POLITICS, SPORT AND EDUCATION IN SOUTH AFRICA

Abstract

DURING THE LAST THIRTY YEARS, the pressure to isolate South Africa from international sport has steadily intensified. As a result, South Africa is now excluded from official international competition in all major team sports except rugby. The official reason for exclusion advanced by the various international sporting bodies bears repeating, since it is based not on an abhorrence of the political system of South Africa as such, but on opposition to the political distortion of sporting activity in South Africa: the legal ban on blacks and whites mixing on sports fields and the straitjacket imposed on black sporting development, which has denied basic sporting opportunities and freedoms. The South African government has been slow to react to the growing boycott. During the 1970s a number of initiatives were launched, but to little effect. It was not until the advent of the Botha administration in late 1978 that a more assertive response to the boycott began to emerge. This has now developed into a full-scale international offensive aimed at 'setting the record straight' about the actual sporting conditions now prevailing in South Africa and thereby securing the country's re-admission to international sport. The recent appointment of a sport attache to the South African Embassy in London, and the opening of a South African Sports Office there are indicative of the lengths to which the government and various South African sporting bodies are now prepared to go to regain