FT MAGAZINE In late September 1961, Fifa, football’s global governing body, and Uefa, its European counterpart, held a series of meetings in a stately red-brick building behind Westminster Abbey in London. During days of discussions, 67 Fifa member states considered the growing problem of their stance on South Africa’s apartheid regime. The resulting decision to suspend South Africa from international football, arrived at on September 28/29, was the first significant step in what would become a much wider boycott – and would hold until apartheid collapsed almost 30 years later.
In 1956, Theophilus Ebenhaezer Dönges outlined South Africa’s apartheid sports policy while serving as interior minister. The policy prohibited mixed-race sports teams in South Africa, and stated that foreign countries playing international games there must send an all-white team. South Africa was duly banned from the African Cup of Nations, but, on the international sports stage, it continued unfettered.
However, by the early 1960s, western attitudes were shifting. The 1960 Sharpeville massacre, in which South African police opened fire on peaceful black protesters, shocked the international community. In the sporting world, newly independent African countries such as Ghana and Nigeria were joining Fifa and making their views heard.
“It was very significant,” Peter Alegi, co-author of South Africa and the Global Game: Football, Apartheid and Beyond, says of Fifa’s decision. “It was the first major indictment of the apartheid regime, and it was done in the world’s most popular sport.” Others soon followed suit – South Africa was barred from the Olympic Games in 1964, from international cricket in 1970, and, on and off, from tennis’s Davis Cup.
The sports boycott expanded into a wider cultural boycott in the late 1970s, and increasingly tough economic sanctions followed in the 1980s. By the time South Africa finally released Nelson Mandela from jail in 1990 and started to dismantle apartheid, the country was a pariah state.
South Africa rejoined Fifa in 1992 and is preparing to host next year’s world cup. This has particular resonance for the country’s black community, among whom football remains the most popular sport. When Fifa president Sepp Blatter announced in 2004 that South Africa would host the event, Nelson Mandela, then aged 85, wept with joy. “I feel like a young man of 15,” he said.
