicise the evils of apartheid. When the touring South African cricket team arrived in Britain in April 1960, three weeks after the Sharpeville massacre, AAM organised, in collaboration with CARDIS, demonstrations outside of every ground where a game was being played. The return tour of the Springboks to England in 1965 witnessed further AAM-led public protest and agitation. It called, albeit unsuccessfully, for a complete boycott of all scheduled matches. ‘Every spectator at such a match, whether he means to or not, is giving support to apartheid politics in sport’, AAM intoned in a campaign leaflet. The appearance of South African tennis players competing at Wimbledon in 1964, and the scheduling of international and club competitions between Britain and South Africa in bowls and rugby union, inspired further AAM protest activity in the formative years of its existence.
By the time of SANROC’s re-emergence in exile in 1966, the AAM had already demonstrated a clear organisational interest in employing sport as a crucial strategy in its anti-apartheid agenda. The resurrection of SANROC in London, however, ensured that the sports boycott soon became contested territory. Conflicts, jealousies, ideological struggle, and debates over strategy frequently undermined inter-organisational solidarity and collaboration, key watchwords in the transnational anti-apartheid movement. SANROC’s relationship with AAM during its early exile in London was characterised by such tensions. The appearance of AAM secretary Abdul Minty at the 1963 IOC in Baden-Baden, where he stood in as a late-representative for the incapacitated Brutus and the SANROC leadership – which had been either arrested, grounded, or had fled into exile – convinced AAM that it had assumed full responsibility for SANROC’s future affairs. Chris de Broglio’s arrival in London in 1965 soon disabused the AAM of that notion. A power struggle ensued. De Broglio recounts how the AAM challenged his right to represent SANROC’s interests at the 1966 IOC session in Rome, even going as far as trying (and failing) to persuade Canon John Collins not to approve IDAF funding of De Broglio’s trip to the Italian capital. The presence of Brutus, a high-profile political exile and leader of the non-racial sports movement in South Africa, further undermined AAM’s legitimacy as the focal point of the sports boycott. The AAM’s decision to decline Brutus’s offer to work ‘for free’ upon his arrival in London exacerbated inter-organisational relations, ensuring limited contact and collaboration with SANROC in the years 1966 and 1967. ‘They didn’t want me’, Brutus later confided. ‘Perhaps it was a simple ego thing; that they thought I might become too prominent.’ It would take until the late 1960s, and AAM’s adoption of civil disobedience campaigns following the penetration of Peter Hain and the Young Liberals student generation into its membership ranks, before it established a collaborative working relationship with Brutus and SANROC.
In its new home in the British capital, SANROC resembled an intimate group of highly motivated political exiles who expressed a long-term commitment to their homeland and to the realisation of a democratic South Africa. The basement of Chris de Broglio’s Portman Court Hotel functioned as its headquarters and a ‘second-hand electric typewriter’ its primary weapon against racialist sport. Like many liberation movements in exile, SAN-ROC had no paid employees; rather it relied upon the voluntary work of Brutus (president), De Broglio (treasurer), and Reg Hulongwane (secretary), as well as the contributions of Brutus’s brother Wilfrid and Brutus’s eldest son Julian.
Don’t Play with Apartheid
Like so many South African exiles that domiciled in Britain in the years after Sharpeville and Rivonia, Brutus depended upon the financial and practical assistance of one of the leading pillars in the transnational anti-apartheid movement, IDAF. Under the leadership of Canon John Collins, IDAF devised an arsenal of creative ways to secrete funds into South Africa in order to aid and defend the victims of apartheid. With the fulsome support of the UN’s ‘Special Committee against Apartheid’ and a coterie of sympathetic social democratic governments, IDAF provided financial support for the legal defence of South African political prisoners and their families and campaigned against the ill-treatment of political prisoners. Brutus and his family were recipients of the IDAF’s munificence. The IDAF paid the airfares to bring Brutus, his brother Wilfrid, and their families to London. IDAF appointed Brutus in 1967 as Director of its World Campaign for the Release of South African Political Prisoners. Brutus’s incarceration and ill-treatment on Robben Island, his profile as a well-known critic of apartheid, and his exile in London made him a natural appointment. From their offices in St Paul’s Cathedral, Collins and Brutus developed an intimate and trusted working relationship, inspiring IDAF’s decision in 1967 to begin funding SANROC’s operations at a sum eventually reaching £12,000 per annum by 1969. Collins justified the expenditure, presaging that IDAF’s investment in sport ‘was one field in which a positive victory was a distinct possibility’.
The Canon’s position within establishment circles in Britain and his political connections afforded Brutus access to the halls of political power and influence. With the British government preoccupied with protecting its economic and Cold War strategic interests, Brutus turned to both international organisations and foreign governments for support. As director of IDAF’s prisoners campaign Brutus became a transnational political actor, moving across borders and appealing to government officials and civil society organisations sympathetic to the anti-apartheid cause. Brutus used his access to international forums to further the aims of SANROC, hitching his anti-apartheid sport agenda to political discussions concerning human rights. His visit to the UN headquarters in New York in February 1967, where he provided personal testimony to the ‘Special Committee Against Apartheid’ on the plight of South African political prisoners, as well as future appearances at the UN Seminar on Apartheid in Kitwe, Zambia, in July 1967 and the UN Conference on Human Rights in Tehran in 1968, brought him within contact of socialist and Nordic government officials and Pan-African and non-aligned networks. He embraced these interactions as opportunities to foster transnational collaborative relationships, fundraise, and disseminate fact-finding reports about the racist nature of South African sport. In New York, Brutus also participated in a series of lectures sponsored by the American Committee on Africa, an anti-colonial pressure group founded by Methodist minister George Houser in 1953 in response to the Defiance Campaign in South Africa. These events aimed at ‘acquaint[ing] Americans more closely with the present situation in South Africa’ and urging them to join ‘a world boycott of South African athletes’. Through Brutus’s skilful networking, the American Committee on Africa joined SANROC in its sport protest activities.
Under exile conditions, developing solidarity links served as the major function of SANROC. Brutus acknowledged the organisational importance of diplomacy, undertaking an exhaustive travel schedule upon his arrival in London. In 1966 alone, Brutus and his SANROC associates travelled to the annual meetings of the international athletics (Budapest), wrestling (Berlin), gymnastics (Dortmund), swimming (Dubrovnik), and tennis (Basle) federations, as well as the annual IOC session (Rome), the British Empire and Commonwealth Games (Jamaica), the European Athletic Championships (Budapest), and the founding meeting of the Supreme Council for Sport in Africa (Bamako). Brutus’s exhaustive travel schedule and persistent lobbying made it increasingly more difficult for international sport leaders to ignore the issue of apartheid.
SANROC’s diplomatic activities necessitated Brutus to look beyond IDAF for additional financial and logistical support. His ‘primary objective’ of expelling racist South Africa from international sport hinged upon the support of an ascendant solidarity network of Pan-African and socialist nations. The Soviet bloc, a benefactor of the exiled ANC, proved especially receptive. Sympathetic to SANROC’s schemes to expose the discriminatory practices of Western-controlled international sports federations, the East German National Olympic Committee facilitated Brutus’s attendance at the annual meetings of the international wrestling and gymnastic federations by providing air-tickets, visas, an interpreter, a car, and a driver. Hungary offered SANROC similar provisions during both the European Athletics Championship and annual meeting of the International Amateur Athletic Federation (IAAF) in Budapest. The Malian government later served as his benefactor for the inaugural meeting of the Supreme Council for Sport in Africa (SCSA). Brutus played, what he considered, a ‘pivotal’ role in Bamako, drafting SCSA’s founding constitution and rallying the participating nations to unanimously express ‘its total opposition to racial discrimination in sport which is contrary to Olympic ideals’. On Brutus’s advice, SCSA also issued a resolution threatening a widespread boycott of the forthcoming 1968 Mexico City Games if Olympic officials in Lausanne invited white South Africa to participate.
The formation of representative Pan-African sport organisations such as SCSA illustrated the rapid development and consolidation of competitive sport in the newly decolonised global south. Incipient African and Asian nations were eager to participate in international sport and to reap the symbolic and legitimising benefits afforded by membership to the world’s highest ‘cultural club’. The entire complexion and composition of international sport (both on and off the field) changed in the 1960s. Traditional, self-perpetuating bureaucracies such as the IOC were transformed from within as a larger, more representative body of nations took up seats on these powerful federations. Emerging African, Caribbean and Asian nations with the support of socialist states entered the international sporting fold behind the rhetoric of anti-imperialism to challenge white, western, capitalistic sporting interests. Representing an influential voting bloc within both the IOC and international sport federations, these fledging sporting nations immediately took aim at South Africa, exposing the brutality of the Pretoria regime and the discriminatory realities of apartheid sport, and challenging the membership of its all-white representative bodies.
The imperial old boy network – the ideologically conservative, patriarchal establishment that had long shielded white South African officials from international criticism – fractured under the weight of this opposition. Apartheid, with its explicit racial hierarchy, discrimination, and territorial segregation, was a liability that undermined the ability of international sport federations to project themselves as guardians of the democratic arenas of modern sport. The presence of SANROC delegates at the annual meetings of international sport federations, its targeted mailing campaigns to national sports bodies and officials, the collaborative support of an Afro-Asian and socialist voting bloc, and the threat of a mass boycott – a potent new weapon in the transnational fight against apartheid – culminated in successful challenges to the hegemonic position of white South African sport. By 1970, the international sporting community had virtually severed all relations with apartheid South Africa’s sport bodies. The international federations of table tennis (1956), association football (1964), fencing (1964), boxing (1968), and weightlifting (1969) issued expulsions; basketball, cycling, netball, pentathlon, and tennis barred South African participation in their respective world championship events; and wrestling and athletics had formed committees to investigate SANROC’s claims of racial discrimination.
As Western protection evaporated, South Africa stood exposed to the realities of the post-colonial world. Government propagandists rushed to defend South Africa’s racialist policies, reviving the hackneyed arguments that mixed-racial sport exacerbated social stress and disorderly behaviour and that black South Africans did not possess the requisite skills to compete in elite sport. For a nation, or more specifically a white minority, dedicated to competitive international sports, the consequences of isolation were severe. Under growing internal pressure, Prime Minister John Vorster challenged negative perceptions of apartheid by introducing a new sports policy in April 1967. Excluded from the 1964 Tokyo Olympics and facing the threat of South Africa’s official expulsion from the Olympic Movement, Vorster temporised. He permitted a ‘mixed-race’ South African team to compete in future Olympic Games and also expressed governmental approval for South Africa’s ‘traditional’ rivals (i.e., white English-speaking countries) to send mixed-race rugby and cricket teams to compete against South Africa within the Republic. Vorster reassured his dogmatic verkrampte critics that ‘no mixed sport between white and non-white will be practiced locally, irrespective of the standards of proficiency’. The edifice of apartheid and separate development remained in place. SAN-ROC seized upon the incongruity of Vorster’s domestic and international sport policies. ‘The present changes in the sports arrangements in South Africa are only APPARENT; they DO NOT REMOVE RACIAL DISCRIMINATION’, Brutus inveighed.
Vorster’s recalibration found a receptive audience among the powerbrokers of international sport. Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) president Sir Stanley Rous, IAAF president the Marquis of Exeter, and IOC president Avery Brundage all displayed a remarkable degree of patience in dealing with the ‘rebel’ apartheid state. For Brundage and the IOC in particular, apartheid appeared to be more of a political embarrassment than an intrinsic moral concern. Brundage worked with South African officials to fall in line with the Olympic Charter. He even agreed to send a three-man IOC fact-finding commission to South Africa in 1967 to monitor developments on the ground. Denied visas to visit South Africa and expose the IOC commission to the real conditions facing black sport, Brutus and SANROC submitted an exhaustive series of reports and testimonies to the IOC headquarters in Lausanne. Brutus also travelled – as a fully funded guest of the Nigerian Sports Council – to the Second General Assembly of the SCSA in Lagos in December 1967 to successfully shore up African support for a boycott of the forthcoming Mexico City Olympics if the IOC commission recommended inviting South Africa. This proved a prescient move.
The IOC commission’s release of a favourable report and the IOC’s subsequent decision in February 1968 to invite a multi-racial South African team to Mexico City animated SAN-ROC. It joined forces with AAM – a sign of improved inter-organisational relations following Brutus’s collaboration with AAM on the World Campaign for the Release of South African Political Prisoners – in undertaking a massive letter writing campaign. They called upon nations to support an African-led boycott of the Mexico City Olympics, citing the fallacies of Vorster’s sport policy which prohibited mixed-race Olympic trails and rendered black athletes unable to compete on equal terms due to a lack of sporting facilities. The boycott bandwagon quickly gathered steam. Supported by a powerful African-communist lobby and an integrated global network of anti-apartheid groups, SANROC pressured the IOC to reconsider its decision. Staring over the precipice of a mass Olympic boycott, a despondent Brundage announced to IOC members that it ‘would be most unwise for a South African team to participate in the Games’. With South Africa, as well as white-settler ruled Rhodesia, an illegal regime following its UDI, excluded from the roster of participant nations in Mexico City, SANROC scored another significant victory in its campaign against racialist sport.
An ‘Utter Nuisance’
Operating from London, SANROC members enjoyed a freedom of distance that protected them and their families from the indefinite detentions, bannings, censorship, and an array of other repressive measures that characterised the increasingly authoritarian homeland they had left behind. After decimating the internal resistance movement, Pretoria turned its attention to political dissidents in exile, expanding its surveillance operations and waging a war of misinformation against them. SANROC, and most notably its president Dennis Brutus – a man Pretoria labelled in 1969 ‘one of the 20 most dangerous South African political figures overseas’ – represented an important target for South African intelligence organisations. Classifying SANROC as a ‘Communist-inspired agitation group’, the South African Security Branch, and post-1969, the Bureau for State Security (BOSS) engaged in intelligence gathering, infiltration, surveillance, bugging, and interception of mail. Gordon Winter, the British journalist turned BOSS operative, revealed in his explosive exposé Inside Boss how South African intelligence bugged Brutus’s home telephone, monitored SANROC’s franking machine (allowing for all his mail to be intercepted and copied), and even how he personally attempted to infiltrate SANROC by presenting himself to Brutus as an anti-apartheid sympathiser. The British government seemingly turned a blind eye to these counter-exile activities. Its continuation of the no-visa rule allowed South Africa intelligence operatives to enter Britain without restriction and engage in subterranean activities targeting leaders of the non-racial sport movement (and more broadly of the liberation movement in exile) that intensified in both their ambition and violence over time.
Winter’s revelations indicated a long-running attempt by the South African security apparatus to cast Brutus and SANROC in the role of ‘communist agitators’, employing the state’s propaganda machinery and a Cold War paradigm to persuade British audiences that non-racial activism and communism were a singular phenomenon. This carefully scripted image of Brutus and his colleagues as communist troublemakers held a particular currency within the establishment circles of British sport administration. Anti-communism animated their right-wing thinking. As such, they delegitimised SANROC’s appeals to non-racial discrimination in sport as part of a Moscow-inspired propaganda campaign. Brutus’s leadership role in the formation of the ‘Stop The Seventy Tour’ (STST) campaign, his mentorship of the campaign’s spokesperson Peter Hain, and his vocal advocacy of the direct-action methods of civil disobedience that marred the 1969 South African rugby tour and forced the subsequent cancelation of the 1970 South African cricket tour, reinforced this impression. Wilfred Wooler, Secretary of Glamorgan County Cricket Club, captured the general attitude of British sporting officials when he branded Brutus and his SANROC associates an ‘utter nuisance’. ‘We have no sympathy with your cause in any shape or form’, Wooler charged. ‘You do far more damage than good […] Furthermore, I personally suspect your motives and your back-ground.’ Rooted in their elitism and conservatism, the Tory-dominated members of the MCC and the RFU were, to borrow Saul Dubow’s appellation, fiercely ‘anti-anti-apartheid’. They castigated SANROC’s leadership, dismissed its deputations, and ignored the flood of correspondences protesting the participation of British teams against apartheid South Africa.
SANROC struck at the heart of the deep cultural bonds that existed between British and white South African sport leaders. Reciprocal cricket and rugby union tours had historically connected the imperial metropole with its white dominions, aiding in the construction and propagation of an ‘imagined community’ of Britishness. Despite South Africa’s departure from the Commonwealth in 1961, the racial ideology of ‘kith and kin’ and ‘good stock’ proved a powerful motivator of British sporting sentiment. Just as British capitalism buttressed the apartheid regime, British sporting bodies collaborated with and protected white South African sporting interests. A vestigial desire to preserve the historic ties of language, race, and culture led British sporting officials to defend the Republic of South Africa’s right to remain within the Imperial Cricket Council, and decide not to select (initially) the South African-born coloured cricketing star Basil D’Oliveira for the touring England team to the country in 1969. Deploying the language of imperial Britishness, British officials also displayed a dogged determination to ensure the continuation of the 1969 South African rugby tour, even going as far as to curtail the number of fixtures and erect barb-wire fences around stadiums to deter anti-apartheid protesters. The British government – prompted by the threat of a SANROC-inspired mass African boycott of the forthcoming Commonwealth Games in Edinburgh – even had to violate the sacrosanct British political tradition of non-interventionism to convince obdurate British cricketing authorities to cancel the 1970 South African cricket tour to Britain.
The STST methods of civil disobedience, the mass and occasionally violent demonstrations that followed, and the ultimate disruption and forced cancelation of reciprocal cricket and rugby union tours made Brutus and his SANROC colleagues persona non grata in British sporting circles. The British sporting establishment’s portrayal of anti-apartheid protesters as violators of the democratic precepts of both British society and British sport obscures the racially charged atmosphere of late-1960s Britain. The nation was engulfed in a post-imperial crisis, plagued with its own domestic insecurities over immigration and race, and adjusting to the social and political conditions of a new multiracial Britain. SANROC’s calls for the cessation of sporting links with apartheid South Africa had a particular resonance in an era of British domestic race riots, crude ideas of black criminality and inferiority, and legislative debates concerning the rights of entry of black, New Commonwealth immigrants into Britain. Enoch Powell’s trenchant ‘rivers of blood’ speech, his calls for the repatriation of black immigrants already settled in Britain, and the legislative recasting of Britishness in racially homogenous language through the passage of the 1962 and 1968 Commonwealth Immigration Acts, provides important context for understanding the divisiveness of SANROC’s anti-apartheid sport campaigns in Britain. Fired by conceptions of white imperial solidarity and racial homogeneity (set against the prevailing domestic threat of the immigrant ‘Other’), some Britons passionately defended the continuation of sports tours with South Africa as fundamental to the preservation and strengthening of cultural and racial ties and core ‘British’ values. Post-imperial racial fears paralleled a general shift in British attitudes towards South Africa during the late 1960s. The growing British belief that Vorster had steered his National Party government on a more ‘moderate, pragmatic, and reformist’ path, aligned with the Republic’s rapid economic growth ushered Britain into a new phase of tolerance and indifference towards South Africa’s racist policies and, as a consequence, the AAM into a ‘Difficult Decade’.
The furore generated over the anti-apartheid rugby and cricket campaigns exposed an entirely contrary set of British attitudes. Deeper, intensified, and visceral divisions emerged. For black Britons in particular, those occupying the indeterminate space outside of the racially homogenous boundaries of Britishness, the sport campaigns served as an important rallying point. The formation of the ‘West Indian Campaign Against Apartheid in Cricket’, an umbrella group comprised of British migrant, religious, and left-wing organisations, played a key role in galvanising black communities in opposition to the appearance of a white South African test team on British shores. In a multiracial collaboration not seen again until the high-noon of British anti-apartheid activism during the 1980s, white radicals worked alongside British immigrant groups in denouncing racism both at home and in the Republic.
Young Britons, particularly those among an emerging generation of student activists, also embraced SANROC campaigns and the STST’s direct-action tactics. They perceived apartheid sport as anathema to the emerging language of human rights and the new multiracial and multicultural composition of British society. SANROC’s re-emergence in exile coincided with a fundamental shift in the position of young people in post-imperial Britain. Enjoying unprecedented access to wealth, opportunity, education, and employment, young Britons began to challenge the attitudes and authority of older generations. They took to the streets in protest, leading sit-ins on university campuses across Britain and staging street demonstrations against contemporary issues of perceived injustice such as South African apartheid, Enoch Powell’s racial invectives, nuclear weapons, and, in solidarity with other students groups around the globe, the Vietnam War. Thus, the mobilisation and expression of support for SANROC and STST’s anti-apartheid sport campaigns spoke to broader inter-generational conflicts and the growing political visibility, radicalism, and idealism of young Britons during the late 1960s.
Set against the broader history of the British anti-apartheid movement, the rugby and cricket campaigns were remarkable in their ability to mobilise British domestic interest and opinion on the apartheid issue. Both Hain and Brutus’s sport-centred activism exposed the racial and inter-generational fault lines of post-imperial Britain, generating controversy, heated editorial discussion, and ultimately thrusting (albeit temporarily) the apartheid issue to the top of the political agenda. SANROC finally penetrated British-South African historic sporting bonds. The decision of the Cricket Council – the successor to the MCC as the governing body of English cricket – to proscribe future tests tours with South Africa ‘until such time as Test cricket is played and tours are selected on a multi-racial basis’ pushed white South Africa even further to the periphery of international sport.
Conclusion
Out of the unfamiliarity, dislocation, and uncertainty of exile, Dennis Brutus and his SANROC colleagues built a strong and coherent organisation that, given its size and limited mandate, achieved remarkable success in the immediate years following its revival in London. Exile provided the climate for SANROC’s resurgence and triumph, a chance to contribute to the external struggle against Pretoria. SANROC’s achievements in the years 1966-1970 are perhaps even more impressive when you consider the size of its operations. SANROC’s intimacy and the passion and defiance of its members gave it strength, but its success rested largely on Brutus’s ability to tether the issue of racism in South African sport to broader discussions of human rights that dominated the agendas of state institutions and international organisations throughout the 1960s. The transnational solidarity links that Brutus and SANROC forged during his exile in Britain culminated in the official expulsion of South Africa from the Olympic Movement. After succeeding in casting South Africa’s name off the roster of participating nations at both the 1964 and 1968 Olympic Games, Brutus and SANROC engineered an international campaign to force the IOC to expel the all-white SANOC on 15 May 1970 at its annual session in Amsterdam. ‘The success of the fight against racialism in sport up to this stage’, a jubilant Brutus reflected, ‘has been because there has been so much support from so many people in so many parts of the world’. Under Brutus’s direction, the international campaign against apartheid sport had reached maturity. In 1972, the various branches of the transnational anti-apartheid sport network banded together to establish a coordinating body, the International Committee Against Racism In Sport (ICARIS).
The years 1966 to 1970 marked the apex of SANROC’s fight against apartheid sport. Following a series of victories, Brutus moved to the United States to pursue an academic career, teaching literature and African studies at Northwestern University (1971-1985). Brutus’s transatlantic relocation reflected his belief that the United States had supplanted Britain as the loci in the global anti-apartheid struggle. Although he remained actively involved in the anti-apartheid struggle, chairing and coordinating both SAN-ROC and ICARIS’s activities, he later considered coming to the United States a ‘mistake’. Brutus lamented that his absence from London slowed the ‘tempo’ of SANROC’s activities. He cited the 1974 British and Irish Lions rugby union tour to South Africa and the continuation of British-South African sporting relations as proof that SANROC failed to conduct its campaigns ‘with anything like the seriousness, the vigour, the intensity that it might have been’. Deprived of Brutus’s day-to-day presence, the exiled SANROC struggled to contain the rising political dogma of Constructive Engagement and the receptiveness of British sport bodies to both Vorster’s ‘multi-national’ sports policy and the white South African sporting establishments broader efforts to ‘normalise’ sport. Ideological tensions further isolated Brutus from SANROC’s operations. Under the growing influence of Sam Ramsamy, who replaced Brutus as president in 1976, SANROC embraced the emerging transnational anti-apartheid sentiment that the sport boycott should remain in place until the complete abrogation of ‘apartheid per se‘. Brutus’s belief that the elimination of apartheid from sport represented the primary justification for the sport boycott had been replaced during the late 1970s by the South African Council On Sports’ (SACOS) popular mantra: ‘no normal sport in an abnormal society.’ His public proclamations throughout the late 1980s favouring ‘co-operation’ with South African sport bodies ‘irrespective’ of racial stance and his support of South Africa’s return to the Olympic Games on a ‘non-racial basis’, pushed him even further to the periphery of the anti-apartheid sport movement. Citing significant ‘ideological differences’ and ‘irresponsible interventions’, Ramsamy eventually expelled Brutus from SANROC on 30 January 1989.