James Alexander Ivey. International Journal of the History of Sport. Volume 36, Issue 1, January 2019.
The year 1980 proved to be a time of diplomatic crisis for the British government and the Commonwealth due to the confluence of two events: a British Lions tour of South Africa and the Moscow Olympics. The Thatcher government debated its Commonwealth counterparts over the perceived hypocrisy of British policy towards South Africa and Moscow. While the British government campaigned internationally for a boycott of the Moscow Games, many African and Caribbean countries believed Britain was taking a harder line against Moscow than in enforcing the Gleneagles Agreement to end all sporting contacts with apartheid South Africa. This inconsistency led to threats of retaliation from African countries and seriously affected the influence Britain had in Africa during the period of Rhodesian independence and the ongoing conflict in Namibia. Controversy erupted surrounding the plans for a British Lions tour, how the invasion of Afghanistan changed the target of the Moscow boycott, and about the discussions between Britain and other countries about sporting ‘double standards’.
In 1979, Great Britain was on course to become a sporting pariah. Although it had signed the 1977 Gleneagles Agreement to cease all sporting contacts with South Africa, in 1979 and 1980 the Home Rugby Unions twice flouted the boycott. In the autumn of 1979, a multi-racial South African Barbarians team played a series of matches in Britain. Then, in January 1980, the Four Home Unions announced that the British Lions rugby team would that year play eighteen matches in South Africa from May 10 until July 12. These blatant violations of the anti-apartheid boycott by British rugby organizations incensed African nations. On December 17, 1979, the Supreme Council for Sport in Africa (SCSA), the sporting wing of the Organization of African Unity, voted ‘to break off all sporting relations with Britain in protest against continuing links with South Africa’ and ‘called for action to have Britain and Ireland banned from the Moscow Games if a British Lions team was sent to South Africa’. While the SCSA ‘voted against an African boycott of the Olympics’, it declared that this policy could change if the British Lions carried out their plans to compete in South Africa.
Only seven days after the SCSA’s vote, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. Western countries, led by an abruptly antagonistic President Jimmy Carter, sprang into action and sought to move the Olympics away from Moscow, and then to organize a mass boycott of the Games. The invasion let Britain off the hook. The world’s focus was now on the Soviet Union and the Afghan crisis rather than on the anti-apartheid boycott. As an enthusiastic ally of the United States, Margaret Thatcher and her Conservative government threw their support behind the American-led boycott and lobbied African nations to join. African nations accused Britain of hypocrisy for supporting the Soviet boycott while providing tepid backing to their anti-apartheid efforts.
The SCSA’s attempts to punish Britain were largely unsuccessful. However, this does not mean the episode should be left out of the history of the 1980 Moscow Olympic Games boycott. The interplay of these two events – the Lions’ tour and the Soviet invasion – reveals the complexity of the international anti-apartheid movement and the importance of the Cold War to the ongoing struggle. Britain was initially the main focus of African anger in 1979. After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the situation transformed, with Britain shifting from a defensive stance to supporting a boycott against the Soviet Union.
Olympic Boycotts, Decolonization, and the Anti-Apartheid Struggle
Boycotts of the modern Olympic Games have been fairly common. The largely aborted boycott of the 1936 Berlin Olympics was followed, in 1956, by the decision of Egypt, Iraq, and Lebanon to shun the Melbourne Olympics in protest over the Suez crisis and the participation of Israel, France, and Britain. Also in 1956, the Netherlands, Spain, and Switzerland withdrew due to the Soviet army’s crushing of the Hungarian Revolution. Boycotts in the interwar and immediate post-war periods generally involved few nations, however, and they failed to elicit reaction from either the host nation or the International Olympic Committee (IOC).
The first sustained international campaign to boycott the Olympic Games started over the issue of apartheid. The IOC’s membership had increased rapidly in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and new member states from the Global South sought to bring new sporting and political issues to the forefront of the Olympic movement. From the 1960s, consistent pressure against the apartheid state played out within the IOC through coordinated action on a global scale. African countries, united under the aegis of the Supreme Council for Sport in Africa, as well as organizations such as the South African Non-Racial Olympic Committee (SANROC) and other anti-apartheid groups based in Western countries, all sought to isolate South African sport in the hope of effecting change within the apartheid state.
Apartheid South Africa participated in its last Olympics in Rome in 1960. In a rebuke against its racial policies, South Africa was suspended from the 1964 Tokyo Olympic Games. International pressure was sustained through the 1968 Mexico City Games, despite the IOC initially voting to allow South Africa to participate in those Games. Teams represented by the SCSA threatened to withdraw, and with support from the Eastern Bloc and African American athletes organizing their own protest against racial discrimination abroad and at home, the SCSA forced the IOC to prohibit South African attendance. In 1970, the IOC bowed to the inevitable and expelled South Africa from the Games.
Even after South Africa’s expulsion from the Olympics, the boycott continued to be used as a tool for enforcing South Africa’s isolation by punishing those who continued sporting contact with the apartheid state. Famously, the 1976 Montreal Olympics were disrupted by the withdrawal of 26 African nations after the IOC rejected the SCSA’s demand that New Zealand be disinvited. The New Zealand All Blacks rugby team began touring South Africa in June, one month before the Olympics opened. African countries sought a hard response from the IOC dealing with those who crossed the picket line; instead, the IOC allowed New Zealand to participate on the grounds that rugby was not an Olympic sport. The SCSA withdrew its members in the largest Olympic boycott to that point.
This coordinated, somewhat effective, action raised the prospect of more African boycotts and moved the issue beyond mere threats. Canada, in particular, worried about a follow up boycott occurring at the Edmonton Commonwealth Games in 1978. The Commonwealth Games were more susceptible to boycott action since the proportion of Global South members was higher than in the Olympics. Canadian fear inspired rapid diplomatic action, which led to the Commonwealth’s Gleneagles Agreement in 1977, a formal treaty aimed at isolating South Africa from all sporting contacts until the end of apartheid. The Gleneagles Agreement was designed to solve growing issues within the Commonwealth over continued sporting contacts with South Africa. The Agreement bound its signatories to ‘taking every practical step to discourage contact’ with South African teams.
The Gleneagles Agreement was a step in the right direction for many Commonwealth countries. In particular, the agreement of Britain and New Zealand to work towards ending sporting contacts with South Africa was an important step. However, it did not stop Nigeria from boycotting the 1978 Edmonton Commonwealth Games in protest against New Zealand’s participation in the event. The only other country not to attend that event was Idi Amin’s Uganda, which boycotted over their political relationship with Canada rather than the issue of apartheid.
In spite of the Gleneagles Agreement, the fear of another African boycott continued to hang over the Olympics like a Damoclean sword. Jennifer Parks has shown that the Organizing Committee of the Moscow Games perceived another African boycott as the biggest threat to the first Socialist Olympics and it desperately sought to prevent a repeat of Montreal. From 1976 onwards, the USSR encouraged countries to attend their ‘anti-colonial and anti-[a]partheid’ Games, publicly pressured ‘offending’ countries to limit sporting contacts with South Africa, and sought to induce participation from hesitant nations with gifts and political promises. The year before the Moscow Games, it appeared that the campaign had worked. Soviet officials felt confident that African countries, barring unforeseen circumstances, would compete in the Moscow Games.
The Barbarians Tour and the Boycott Threat
On May 3, 1979, Margaret Thatcher and the Conservative Party defeated James Callaghan’s incumbent Labour government. The change from Labour to Conservative marked a shift in Britain’s formal and sporting relationship with South Africa. From a foreign policy perspective, Thatcher’s government was keen to support South Africa as an ally and trading partner, but also it sought to effect change gradually through economic, social, and cultural contact rather than by pursuing a policy of isolation. A Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) paper from April 1980 outlined Britain’s new policy towards South Africa: it states that Britain should ‘encourage peaceful political and social change in South Africa, both for its own sake and to safeguard our commercial and other interests without jeopardizing those elsewhere’. Peaceful change would help avoid an ‘Iran-type situation with political change leading to chaos’. Britain was also interested in protecting its South African investments, accessing scarce materials, especially those where ‘main alternative reserves … are in the USSR’, and continuing to use South Africa as an anti-Communist bulwark in Southern Africa. Part of affecting ‘peaceful political and social change’ meant rebuilding connections with South Africa that had been undermined by the Labour administration; sport would be an important way of doing this.
After the Conservative victory, Britain thus appeared to be in favour of resuming sporting contacts with South Africa on a formal basis. Journalists, politicians, and rugby officials all began questioning whether a possibility existed to alter the Gleneagles Agreement, but only ‘when circumstances were right’. Dennis Thatcher, husband of the Prime Minister, advocated for sporting contacts with South Africa, as did the British Ambassador to South Africa, Sir John Leahy, who believed resuming such contact with the country ‘may help to accelerate the progress of non-discriminatory sport … and perhaps bring in its wake some loosening up of race relations generally’. MP John Carlisle spent much of 1979–1980 appealing in Parliament for the reintegration of South Africa into the international sporting fold. On one occasion, he went so far as to ask in the House of Commons: ‘Is it not time that we tore up the Gleneagles agreement?’ The biggest indication that policy could change was the quasi-governmental British Sports Council’s decision to send a ‘fact-finding’ mission on a three-week tour of South Africa in January 1980. This political shift convinced rugby officials that reconnecting with South Africa was now almost certain. To test this new atmosphere, the Home Rugby Unions decided to invite a South African team to tour Britain in the autumn of 1979.
During the summer of 1979, six British rugby clubs toured South Africa in violation of restrictions on sporting contacts, but it was the arrival in Britain of a mixed-race South African Barbarians team in October to play seven matches against British opposition that sparked an international crisis. South African officials and advocates of rugby contacts in Britain advertised the Barbarians as being multi-racial. The team would consist of eight white, eight coloured, and eight black players, which was done in the hope that the tour would appear more acceptable and bypass objections that South African sport was segregated. On the sporting side, the Barbarians performed admirably during the tour, winning four of their seven matches and drawing one. The tour was disrupted on several occasions by anti-apartheid campaigners; however, anti-apartheid activism within Britain had somewhat dissipated and the opposition was unlike the coordinated effort of the famously successful ‘Stop the Seventy Tour’ campaign almost a decade earlier. For rugby officials, the Barbarians tour was seen as ‘a water-testing venture, and its relative success convinced the Home Unions and South Africa that there was no reason why they shouldn’t continue their policy of maintaining contact’. Persistent rumours throughout the summer had suggested that the Home Unions were willing to challenge the Gleneagles Agreement with a South African tour, and the Barbarians tour further heightened this speculation.
Prior to the arrival of the Barbarians in October, the British government received messages of concern from other Commonwealth states, anti-apartheid groups, and the United Nations, all demanding the government to intercede and enforce the Gleneagles Agreement, and thus maintain the fragile sporting peace. Michael Manley, Prime Minister of Jamaica and the principal architect of the Gleneagles Agreement, worried that Britain was aiding the cause of apartheid. The United Nation’s Chairman of the Special Committee against Apartheid, B. Akropode Clarke of Nigeria, publicly stated that the Barbarians ‘tour of the United Kingdom and Ireland was designed as a subterfuge and a provocation’, and that the British government should take relevant steps in accordance with United Nations resolutions and Commonwealth agreements to stop the tour from happening. Shehu Shagari, the new Nigerian President, scathingly accused the British government, ‘and Mrs Thatcher in particular, of lacking the moral courage’ to prevent the Barbarians tour. Tanzania’s Daily News stated that ‘either [Britain] cuts off sporting ties with South Africa … [o]r it must accept isolation from the rest of the world in the sports arena’. Abraham Ordia, President of the SCSA, charged that Britain was not doing enough to discourage contacts and fulfil its obligations under the Gleneagles Agreement. Ordia, writing to the British Minister for Sport Hector Monro, laid out the danger: ‘Africa will have no alternative but to act if we are driven up against the wall by the actions of selfish sportsmen and women, or by the failure of Governments to act in a sufficiently committed way. Africa will not hesitate to put principles before medals’. The threat was clear: the Barbarians tour and Britain’s existing connections to South Africa were enough, in the eyes of Ordia, to initiate discussions of another African Olympic boycott. The rumours of a forthcoming British Lions tour further aggravated the situation and would lead to Ordia labelling Britain ‘the worlds [sic] greatest collaborator with apartheid sport’.
A Boycott of Britain or an Olympic Boycott?
Before the 1979 British election, South African officials believed ‘that if the Tories’ formed ‘the next Government there will be a softer line towards sporting contacts’ and that ‘getting a representative multi-racial side to Britain’ was the first step in this process. Their assumption was correct. The British government expended little effort in responding to calls from anti-apartheid organizations and other states to block the Barbarian’s tour. Hector Monro’s efforts to prevent the Barbarians tour included sending the Home Rugby Unions a letter detailing the government’s position. The letter stated that while Monro valued ‘the independence of our sporting bodies … I believe that they should consider their wider responsibilities too’. The letter contained no threat to the Unions, and no further action was to be taken. British tradition dictated that sporting organizations were independent from government control. As a result, all that Monro could ask was that the Unions consider their actions in the context of international politics.
The British government understood that a fight was already brewing over the Barbarians tour. The first issue was Britain’s position at the Olympic Games. The Barbarians tour started the ball moving on a possible boycott against Britain and Britain’s participation in Moscow, with SANROC at the forefront. British ministers believed SANROC would ‘try to persuade all Commonwealth countries bilaterally to cut off sports contacts with the United Kingdom. They would subsequently extend Commonwealth action into a World-wide [sic] boycott’. The threat of an African boycott was especially dangerous with the Olympics being held in the Soviet Union. Officials presumed that the Soviets would ‘prefer to prevent British attendance rather than accept a boycott by some developing countries, with whom they regard their political relations as very important’.
The Barbarians tour would not just harm Britain’s sporting prestige but would also harm its foreign policy aims in southern Africa. Rhodesia was a key issue in 1979/1980 as the ongoing ceasefire and reconciliation discussions at Lancaster House dragged on; simultaneously British officials hoped to resolve the issue of Namibia being occupied by South Africa. In addition to resolving outstanding conflicts, the British government hoped to strengthen relationships between itself and emerging powers in Africa, particularly with the new democratic regime in Nigeria. A British rugby tour to South Africa would be important not only for British sport but also in international trade and ongoing negotiations in the future of Southern Africa. At the SCSA’s December 1979 meeting in Yaoundé, Cameroon, African countries began to discuss an appropriate response to British stubbornness. The Times of Zambia fired a warning shot before the SCSA met, asserting that ‘Mrs Thatcher’s Tory government must be shown in very unequivocal terms that Africa is going to make its name stink throughout the world’ and the SCSA must punish Britain for its ‘overtly racist politics abroad’.
On the SCSA’s agenda was the possibility of boycotting the Olympic Games if Britain were to attend, but after a vote, it was decided that there would be no African boycott. On December 17, 1979 the SCSA passed a resolution which included provisions to ‘break all bilateral sporting relations with Great Britain and … to boycott all sports meetings organized in Great Britain’, to refuse ‘support to British teams and officials’, and to ‘enter into no training contact with British teams and trainers’. The SCSA hoped to strengthen their position by calling ‘upon all countries to break … sports relations with Great Britain’ until Britain adhered fully to the Gleneagles Agreement. These strictures were only a response to the Barbarians tour, and the SCSA discussed further provisions if the prospective Lions tour went ahead. If the Lions team decided to travel to South Africa, then the SCSA would ‘take all measures to expel Great Britain and Ireland from the Moscow Olympics’ and would ‘use every endeavour to rally collaboration and support of all Third World countries and of the socialist world … as well as other friendly countries’. The Yaoundé meeting drew a clear line in the sand and brought the real and public threat of a boycott back to the Olympic Games.
The irony of the situation was that the Soviet Union, despite public condemnation of Britain, was reluctant to support an African boycott or campaign against British participation. In the years building up to the Moscow Games, Soviet newspapers and officials criticized British teams travelling to South Africa as part of a Cold War propaganda strategy and also to encourage African participation in their Olympics. The Soviet newspaper Izvestiya, in an article entitled ‘Encouraging the Racists’, argued that the Barbarian tour showed the ‘British Government’s desire to develop cooperation with the racist regime’ in Pretoria. In the Soviet Literary Gazette, journalist Vladimir Simonov argued, ‘If the IOC in accordance with its statutes bars Britain from participation in the Olympic Games for contacts with racists, then that is good … At the top in London, they are not averse to playing alongside the apartheid regime, and giving it international publicity’. The Deputy Chairman of the Moscow Organizing Committee, Vladimir Popov, while on a summer diplomatic trip to London in 1979, warned Britain over its sporting contacts prior to the Barbarians tour, stating ‘the doors of Olympic Moscow will be tightly shut for the advocates of racism and apartheid’ and that ‘there need be no British blood on Russian hands’ as long as Britain adhered to its international agreements. During a November visit to Bournemouth for a Physical Education conference, Vladimir Prokopov, Chief of the International Relations Department for the Moscow Games, warned assembled delegates that, ‘We in the Soviet Union stand against sports contacts with South Africa’, before going on to argue that the Soviet Union wanted to avoid a repeat of Montreal by any means.
Despite such stern statements, socialist support for the SCSA never developed beyond rhetoric. In private the Soviet Union hoped to persuade everybody to attend the Games, including Britain. In November 1979, a ‘Handbook for Party Activists’ attributed the decision to award the Games to Moscow to the ‘historical importance and the correctness of the foreign political course of our country, of the enormous services of the Soviet Union in the struggle for peace’ and to the Soviet Union’s role as a leading sports power in the Olympic movement and beyond. Because the Games were such a propaganda victory, Lord Killanin, President of the IOC, told Hector Monro, he believed ‘the Russians will not welcome significant disruption of the Games … [and] are believed to be in touch with the major pressure groups to cool the issue’ rather than see a boycott mar their Olympics.
Moscow played an important role in moderating African boycott threats against Britain. When Ignati Novikov, the President of the Organizing Committee for the Moscow Games, travelled to Yaoundé, he came with a message of Soviet friendship but also of Soviet powerlessness. He understood the position of the SCSA, and while he accepted that African states wanted Britain to be disinvited, he clearly stated that ‘we [the Organizing Committee] do not have the power to do this [disinvite] which is within the competence of the CIO [sic] and not that of the Organizing Committee’. By blaming the presence of Britain on the IOC rather than on the Soviet organizers, Novikov hoped that African countries would not take action against the USSR if a British team attended the Games. John Rodda, a British journalist for the Guardian, covering the SCSA meeting, noted that though ‘there are ways and means of keeping Britain out of Moscow … there is no evidence yet that the Russians are shaping up for the … showdown’; rather ‘their objective clearly is to get every nation possible to the Games’. Novikov’s stratagem appeared to work: the Soviet Union successfully dissuaded the SCSA from boycotting Moscow and making a ruckus. Instead, the Soviets ‘persuaded the Africans to point the rifles of their protests at other targets such as the Commonwealth Games’ in two years’ time. An African boycott of the Olympics was off the table, but the Lions tour still threatened Britain’s appearance at the Games.
The Lions and Afghanistan
Until the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, Britain’s attendance at the Moscow Olympic Games hung in the balance. While the Soviet Union managed to moderate African threats against Britain, the SCSA made it clear that if the Lions tour went ahead, then they would make every effort to exclude Britain from the Olympic Games. But in the aftermath of Afghanistan, this was an impossible threat. Afghanistan changed the whole narrative: instead of debating whether the Lions should go to South Africa, Britain was now interested in whether their team should be at the Olympics. This does not mean that the Lions issue went away. It was ever present throughout the whole period.
The invasion of Afghanistan set the wheels turning on a boycott of the Moscow Olympics. The invasion officially started on December 24, and by early January it appeared as if the British government was leaning towards using the Olympics as a weapon to strike back. It would not be until January 20 that President Carter officially informed Thatcher of his intent to ask the United States Olympic Committee to reject their invitation to Moscow, but the prospect of an organized, Western boycott had already been hovering for a while. Once Carter declared his intention to boycott, Thatcher readily followed and began to campaign within Britain.
Before the American-led Moscow boycott was officially announced, there were already connections being made between the British Lions and any future boycott. An article in Sovietskii Sport, published on January 13, claimed that the boycott was a ‘premeditated plot’, ‘part of the American policy of disrupting détente’, and that ‘the boycott fuss was being used by British conservative forces as a cover for legalizing British rugby links with South Africa’. This last point was not strictly true, but the boycott did provide excellent cover for the Lions tour to be publicly announced.
Once Thatcher publicly announced her intent to boycott the Moscow Games, the Conservative government vigorously pressured the British Olympic Association (BOA) into following the government’s position. These attempts to persuade the BOA and its head, Sir Denis Follows, to boycott the Moscow Olympics are notable when compared to the campaign to stop the Lions from touring South Africa. Over the course of six months leading up to the Olympics, Thatcher wrote on four separate occasions to the BOA on the importance of boycotting Moscow. On January 22, two days after Carter announced his intentions, Thatcher wrote her first letter to Follows. One month later, on February 19, she wrote again. On March 19, just before the BOA made its decision to go to Moscow, another letter was sent, and finally, May 20 saw the last letter from Thatcher, as she sought to reverse the BOA’s decision. The Conservative government tried to strongarm the BOA in a number of ways, from withholding funding to athletes, who had to appeal to the public for the final funding package necessary to attend the Games, to refusing to allow civil servants and military personnel to take leave to compete, to passing a resolution in Parliament that called on the BOA to boycott the Games.
In comparison, the efforts that Hector Monro made to prevent the Barbarians coming from, and the Lions going to, South Africa, were measly. The British government knew this, too, and was keen to present itself publicly as having made a similar effort in both cases. Taking for example a letter from Lord Gordon-Lennox in the FCO to R. B. Dorman of the British Embassy at Cape Town, Gordon-Lennox stressed that the government must ‘treat the Lions Tour to South Africa on the same basis as that of any British teams which may attend the Olympic Games in Moscow. It would be politically damaging both internationally and at home for us to appear less concerned over the Lions Tour’.
Anti-apartheid groups regularly criticized the inconsistency in British policy on these two issues. Sam Ramsamy, head of SANROC, wrote to Thatcher: ‘We feel that if your Government expends less than half its energy that it is exciting against the Moscow Olympic Games, the British Lions tour to South Africa could be easily aborted’. The New Zealand anti-apartheid group, Halt All Racist Tours (HART), sent a list of demands to the British High Commissioner in New Zealand stating that while they were ‘pleased to note the opposition of the British Government to the decision … to send a Lions team to South Africa’, the government did not seem to do anything beyond this expression. HART argued that ‘the Prime Minister has made absolutely no doubt of where she stands regarding a British boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics. An equally forceful stand against the British Lions tour of South Africa is now required’. Stop All Racist Tours leader, Peter Hain, wrote to Thatcher arguing that, ‘at the moment the government is guilty of double standards in taking a vigorous position over British athletes going to Moscow but not being prepared to actively oppose the international crime of apartheid in sport’.
Even with the Afghanistan crisis and the American-led Moscow boycott dominating international sports from the beginning of 1980, the SCSA did not give up its threats against Britain and continued to pressure the British government to intervene to stop the Lions tour. In February 1980, the British High Commissioner to Nigeria, Mervyn Brown, attempted to engage Abraham Ordia on the SCSA’s opinions regarding Britain, Afghanistan, and whether there was any chance of the SCSA boycotting the Moscow Games. Brown, for all his efforts, failed to steer the conversation in the desired direction.
Instead, Brown reported that Ordia had ‘said with some relish that on the issue of the Moscow Games he was happy to accept the advice constantly given to him by British sporting leaders in the context of South Africa, that sport should not be mixed with politics’. This line had been repeated regularly by British officials throughout 1979 and 1980 as a defence for government inactivity. In response to Sam Ramsamy’s criticisms on a different occasion, the government argued ‘governing bodies of sport in this country are rightly independent of Government. If some of them choose not to heed advice, this is their prerogative as part of the democratic system which operates here’. In response to criticism from the Bahamian government over the Lions tour, the FCO had responded that it was impossible for the government to intervene since ‘governing Bodies of sport in the United Kingdom are autonomous and Ministers do not have the power to direct them’.
Ordia continued to lecture Brown that Afghanistan had come at the wrong time. This new crisis was distracting the world ‘from the main business of attacking South Africa’. He argued that ‘Britain had never given him any support in imposing a sporting boycott on South Africa’, and that while the Labour government had been willing to help on the issue, ‘the Conservative Government was another matter’. Ordia reluctantly admitted at this meeting in February that the SCSA would not try to have Britain excluded from Moscow or the IOC, but would consider taking action at the 1982 Commonwealth Games. The notes scrawled on the side of a letter by J.R. Johnson of the West African Department commented that ‘Mr Ordia is not making idle threats: He relishes using the SCSA’s boycott power’ and Britain should be worried about what effect Ordia could have on relationships with African countries.
The hypocrisy of Britain’s position was compounded by its inquiries as to whether other Commonwealth countries would support an America-led boycott of the Moscow Games. On the first day of 1980, MP Neville Trotter called on the Prime Minister to use Britain’s influence ‘as the founder member of the Commonwealth … to mobilize opinion in the Third World’ against the Moscow Games. His argument was that in order to make the international boycott a success, it was necessary to build an international coalition. Britain attempted to mobilize international support for the boycott and enquired after the positions of most states around the world in the hope of using Britain’s ‘soft power’ to swell the number of protesting states. However, the focus of many of Britain’s inquiries became the Lions tour.
The two boycotts created an inherent contradiction within British foreign policy. President Léopold Sédar Senghor of Senegal wrote to Thatcher on February 26, 1980 to express his outrage over the Lions tour. In his letter, Senghor warned that the tour ‘will not fail to have political repercussions’ and that it would be in the best interests of Britain if Thatcher ‘made an effort to ban these sporting connections between [her] country and South Africa, the country of apartheid’. Similarly, President Tolbert of Liberia, a fellow boycotter, expressed his frustration with Britain’s policy:
At a time when certain western powers are waging a victorious campaign against the Moscow Olympics … we find it difficult to comprehend why the same rules should not be applied against a regime which defi[a]ntly continues to pursue policies of suppression[,] oppression and blatant racism as well as frustrate the legitimate aspirations of a struggling people.
In some countries, the government sided one way and the people another. In February, Kenya decided to skip the 1980 Olympics, which was welcome news to the pro-boycott camp. President Daniel arap Moi decided that ‘the Soviet Union had created conditions which made it impossible for Kenya to participate … The decision, which was supported by Kenya’s sportsmen, was final’. Even though Kenya proved a loyal ally to the American-led boycott camp and provided information on other African countries during this period, the issue of the British Lions tour was not forgotten. During July and August, just after the Lions toured South Africa, London’s Metropolitan Police rugby team played several games in Kenya against local sides. The tour overlapped ‘with an internal political squabble within the Kenya Rugby Football Union which resulted in a shift of policy towards avoiding sporting contacts with countries who had had such contacts with South Africa’. Games were occasionally disrupted by local players choosing to boycott, rather than play a British team. Cyril Jonsen, from the British High Commission in Nairobi, concluded that ‘the political opposition [to this tour] will have given the Kenyan authorities and the KRFU much food for thought, and we would expect it to be a long time before any further invitation is issued to a British rugby team to come and play here’. Though the Kenyan government was firmly within the Moscow boycott encampment, Kenyans were not responsive to British rugby teams in the aftermath of the British Lions’ tour of South Africa.
Double standards also came into play over why so many Western countries had failed to support the Montreal Games boycott four years earlier. Either as a slight against British and American reluctance to support a boycott in 1976 or as a sign of loyalty to the Soviet Union, which had rhetorically supported the Montreal walkout, many African states chose to defend their decision to go to Moscow by referencing the West’s earlier unwillingness to support their anti-apartheid struggle. Zambia initially rejected British inquiries about joining the boycott, ‘accusing the West of double standards’. British and American attempts to organize a boycott were particularly unwelcome since the organizers were ‘the same countries which criticized (and ‘laughed at’) Africa over the Montreal Games walk-out’. The Nigerian government was concerned about Soviet aggression towards a Muslim country, but ‘resent[ed] outside attempts to bounce them into a boycott … The Nigerians do not see why they should support the USA, who ‘abandoned Black Africa at Montreal in 1976’. Nigeria was also not overly concerned about Afghanistan because ‘for them South Africa, not the USSR, is enemy number one’, and Britain and America had not shown adequate support in their fight. The Ghanaian government remained silent until announcing they would not send a team to Moscow, but Ghanaians who were asked about whether they supported the boycott argued the West did ‘not really deserve much support’ due to their unhelpful attitude in Montreal. Botswanan officials referred to ‘the West as being hypocritical in that they criticized the Nigerian boycott of the Commonwealth Games’, which was also over the New Zealand rugby tour of 1976, but chose to boycott the Soviet Union when it suited their needs.
One of the reasons given by many African countries for not joining the Moscow boycott was the continued Western inaction over apartheid. Britain, as the worst offender, was least likely to get sympathy from African countries when the boycott became a part of the discussion. This was true of the vast majority of African countries who attended the Moscow Games but also of those few allies who joined the American boycott, too. The Soviet Union received much goodwill from African countries due to its vocal criticism of the apartheid regime as well as for the aid it provided to groups attempting to fight it. While some African countries were willing to boycott Moscow in 1980, this did not abate their frustrations over the absence of decisive action against South Africa on the part of Western nations.
The Aftermath
British and American attempts to gain support from African countries for the Moscow boycott were somewhat successful. Fifteen sub-Saharan African countries stayed home, including Ghana, Kenya, and the Ivory Coast. While the boycott debate continued up until the opening of the Olympic Games on July 19, the British Lions team toured South Africa during the two months prior, lost the series 3-1, and thus ‘did the morale of white South Africans no end of good’. The effects of this tour were debated in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office during and after the event. Officials wanted to know how this sporting event would affect British aspirations within Africa and in the Commonwealth.
Britain’s role in southern Africa was increasingly active by 1980. Not only had Britain hosted negotiations over the future of Rhodesia in 1979, it had handed power over to the new Zimbabwean government of Robert Mugabe in April 1980. Britain was also part of an international effort to resolve the border war being waged in Namibia between forces from South Africa, Angola, Cuba, and the South West African People’s Organization (SWAPO).
In a report sent to Lord Carrington, Leahy stated: ‘Superficially at least, the 1980 Lions’ tour did the morale of white South Africans no end of good. It came as a happy distraction from the harsher realities of the contemporary South African scene – boycotts and disaffection in the coloured schools, strikes in the factories, terrorist incidents at Silverton and the SASOL plants, bloody riots in Cape Town, an allegedly Marxist government in Salisbury and continuing fighting in Namibia. For three months people could and did talk nothing but about rugby: other things were relegated to the inside pages of the press’. At the end of his eight-page review of the tour, Leahy concluded that ‘we ourselves can perhaps draw some modest satisfaction from the twin facts that we opposed the tour and yet the tour took place. It may sound cynical to say it, but, leaving aside the wider considerations, in the context of South Africa today I believe both decisions were right’. The greatest fear of anti-apartheid activists was that the Lions tour would encourage white South Africans. Leahy’s report on the situation in South Africa proves that their fears were well placed. After reviewing Leahy’s report, Lord Gordon-Lennox responded:
These tours are seen by many black Africans and other third world countries not only as a blatant disregard for the Gleneagles Agreement but also as an indication that, despite our protestations about abhorring apartheid, Britain remains fundamentally sympathetic to apartheid … Our sporting links with South Africa could therefore undermine our credibility in black Africa and weaken still further our ability to exercise a moderating influence on black African countries over South[ern] African issues.
The South Africa Department in London similarly declared that British ‘policy towards South Africa is surely based on the theory that we should use our contacts to help white South Africans face up to the problems of their country and introduce reforms’. These reforms ‘will hopefully avert violence and bloodshed. We therefore deplore anything which encouraged white South Africans to believe in their invincibility’, such as a victorious rugby tour.
The Lions also created problems over Rhodesia. Mervyn Brown, in his meeting with Abraham Ordia, had indicated that the Lions tour came at an ‘unfortunate time when we shall be hoping to recover the ground we have lost recently over Rhodesia’. By the end of February, Robert Mugabe and his left-wing Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) party had won the first Zimbabwean election and were set to be handed power and independence. The relationship between Britain and Zimbabwe was immediately complicated by rugby and the Lions tour. On the one hand a new, partially integrated Zimbabwean Rugby Union team did tour Britain during the summer and autumn of 1980, playing six matches, with Mugabe’s blessing, which had proven important to the British government. But on the other hand, the Lions tour, which originally included a game in Harare (then Salisbury), was disinvited by the Zimbabwean government due to the South African connection. Instead, a second British amateur team, the Public School Wanderers, was invited to play. But just before the Wanderers were due to take the field, Minister of Sport Nhongo Joice Mujuru walked out of the stadium in what was perceived as an official snub. The Deputy Minister of Sport argued that Zimbabwe had no option but to reject the British team. He argued that a Lions game in Zimbabwe ‘would have been played without any difficulty if it had not attracted such worldwide publicity’. The larger issue was that Zimbabwe had ‘just been reaccepted in the Organization of African Unity and the United Nations and the Supreme Council of Sport in Africa’ and the government could not risk their new connections by playing British teams at this time.
The British Lions tour posed a threat to Commonwealth relationships in several ways. Ordia argued that the tour would harm relations between Nigeria and Britain. Hector Monro thought in the aftermath of the Lions tour that ‘it is certainly possible … African (and Caribbean) feelings might find expression in action prejudicial to the UK’s economic interests and her ability to play a full, and influential, part in the broader activities of the Commonwealth’. At best, FCO officials predicted that there could be a few symbolic resignations from the Commonwealth by African countries over this issue. At worst, they expected that Britain would be forced out of the Commonwealth Games in 1982 or that the Commonwealth might be split between the white dominions and other colonies.
The Commonwealth Games of 1982, due to be hosted in Brisbane, appeared the most likely target for an anti-British boycott. Abraham Ordia had said as much. The Australians expressed their fear at having to choose between an African boycott or not inviting the British teams. In the end, the Brisbane Commonwealth Games proceeded without a boycott or the need to disinvite the British teams. Commonwealth countries waited until the 1986 Edinburgh Games to express their anger. The immediate cause of the walkout was the English inclusion of South African-born athletes Zola Budd and Annette Cowley; ‘at final count, 22 African and Caribbean nations withdrew, along with India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia and Cyprus … Bermuda marched in the Opening ceremony and then withdrew’. But the longer-term issue was Britain’s resumption of sporting contacts with South Africa, namely the British Lions tour and the England tour of South Africa in 1984.
For some British officials, the only hope that the government had of quickly moving on from the Lions debacle was the possibility of a South African tour of New Zealand in 1981. At the announcement of the prospective tour, E.J. Sharland of the Cultural Relations Department suggested, ‘I suppose we could draw some comfort from the thought that a Springbok tour of New Zealand in 1981 would divert some of the African anger from our handling of the Lions’ tour’. But there were other problems:
The outcome could be a very stormy GHOGM [sic] (Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting) in 1981, a 1982 Commonwealth Games with less than its full quota of participants, an attempt to prejudice the New Zealander’s ability to play a full part in Commonwealth affairs and, just possibly one or two protest resignations from the Commonwealth. The price therefore, that the Commonwealth (and New Zealand) might pay for our partial escape from criticism over the Lions’ tour could be very high. This is cold comfort indeed.
A Cold War Boycott
African efforts to remove Britain from the 1980 Olympic Games failed. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan changed the situation rapidly. Instead of Britain being the target of an international boycott, Britain was rallying support for a boycott of Moscow. In the months following the invasion, Britain sought to bring other countries into the protest movement, all the while still refusing to enforce a boycott of South Africa. This hypocrisy angered many in Africa, some accusing Britain of being the ‘greatest collaborator with apartheid sport’.
This case study shows how the Cold War not only amplified the conflict over apartheid, but could also drown it out. Through most of the post-war period, the conflict over apartheid South Africa and southern Africa replicated Cold War tensions: the Americans supported South Africa as a bulwark against Communism and a source of necessary materials; the Soviets and Cubans backed other governments and liberation movements north of South Africa. Each side had an interest in the apartheid struggle and the Soviet Union made full use of its anti-colonial, anti-apartheid rhetoric in the build-up to the Olympics. But in this one case, African unity over anti-apartheid measures was challenged by the immediacy of Afghanistan. This is not to say that countries forgot about Britain’s intransigence, but rather that in the spring of 1980, Africa could not coordinate an effective policy against Britain after the Lions were announced to go on tour.
Britain’s assessment of the impact of the Lions tour and its policy towards South Africa was couched in a Cold War mindset. The justifications for remaining allied with South Africa included that it was a capitalist ally against communism and that it possessed resources vital to that struggle. The British government’s assessment of the aftershocks of the Lions tour also indicated that Britain hoped the Lions tour would not antagonize southern African states. Robert Mugabe’s ZANU had received support from the Kremlin prior to independence and Britain was concerned with the Soviet influence this might engender. Efforts to keep the Commonwealth together, to expand trade links with countries such as Nigeria, and to maintain good diplomatic relations with former colonies, were all part of a British strategy to retain global relevance in the Cold War era. But conflicts over sport were one major way in which the British government aggravated relations with former colonies. By not engaging with anti-apartheid activities and flouting protections such as the Gleneagles Agreement, Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government jeopardized these relationships. Although the invasion of Afghanistan and the American boycott bailed it out of immediate trouble over Olympic participation, perhaps being excluded from the 1980 Olympics would have swayed public and official opinion within Britain.