‘In the Interest of Reporting the Facts, and Not the Fiction, of South African Sport’: Race, Netball, and the Struggle for Social Justice in South Africa

Abstract

Despite its national footprint, netball is a largely neglected area of South African sports history. Its intersections with race, gender and apartheid, the black struggle for social justice, international boycotts, rebel tours and local politics in general, remained an unmapped landscape. Unsurprisingly, this aided the construction and persistence of several myths about apartheid netball. This study debunks the existing myths and foregrounds the establishment sport’s past behaviour and the struggle of generations of black players and administrators (male and female) to advance the cause of social justice and the de-racialization of their chosen sport.