From Nairobi to Baden-Baden: African Politics, the International Olympic Committee, and Early Efforts to Censure Apartheid South Africa

Abstract

In July 1963, some three months before sports administrators from around the world were to descend on Nairobi for the International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) annual session, the meeting was in jeopardy. Government officials in Kenya announced that in protest against white minority rule on the African continent, delegates from Portugal and South Africa were to be denied entry visas. Their decision culminated in the eleventh-hour transfer of the IOC session from Nairobi, Kenya, to Baden-Baden, West Germany. Kenyan politicians, on the cusp of ousting British colonial control, were using the Nairobi IOC gathering of 1963 to advance the anti-colonial resolutions of the newly established Organization of African Unity (OAU) in solidarity with Africa’s independent states.