A richly researched and compelling account of Britain’s entanglements with apartheid sport

Michelle Sikes
Center for the Study of Sports in Society at Penn State

The struggle over Britain’s sporting ties with apartheid South Africa remains one of the most compelling case studies in the politics of race, empire and international sport. In British Sporting Relations with Apartheid South Africa: The Politics of Racism and Anti-Racism, 1948-1994, Matthew P. Llewellyn and Toby C. Rider have produced a detailed and ambitious account of the twists and turns of this history. The book moves chronologically through encounters involving multiple sporting festivals and codes, from the Olympics and Commonwealth Games to cricket, rugby, and football, while weaving them into broader narratives of British domestic politics, foreign policy and the global anti-apartheid movement. Unlike many studies that focus mainly on the activity of anti-apartheid activists, Llewellyn and Rider also devote attention to their opponents, the so-called “bridge-builders,” who sought to preserve sporting relations with white South Africa. By placing advocates and opponents of the boycott in the same frame, the book advances our understanding of how sport became a forum for competing visions of race, politics and Britain’s place in the world.

The introductory chapter distinguishes the book immediately. Where much of the existing literature emphasizes the anti-apartheid cause, Llewellyn and Rider devote energy to analyzing the sympathies of Britons who defended sporting ties with South Africa. These “bridge-builders” were motivated by a mix of racial assumptions, imperial nostalgia and romantic ideals of sport as apolitical. Grounded in an impressive command of the literature as well as extensive archival research, the authors contend that resistance to the boycott in Britain was deeply rooted in the nation’s political culture.

Anti-apartheid activists argued that hosting South African teams “amplified the issue of domestic racism”. Black Britons, who situated their struggles for citizenship and belonging alongside global movements for civil rights, took “specific aim at apartheid South Africa”.

The first chapter carefully traces the emergence of the boycott concept. Its origins lay with radical clergy such as Trevor Huddleston, who, as early as 1956, called for a cultural and sporting boycott of South African sport. Huddleston’s appeals influenced Dennis Brutus, whose activism culminated in the establishment of the South African Sports Association and later, the South African Non-Racial Olympic Committee. The narrative makes clear the faction-ridden networks that linked British anti-colonial clergy, exiled activists and African campaigners. Brutus diverged from Huddleston by insisting that international competition should remain open to Black South African athletes, a distinction that reflected debates over the meaning of non-racial sport and the strategies for achieving it. This step-by-step reconstruction of the boycott’s genesis is one of the book’s early strengths.

Another theme of the book’s early chapters is the evolving tenor of protest. In the 1950s and early 1960s, demonstrations were, in the authors’ words, “orderly and conducted according to the conventions of civil society protests” (p. 68). By the end of the decade, however, patience with the “overlords of sport” (p. 117) had worn thin. The Stop the Seventy Tour (STST) campaign encapsulated the change. As Llewellyn and Rider note, the STST was “a different type of movement, young, bold, militant, and unrestrained by the conventions and limitations of respectable civil society protest” (p. 121). Predominantly student-led, the STST drew on a diverse coalition of supporters, from local organizers to trade unions. Its decentralized structure, which allowed communities to devise their own tactics, frustrated police and sporting authorities and made the campaign unpredictable and dynamic.

The 1969/70 South African rugby tour and ensuing protests also shed light on racial tensions within Britain itself. Anti-apartheid activists argued that hosting South African teams “amplified the issue of domestic racism” (p. 125). Black Britons, who situated their struggles for citizenship and belonging alongside global movements for civil rights, took “specific aim at apartheid South Africa” (p. 125). This was a fleeting moment of multiracial collaboration, one not seen again until the 1980s, and in another recurring theme, the authors argue that throughout these campaigns, entanglements with apartheid sport revealed Britain’s own domestic racial dilemmas.

In the wake of the STST’s protests that included thousands of demonstrators, creative disguises, pitch invasions, and even an activist chaining himself to the Springboks’ team bus, the planned 1970 South African cricket tour loomed large. Llewellyn and Rider detail the tensions between the Harold Wilson’s Labour government, the Cricket Council, and anti-apartheid activists. Conservative leaders such as Edward Heath and sporting figures such as English cricket captain Rachael Heyhoe Flint defended hosting the South Africans as a matter of law, order and respectability, while trade unions and the Supreme Council for Sport in Africa (SCSA) threatened boycotts of the upcoming Commonwealth Games if the cricket tour went ahead.

Wilson eventually intervened to cancel the tour, citing the risks to race relations and diplomacy. Yet less than a month later, Heath’s Conservatives won the general election. The authors are cautious about drawing causal links, but the juxtaposition raises questions. Certainly the rugby tour that required the protection of hundreds of law enforcement officers, followed by Wilson’s personal termination of the cricket tour, shows how in Britain sport and politics were intertwined, despite bridge builders’ claims to the contrary.

The book then pivots to the 1970s, a decade of stasis in Britain and reconfiguration in South Africa. South African Prime Minister John Vorster advanced his policy of “multinationalism,” allowing different racial groups to compete as separate “nations” within South Africa. Many British administrators welcomed these superficial reforms. Meanwhile the domestic boycott movement faltered. In 1974, the Labour government, having previously intervened to stop the South African cricket tour, failed to prevent a British Lions rugby team from competing in South Africa, adhering instead to the principle of non-intervention in the movement of British nationals.

The 1977 Gleneagles Agreement, signed by Commonwealth heads of government, largely extended this stance, committing signatories to “discourage” sporting links with South Africa. Britain’s role, often overshadowed by Canada and New Zealand, was more significant than is usually acknowledged. Yet even as Gleneagles was signed in Scotland, a South African tennis team was competing in Eastbourne on the south coast of England. Margaret Thatcher came to power the following year, and bridge-builders began testing Gleneagles’ limits.

Its synthesis of scholarship and archival depth, combined with the integration of underexplored episodes, ensures its place as a major contribution to both sport history and modern British history.

The chapters on the 1980s are among the book’s richest and most original contributions. Llewellyn and Rider integrate the rise of Thatcherism, the New Right and rebel tours into a narrative that spans both domestic and international politics. Figures such as John Carlisle, dubbed “the Peter Hain of bridge-building” (p. 213), show how pro-South Africa advocacy resonated with millions of Britons. The Conservative government’s reluctance to enforce Gleneagles, its selective “discouragement” of tours and its double standards, zealously backing the U.S.-led boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics while downplaying tours to South Africa, are laid bare.

Rebel tours, lavishly funded by South African authorities desperate to break isolation, exposed fault lines within British sport and wider society. Opportunists such as Geoffrey Boycott denounced apartheid in one setting while joining a rebel tour to South Africa soon after, while local councils mounted resistance, denying facilities and mobilizing grassroots activism. Llewellyn and Rider’s exploration of regional dynamics in Wales and Scotland, particularly around rugby, adds a valuable, underexplored perspective to the story.

The breadth of British Sporting Relations is impressive. By covering multiple sports, the book avoids the narrowness of accounts that concentrate on a single code. This breadth demonstrates the pervasiveness of apartheid as a sporting question, one that extended from international contexts to local, county, and regional engagements. The book’s integration of British political history, from Wilson’s Labour government to Thatcher’s New Right, makes it as much a contribution to British political history as to sport history. Attention to Black British responses, generational divides, regional politics and individuals such as Enoch Powell situate sport within debates over race, empire and identity playing out in postwar Britain.

Although this book will no doubt become an essential reference on British sporting relations with apartheid South Africa, a few questions remain. It would have been helpful to include more context on the size of the Black British population, and how those numbers changed over time. Women’s sport receives only passing mention, apart from the case of Zola Budd’s eleventh-hour acceptance as a British citizen ahead of the 1984 Olympics and brief references to women’s cricket. Para sport is also largely absent.

Despite these caveats, Llewellyn and Rider have written a richly researched and compelling account of Britain’s entanglements with apartheid sport. The book demonstrates that sport was bound up in and revealing of debates about Britain’s racial politics and post-imperial identity. Its synthesis of scholarship and archival depth, combined with the integration of underexplored episodes, ensures its place as a major contribution to both sport history and modern British history.

As a final note, the title is apt. This is a book about “British sporting relations” with South Africa, told with clarity and authority. It reminds us, in Walt Kelly’s sardonic phrase, that “we have met the enemy, and he is us” (to reword Powell’s “enemies within” utterance, which threads throughout the book). For Britain, the history of sporting ties with apartheid is also one of confronting its own legacies of race, empire and inequality.

Copyright © Michelle Sikes 2025