‘Resolving “the South Africa problem”’: Transnational activism, ideology and race in the Olympic movement, 1960–91

Abstract

When the International Olympic Committee (IOC) expelled South Africa from the Olympic Movement in the late 1960s, it precipitated a series of diplomatic actions by other organisations that soon left South Africa internationally isolated. Similarly, when the IOC readmitted the country back to the Olympic family nearly 30 years later, this was swiftly followed by corresponding actions by the wider international community that eventually culminated in the country's full diplomatic reincorporation. While the IOC's decisions were watershed foreign-policy moments in the international community's stance towards apartheid South Africa, they were the product of a lengthy transnational campaign, one that often led to some bitter division within the ranks of the IOC. This essay focuses on the transnational activism that sparked those actions by the IOC, and explores the ideological underpinnings and political dimensions of an advocacy campaign that spanned three decades. This campaign was composed of a loose and variable coalition of African, Third World and Communist states in the Olympic movement. Although largely ignored by most mainstream analyses of the anti-apartheid movement, the lobbying by this coalition constituted one of the earliest and most sustained campaigns against the apartheid regime and pre-empted many of the later achievements of the anti-apartheid movement. The essay explores the relationship between social protest and ideology in international sport and how those elements unfolded in the transnational campaign against the inclusion of apartheid South Africa in the Olympic family.