Sports Illustrated Article on Apartheid and Sports in South Africa

From this week's issue of Sports Illustrated, dated August 18, 2008:

The Full Nelson: How a sports-savvy Nelson Mandela used rugby to unify his troubled land
By John Carlin

Nelson Mandela once said that sports had the power "to change the world ... to inspire ... to unite people." The Chinese seem to have taken Mandela at his word, using the Olympic Games to project an image of their nation as a rising global superpower, while uniting and inspiring their own people around a vision of China as a country triumphantly on the march. Whether China succeeds in these goals, and in acquiring greater international respectability, remains to be seen. But make no mistake: Sports can exercise a powerful force in pulling a country together. Mandela himself showed how at a game he attended—the final of the 1995 Rugby World Cup—a year after he became president of South Africa. He later described it to me as the tensest episode of his entire life....

Click here for full article.

Great article from Sports Illustrated this week. The ability of sports to unify societies, cultures, races, and more never ceases to amaze me. Mr. Carlin's article hits on some of the same points I made in a previous essay I wrote on the role of sports in eliminating apartheid in South Africa. (You can read that essay here.) One point that I think Mr. Carlin misses, however, is that Nelson Mandela wouldn't have had the opportunity he had at the 1995 Rugby World Cup if it hadn't been for the efforts of such groups as the African National Congress, the Progressive Federal Party, and South African Council of Sport. Those groups used rugby as a forum for protesting the apartheid rules, even making apartheid and rugby election issues in 1981. International sporting boycotts of the all-white South African rugby team directly led to changes in the South African racial relations establishment, mostly because the Afrikaners (white South Africans) realized that their apartheid rules prevented them from competing on the world stage. In fact, the 1995 World Cup was merely the symbolic culmination of decades of efforts of using sports to end apartheid in South Africa, and even then, problems persisted in the form of social segregation, riots, and the like. Make no mistake - Mr. Carlin's points about Nelson Mandela's efforts are largely correct. He just shouldn't ignore the efforts of others before Nelson Mandela who also contributed to ending apartheid via sports. The 1995 Rugby World Cup was a seminal moment in South African race relations; hopefully the 2010 Football (Soccer) World Cup will have a similar unifying impact on South African society.

(Originally written on 08/17/08)