The study of international sporting boycotts has become something of a cottage industry in recent decades. A growing body of historians, heralding from a variety of subdisciplines, have examined a range of efforts targeting specific countries or events, carefully dissecting how the initiatives unfolded, who was involved, and why it all happened in the first place. Importantly, some scholars have assessed whether the boycott lever succeeded. In doing so, they invariably highlight, intentionally or not, the complex connection between the phenomenon of modern sport and the intricate dynamics of local and global affairs. Most sporting boycotts, it turns out, do not seem to work. Efforts, for instance, to prevent athletes from attending the “Nazi Olympics” in 1936 proved largely ineffectual. The infamous boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics, due to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan not long before, failed to achieve its stated goal: to compel Soviet forces to withdraw. If we can say anything for certain, it is that enforcing a sports boycott is astonishingly difficult because it tends to require a whole network of actors, state and private, cooperating across national and transnational lines.Footnote 1
The sports boycott of apartheid South Africa, lasting from the late 1950s until the early 1990s, was characterized by all these same complexities. In fact, it was possibly the most complicated boycott movement in modern history. But unlike other similar endeavors, to some degree it actually worked. Over time, it forced the white minority regime to make changes to the racial segregation that defined its sporting system, even if some charged that these changes were mere window dressing. More significantly, it was also part of a broader array of sanctions that gradually contributed to the collapse of apartheid altogether and ushered in South Africa’s first truly democratic election in 1994. Like other boycotts, too, efforts to isolate South Africa from international sport were never harmonious and always struggled for unity between activists, governments, and power blocs. Creating a shared policy to implement the boycott between state actors proved especially meddlesome, as it involved massaging a whole gamut of different political traditions, ideologies, and strategic differences.Footnote 2 Nevertheless, one such endeavor to bridge these variables was The Commonwealth Declaration on Apartheid in Sport, a joint statement of policy better known as the Gleneagles Agreement.
Brokered in 1977 during the weekend retreat of the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting at the Gleneagles Hotel in Perthshire, Scotland, this historic agreement sought to defuse the fallout from an explosive New Zealand rugby union tour to South Africa in 1976. With New Zealand’s Prime Minister, Robert Muldoon, refusing to discourage the tour, African states boycotted the 1976 Montreal Summer Olympics—hoping in vain for New Zealand’s exclusion—and then promised to do the same to the 1978 Commonwealth Games in Edmonton, Canada. With the issue alarming the Canadians and threatening to split the Commonwealth, the member states, including the conference host and British Prime Minister James Callaghan compelled Muldoon to commit to a written agreement on sporting links with Pretoria and to do so in the remote Perthshire hills.Footnote 3
When formally announced in June 1977, the agreement addressed long-held views on human rights and antiracism articulated by the Commonwealth and directed at the white supremacist regime in South Africa. The decisive words read that the Commonwealth leaders “accepted it as the urgent duty of each of their Governments vigorously to combat the evil of apartheid by withholding any form of support for, and by taking every practical step to discourage, contact or competition by their nationals with sporting organizations, teams or sportsmen from South Africa or from any other country where sports are organized on the basis of race, colour, or ethnic origin.”Footnote 4 A moment of immense consequence in the history of South Africa’s sporting isolation, this settlement saved the Edmonton Games (only Nigeria boycotted) and, just as importantly, signaled a significant shift in the nature and scope of the boycott movement at the transnational level. From this point on, a more militant and determined international—and especially African-based—opposition increasingly thrust the sports boycott into global corridors of power, turning the movement into an issue of diplomacy and statecraft.Footnote 5
Reflecting on the significance of the agreement, the secretary general of the Commonwealth, Shridath Ramphal, described it as a “substantial achievement in formulating a collective Commonwealth approach to this particular aspect of the international campaign against apartheid.”Footnote 6 Ramphal never argued that the agreement was perfect. It was only an “agreement.” No one signed anything. It had obvious flaws and received a good deal of criticism for its weaknesses. It was impossible to avoid the fact that the language only asked governments to “discourage” sporting ties with South Africa, not to categorically prevent them.Footnote 7 Regardless, there was still something powerfully symbolic in it all, mainly because it included several of South Africa’s most important sporting contacts—Britain, New Zealand, and Australia. Athletes and teams, professional or amateur, elite or high school, pursuing sporting interactions with white South Africa could now be blandished with a letter from the government pointing out that they were in violation of an international accord. For supporters of the boycott, commented the British Foreign Secretary David Owen, the agreement “assumed the sanctity of a biblical text.”Footnote 8
Was it effective, though? From the British perspective, few studies have asked this question in a comprehensive manner. This is regrettable, as Britain presents a fascinating case study in understanding the challenges of collective action at the local and global levels, mostly because it served as a nucleus for anti-apartheid activity. Within two years of the agreement being struck by a Labour government, the Tories came to power under the leadership of Margaret Thatcher. Until the end of her time in office (1990), Britain’s application of the agreement became more controversial and divisive than it ever had during the Labour administration, as critics zeroed in on the new Prime Minister’s interpretation of what “every practical step” represented or required. The ensuing controversy raised the profile of the sport boycott to a point it had not reached since the late 1960s and the explosive Stop the Seventy Tour. The number of letters to Thatcher and her ministers, both domestic and overseas, swell the files at the National Archives in Kew. No other era of the boycott comes close. The level of sustained newspaper coverage was also remarkable. Although there are several studies that explore how and why Thatcher’s government chose to apply Gleneagles, none consider how the agreement was interpreted, debated, and contested from multiple perspectives.Footnote 9 In this article, we examine what motivated such different reactions to Gleneagles in Britain and the Commonwealth and why, ultimately, Thatcher could not seem to please anyone.
Thatcher, South Africa, and the Gleneagles Agreement
When the Congolese sports administrator Jean-Claude Ganga said in 1990 that the “history of the struggle for the abolition of racial discrimination in sport in South Africa is a long and eventful one,” he did not exaggerate.Footnote 10 Britain’s part in this story was pivotal.Footnote 11 The idea for a coordinated international embargo of South African teams and athletes originated, for the most part, from the protestations of British clergy in the 1950s. By recognizing that sports represented something of a religion to the white population in South Africa, they proposed the novel idea of turning this obsession for competitive games into a tool against the regime at large.Footnote 12 In the ensuing decades, Britain became the hub of the global anti-apartheid movement, as various groups, often filled with exiled South Africans, used the country as a base to wage a propaganda war against Pretoria and to promote sporting isolation. At the vanguard of these efforts was the South African Non-Racial Olympic Committee (SAN-ROC) and the Anti-Apartheid Movement (AAM), both based in London.Footnote 13
The struggle reached fever pitch from 1968 to 1970, after controversy enveloped a proposed English cricket tour of South Africa (1968)—now known as the D’Oliveira affair—and then South African rugby (1968–69) and cricket (1970) tours of Great Britain. An ensemble of groups and the Peter Hain-led Stop the Seventy Tour Committee helped to stir a public outcry, organizing civil disobedience protests, rallies, and various other disruptive tactics. In the end, a truncated rugby tour occurred amid a wave of violent demonstrations, and obdurate English cricket officials begrudgingly cancelled the 1970 cricket tour. By this stage, other powerful sports organizations—including the International Olympic Committee (IOC)—had also moved to ban South Africa from events under their jurisdiction, pushing the nation into near total isolation. So fierce was the campaign to “stop the seventy tour” that the Labour-led British government, under Prime Minister Harold Wilson, forced itself into the fray. Working behind the scenes with cricket authorities, government officials urged the cancellation of the tour on the grounds that the matches would cause a great deal of social and political upheaval.Footnote 14 This intervention, although only advisory, compromised Whitehall’s traditional policy of separating politics from sport, as did its decision to withhold government funds, distributed through the British Sports Council, to any team requiring financial assistance for interactions with white South African opposition.Footnote 15
So effective had the boycott become that some of its leaders estimated that South Africa’s complete isolation from international sport was almost a formality. Yet the issue never really faded away. It still flared up, on an intermittent basis, when athletes or teams broke the boycott during the 1970s, as was the case when the New Zealand All Blacks toured the apartheid state in 1976. This, as we detailed earlier, led Wilson’s successor, James Callaghan, along with the leaders of other Commonwealth countries, to commit to the Gleneagles Agreement and thereby take “every practical step to discourage contact or competition” between British athletes and those from South Africa. Callaghan and his cabinet celebrated Gleneagles as a diplomatic win, boasting that they were in lock step with the rest of the Commonwealth on sporting links with South Africa and adhering to the same rules and principles. This also came at no cost. They ceded no ground. The agreement dovetailed neatly with the existing Labour policy: discourage tours through communication with teams and withhold government funding where appropriate. And until the end of 1978, Gleneagles appeared to be working. The AAM’s annual report celebrated that due to the Labour government’s adherence to the Gleneagles Agreement, the “level of sporting relations with South Africa” had “continued to decline.”Footnote 16
The political scene shifted, however, when Thatcher won the general election in 1979. Espousing a platform infused by the language of the “New Right,” she asked voters to put their “faith” in “free markets” and “limited government,” the spirit of laissez faire.Footnote 17 The issue of South Africa was one of several challenges she encountered that had a “distinctively postimperial dimension,” and one that caused a great deal of friction in the Commonwealth.Footnote 18 Yet her approach to this ongoing problem was not necessarily different than that of previous British leaders, be they Labour or Conservative. Since the establishment of apartheid rule in 1948, Britain had consistently opposed comprehensive sanctions against South Africa in the United Nations (UN) and the Commonwealth. In fact, the consensus on sporting exchanges settled in Gleneagles was one of the few areas where action had been taken by the time Thatcher took office. Like her predecessors in number 10 Downing Street, she expressed her strong opposition to apartheid while also seeking to preserve Britain’s substantial economic links with Pretoria, through trade and investment, and its long-standing strategic and diplomatic importance, largely tied to the politics of the Cold War. For Thatcher, South Africa was a haven for free market economics on a continent that seemed to be falling into the hands of radical Marxist leaders aligned with the Soviet Union.Footnote 19
Beyond these staid pillars of policy, the Prime Minister also repeated a series of arguments that had become common place among Conservatives since the 1960s, and most specifically from those who lent to the right of the Party. Time and again, Thatcher questioned why South Africa should be treated differently from other controversial regimes with a record of human rights violations, noting that African states and communist bloc countries were equally reprehensible. The white leadership (or the more moderate Chief Buthelezi) may not be perfect, but it was a safer option than the African National Congress (ANC), which she famously labeled a “typical terrorist organization.” Even more fundamentally, she doubted whether sanctions would actually work, lecturing that such measures would only bring additional suffering to the Black population and cause further discord between races. Rather than isolate South Africa, Thatcher believed that contact and dialogue (or “constructive engagement”) was far more likely to lead to positive change and perhaps even a power-sharing constitution. Indeed, she viewed Presidents Botha and then de Klerk as men taking the country in the right direction and invited the former to Britain in 1984, the first official visit of a South African leader to Whitehall for 23 years.Footnote 20
Given these views, all of which Thatcher spoke of openly, it is easy to see why there were high expectations among conservatives in 1979 that she would not simply accept, or follow, what Callaghan had agreed to two years earlier in Scotland.Footnote 21 The previous Tory government, under Edward Heath during 1970–74, had ignored Harold Wilson’s position on sporting contacts with South Africa by encouraging links and even funding them.Footnote 22 It seems fair to say that Thatcher would never have committed to Gleneagles if given the choice. But when she came to office, it could not be ignored. As far back as March 1978, the Tory Party prepared for how it would face such a moment. The Southern Africa Policy Group assessed that an “incoming Conservative administration should not make the mistake of at first adopting a hard-line non-interventionist policy towards sporting links with South Africa, only to be forced later by Commonwealth pressure … to make a humiliating climb down, as in the case of Mr. Muldoon’s Government in New Zealand.”Footnote 23 Although Party strategists clearly preferred to withdraw from Gleneagles or to temper its language, they acknowledged that this could only happen at the appropriate time. Instead, they essentially followed the same policy as the one bequeathed by Callaghan: discourage the tours and withhold Sports Council funds.Footnote 24 For the remainder of the decade, the policy was an almost constant irritant to Thatcher and her ministers, largely because her position on what constituted “every practical step” was too inadequate for some and too heavy handed for others.
The British Sporting Community and the Bridge-Building Thesis
Thatcher’s decision to uphold the government’s commitment to Gleneagles never came close to satisfying the majority of the people she governed. In fact, it was greeted with a great deal of opposition, especially within the British sporting community, the main target of the policy. Although most British governing bodies for sport followed the international consensus on excluding South Africa from official events, they only did so to avoid rocking the boat. Rugby union was the notable exception. Thatcher had hardly settled into number 10 Downing Street when British rugby teams broke the boycott again with a series of controversial interactions by club sides traveling to South Africa, a mixed-race Barbarians 15 visiting Britain, and then a British and Irish Lions tour scheduled for the new year.Footnote 25 These contacts proved to be headache for the Prime Minister, but rugby was not the only sport to defy Gleneagles. There is ample evidence to prove that athletes from numerous other sports, from the marginal to the mainstream, refused to heed the AAM’s impassioned pleas to avoid contacts with South Africa.
Measuring the number of sporting transactions between British and South African athletes and teams in the Thatcher years is almost impossible, but we can at least get a sense of the scale through the methodical approach to tracing interactions that were released by the UN Special Committee Against Apartheid in May 1981, the “Register of Sports Contacts with South Africa.” This “blacklist,” as critics called it, was published every six months and named and shamed people who breached the terms of the Gleneagles Agreement. Seventy-two British athletes appeared on the first register, more than from any other country, and this trend persisted for the remainder of the decade.Footnote 26
The logic behind this continual refusal to follow Gleneagles in the British sporting community is complicated. At the risk of oversimplifying a position that people justified in different ways and for different reasons, this urge to “build bridges” between both countries was generally supported by two essential strands of thought. First, its adherents tended to follow a Victorian notion of sport, passed down almost without alteration from one generation to the next, inspired by nineteenth century principles of laissez faire economics and private liberty. Guided by this philosophy, they argued that sport and politics should never be mixed and that sport possessed, through its democratic nature and reverence of fair play, the capacity to influence White South Africans, and in particular Afrikaners, and guide them toward a more equitable way of living and governing. So prevalent did this mind-set become in Britain that it soon inspired a catch-all term for those committed to sporting links. Thus, if you favored playing South Africa over boycotting them, you came to be known as a “bridge-builder.”Footnote 27
A second, but less overtly publicized, aspect of bridge-building addressed the strong cultural and historical ties between Britain and South Africa, and especially with the English-speaking Whites. Britain, of course, had played a significant historical role in establishing White settler rule in South Africa. The strong sentimental ties between the countries was constantly nourished by the mass migration of people back and forth and also fortified by a feeling that English-speaking Whites were loyal to the crown and had proved as much by fighting for the allies in the Second World War. Notably, a sizeable body of bridge-builders had close friends, family, and substantial investments in South Africa; they were not defending sporting links with some distant people about whom they knew little but with those whom they recognized, in clear racial terms, as “kith and kin” or “British stock.” Rejecting the arguments and protestations of anti-apartheid campaigners committed to Gleneagles, Pro-Pretoria Britons boasted that they knew the “real” South Africa, a country of vast natural beauty, high standards of living for Whites, and a place where an appropriate racial hierarchy prevailed.Footnote 28 Sporting tours and competitions, especially in cricket and rugby, nourished the sentimental ties of “Britishness,” and celebrated a cherished past of uninterrupted historical tradition. The beginning of apartheid rule, the anti-British attitudes of the Afrikaner-led National Party, and the Republic of South Africa’s departure from the Commonwealth in 1960 may have dampened these feelings, but it did not completely extinguish them.Footnote 29
It is fair to assess that many of these arguments would have resonated with Thatcher and that bridge-building shared many basic traits with constructive engagement. They were essentially identical. Yet Thatcher herself never showed much interest in sport, unlike previous Tory leaders such as Edward Heath or Alec Douglas Home. Her personal thoughts on the sporting boycott we do not know. It is interesting, then, that her Foreign Secretary, Geoffrey Howe, suggests that Thatcher’s ideas on South Africa were “derived” mainly “via Twickenham,” the home of the English national rugby team, and the Gleneagles resort, “the golf course, not the Agreement.”Footnote 30 This is undoubtably a reference to Thatcher’s husband, Denis, who had a strong emotional connection to the Republic. Having visited the country on several occasions, Denis had a keen sense of the land and its geography, he toured many of the game reserves, made many friends there, and waxed lyrical about the beauty of the Cape and the vast grandeur of the veld. A keen athlete and sports fan his whole life, Denis sometimes took his wife to games at Twickenham, and like most rugby fans he was “totally opposed to the Gleneagles Agreement.”Footnote 31 Not one to seek the spotlight, he always tried to keep his opinions on South Africa to himself and rarely made public statements on the issue, even if in 1979 he raised something of a stir in the press by openly supporting the Lions tour.Footnote 32
The point here is that Thatcher was most likely aware of the feeling in the British sporting community and was probably not surprised that they ignored Gleneagles. She also had no intention of punishing them too severely for it. She applied the agreement in the most minimal way. If a team visited South Africa, “every practical step” meant sending an official letter to the organization in question and the denial of government funds that most teams never asked for in the first place. When critics asked for her to act with more force, by preventing the entry or exit of teams from the country, she defended that such measures were impossible in a “free society,” which in fairness had always been the official British position.Footnote 33 What is perhaps more telling is that Thatcher rarely criticized teams for going to South Africa, including the notorious boycott busting rebel cricket tours of 1982 and 1990. The notion, in particular, that the cricketers headed to South Africa to make money, for some a living wage, surely resonated with Thatcher and the ideas behind her entire economic agenda. As the Guardian journalist, Frank Keating, later reflected, by avoiding a denunciation of the rebels, the Prime Minister “was almost certainly celebrating a nice bit of blatant ‘market forces Thatcherism.’”Footnote 34
The Conservative Party and the Pro-Pretoria Lobby
In tandem with the British sporting community, a large number of Tory MPs stood on the side of bridge-building and used parliament as a forum to express it. The explanation for this is simple enough, as it is easy to connect the Conservative Party and British sport, especially the old boy network of cricket and rugby. Many Tories attended elite public schools, played both games in their youth, and still followed each sport as the devoted fan often does. Some Conservative MPs were members of the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) and the English Rugby Football Union (RFU) and mixed in the same social world. When defending sporting links with South Africa, like other bridge-builders they tended to summon a combination of history and tradition to buttress their point, easily dismissing the case for boycotts as an exercise without logic or credibility.Footnote 35 Still, this led to a certain amount of strain in the party, as it conflicted with the Prime Minister’s stated policy, not to mention with a growing body of Tories that believed South Africa should be held accountable for its extraordinary position in domestic and foreign affairs.
Some of the most influential speakers to articulate the bridge-building view came from the right wing of the Conservative Party and were members of the extra parliamentary pressure group, the Monday Club. There may have been disappointment from Monder Clubbers with the Prime Minister’s decision to reach a settlement on Rhodesian independence in 1979, but on the matter of South Africa, as Patrick Wall MP put it, Thatcher had “all the right ideas.”Footnote 36 Thus, the Pro-Pretoria lobby grew increasingly aghast about Thatcher’s stubborn refusal to drop Gleneagles and to keep applying the policy of “every practical step.” The loudest in this battalion was, beyond doubt, the Monday Clubber and Tory MP for Luton West, John Carlisle. With close ties to the old boy network and a member of the MCC, Carlisle visited South Africa at regular intervals—sometimes paid for by Pretoria, sometimes by White South African sporting bodies—and lauded his personal knowledge of the Republic over those who had never been. After visiting the township of Soweto, he famously said that it was “not as bad as it is painted. Parts are quite unpleasant, but then so are parts of Luton.”Footnote 37
There were two general themes to his cause as presented to the press, parliament, and anyone who would listen. First, he and other leading figures in the Tory establishment associated anti-apartheid with broader manifestations of chaos and disorder afflicting postwar Britain—frequently blaming liberals, students, radical clergy, and immigrants as the root cause. He charged that leaders of the boycott were aligned with the Soviet Union and used the agreement as a political tool to “blackmail” Britain into isolating South Africa.Footnote 38 On one occasion, Carlisle blustered, “It is to the shame of the Government that they continue to support the agreement. They have allied themselves to a cause which is unashamedly Left-wing and, in some cases, Moscow-inspired.”Footnote 39
His second main argument revolved around the issue of change. For Carlisle, South Africa had for some years been in the process of fundamentally reforming its racist sporting system, so much so that the Gleneagles Agreement no longer applied.Footnote 40 He pointed to the “numerous neutral observers” who had witnessed these reforms, including the British Sports Council, which sent its own fact-finding mission to South Africa in 1980 and published a report noting the various instances of nonracial sport that they had encountered.Footnote 41 For years to come, he and other bridge-builders referenced the Sports Council’s report when defending South Africa’s cause. Even White South African sports officials cited the document when trying to overturn their suspensions and bans from international federations. The reality is, however, that the Sports Council’s recommendations were never going to change the status of the global boycott, and Thatcher knew that too. Any changes South Africa might have made or would make to its sporting infrastructure were, by 1980, almost completely irrelevant as a strategy to end isolation. The global coalition behind the boycott would only sanction South Africa’s readmission if apartheid itself ceased to exist.Footnote 42
Undeterred, Carlisle kept on pushing the issue in parliament and through personal communications with Thatcher. The release of the UN register, however, marked a tipping point. Almost immediately he formed a new group, Freedom in Sport (FIS), with a few other hardline bridge-builders, the most prominent being the golfer, Tommie Campbell, the former Irish rugby player and Lions manager, Syd Miller, former rugby star, Jeff Butterfield, and then, a little later, Lord Chalfont, an Independent MP. Combining the bridge-builder thesis with a strong dose of Thatcherism, FIS claimed to defend the “individuals choice to play or not to play sport in any particular country and against a team or other sporting individual.” Although the leaders of the group claimed to be “catholic” in their interests and dedicated to defending the freedom of athletes across the planet, they clearly focused on maintaining sporting links with South Africa and barely made the news for work on any other matter. In 1988, the group was renamed Freedom in Sport International.Footnote 43
With Thatcher reticent to denounce Carlisle’s activities, the controversial MP sought to move beyond criticism of the government’s policy to proactively undermining it, including an eminently newsworthy, yet unsuccessful, campaign to compel the MCC to send a touring team to South Africa in 1983/84.Footnote 44 The Minister of Sport, Neil MacFarlane, noted a clear divide in the party over the issue, something Thatcher did nothing to address. In February 1983, he wrote that FIS “is growing in membership and interest” and that “more and more Conservative MPs” were “criticizing” the government’s ongoing support of Gleneagles and are now “urging” for tours to take place between Britain and South Africa. He said this problem was compounded by the fact that “there is quite a groundswell” of support for ending the boycott in the mainstream press—he listed the Daily Mail, the Daily Telegraph, the Sun, and the Times, but could well have added several others—and he had “no doubt that Conservative voters do not like the Gleneagles Agreement.”Footnote 45 With Thatcher largely deferring responsibility on government policy with respect to Gleneagles to him, Carlisle and MacFarlane sparred regularly in parliament, with the former giving the latter an “A rating” for “persistence in pursuit of an issue.”Footnote 46 This unrelenting series of debates left MacFarlane to conclude that “Rugby union’s links with South Africa have caused more debate in the House, more arguments within the Commonwealth, and been given more column inches in newspapers than just about any other sports-related topic I can think of, with the exception of soccer hooliganism.”Footnote 47
Historian Ewen Green notes that Thatcher’s natural affinity with the right of her party could be discerned, quite vividly, when it came to her broader policy on South Africa.Footnote 48 She knew that the government’s position on sporting ties was problematic. The disconnect between “constructive engagement” and the Gleneagles Agreement was obvious. The two policies were simply incompatible. Thatcher tried to massage the dilemma with a little subtlety. “We have chosen … to try to promote peaceful change [in South Africa] through dialogue, encouragement and example,” she explained in a communication with Ian Llyod MP, a Tory bridge-builder. “But there are areas of contact where we, along with the majority of other nations, have thought it right to accept certain constraints—defence and nuclear collaboration are examples. The 1977 Commonwealth Statement on Apartheid in Sport—the Gleneagles Agreement—must be seen against this background.”Footnote 49 In other words, it was a necessary compromise and an easy way to follow the Commonwealth consensus.
Until her last days in office, the pro-Pretoria lobby constantly urged Thatcher to keep faith with South Africa and to hold firm to the tenets of constructive engagement. To what degree did they influence her actions? On this, historian Stephen Howe recommends that the relationship must be put in perspective. He notes that Thatcher did not give any key ministerial positions to people in this faction.Footnote 50 Moreover, her Foreign Secretary, Geoffrey Howe, describes the “instinctively different reactions” he and Thatcher had to South Africa and the “tension” it stimulated between them.Footnote 51 These same “tensions” could be discerned within the party more generally as the decade wore on. When the situation deteriorated in South Africa from 1984 to 1985 and the country effectively descended into civil war, even a large portion of Tories—Heath being one—believed that the time had come to implement extensive economic sanctions and force the issue of ending apartheid.Footnote 52
The Anti-Apartheid Movement
The actions of the British sporting community and the relative inaction of the Thatcher government in the early 1980s raised the profile of the sport boycott to a point it had not reached in a decade. “The sports boycott continues to generate more controversy and greater press interest than any other aspect of the AAM’s work,” noted the organization’s annual report in 1982.Footnote 53 Nor did the controversy relent. For the London-based AAM, Thatcher’s interpretation of “every practical step” fell far short of expectations and could better be characterized as “one of gestures not measures.”Footnote 54
In many ways, lobbying Whitehall had always been a problem for the AAM, and it certainly didn’t help that many Conservative politicians viewed anti-apartheid advocates with the greatest suspicion. During the 1950s and early 1960s, when the Anti-Apartheid Movement in Britain grew and flourished, the issue of sporting contacts with South Africa barely registered in the files of the British government. British MPs may have had opinions on the subject, but they saw no need to act on them. However, by the end of the 1960s this had changed. The maturing force of the sports boycott compelled the government in office act or to explain why it chose not to. From the late 1960s until the end of the apartheid era, every British government faced questions related to its policy on sporting links with the Republic from anti-apartheid activists.Footnote 55
The ultimate goal for campaigners challenging Thatcher, strict immigration controls to prevent South Africans from competing in Britain and to stop Britons from competing in the Republic, never materialized. But they never stopped questioning the intensity with which Thatcher applied the agreement. The AAM’s leadership in tandem with other influential leaders of the boycott movement wrote to Thatcher at the end of September in 1979 and expressed how they were “dismayed” by the lack of tangible action to stop tours, an argument that gained a great deal of currency when the Prime Minister jumped aboard the diplomatic bandwagon to boycott the 1980 Moscow Olympics due to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in late December 1979.Footnote 56 After lecturing all and sundry about respecting Britain’s democratic traditions of noninterference in sport, Thatcher followed the lead of the US president, Jimmy Carter, and pushed hard to persuade the British Olympic Association (BOA) to boycott, a riposte for the Soviet incursion of a sovereign state. Thatcher suddenly embarked upon a very public and persistent campaign, filled with Cold War rhetoric about Britain’s obligations to fight against communist expansionism.Footnote 57 The majority of the British Olympic team still went to Moscow, but Thatcher’s actions left anti-apartheid activists wondering why the same pressure had not been applied to British rugby at any point over the previous six months.Footnote 58 Government officials defended that they had used the same approach in both instances, “to advise and persuade,” but clearly the BOA had been subjected to far more persuasion.Footnote 59
The leaders of the sports boycott in Britain were at the end of their tether. With 1982 designated the International Year of Mobilisation for Sanctions Against South Africa by the UN, the British government seemed intent on undermining the crucial sporting arm of the global anti-apartheid campaign. “Britain has a record of hypocrisy and deceit second to none in implementing the sports boycott,” read the Anti-Apartheid News in June 1982.Footnote 60 These feelings were inflamed still further in 1984 when the Thatcher government expedited the visa application of the white Afrikaner teenage running sensation, Zola Budd, so that she could compete for Britain at the Los Angeles Olympics. Campaigners acknowledged that other South African athletes had switched allegiance in the past, but they protested the sheer speed of Budd’s transition, rubber stamped in only 10 days by a complicit Home Office, and charged that it made a mockery of the immigration process and undermined the spirit of Gleneagles by allowing a banned athlete to circumvent the boycott with undue haste.Footnote 61 It seemed to confirm the AAM’s accusation that the “Government has given numerous signals which have been interpreted as a desire to normalise sporting relations with South Africa.”Footnote 62
Despite these setbacks and the apparent lack of support from Whitehall, the sports boycott reached its apex during the late 1980s as more people joined the fight to enforce Gleneagles. As global pressure to isolate Pretoria spiked, fewer and fewer sporting federations resisted calls to exclude South African athletes. Remarkably, the 1984 English RFU tour to the Republic was the last official test tour of South Africa by a national team in the apartheid era. From thereon in, the amount of activism across Great Britain soared. Aside from the main, and ever present, stakeholders—SAN-ROC and the AAM—it is possible to trace a growing engagement from within the sporting community, as athletes and administrators went beyond adhering to the boycott to actively promoting it.Footnote 63 As the 1980s drew to a close, British sporting transactions whittled down to mostly private tours and exhibition games, but even they were hit by an unprecedented level of local grass roots activism.Footnote 64
It is possible to discern two themes of discourse that had a profound influence on the profile of the AAM in the mid-to-late 1980s. First, the political situation deteriorated in South Africa and from 1984 to 1985 the country effectively descended into civil war. The daily stories and images of the conflict broadcast on British radio and television and splashed across the front pages of British newspapers raised the profile of the anti-apartheid cause and gave credence to its claims. Second, views about the boycott were often animated by Thatcher’s intransigent response to sanctions and the polarizing politics of domestic anti-Thatcherism. Simply put, opposing apartheid became another way to oppose Thatcher’s broader political platform. These two threads helped to boost interest in the AAM and the number of people willing to engage in it. Membership levels rose exponentially from 5,000 individuals and affiliated groups in 1985 to more than 19,000 in 1989. “In the mid-1980s,” wrote an official for the group, Christabel Gurney, “the Anti-Apartheid Movement was transformed into Britain’s biggest ever international solidarity Movement.”Footnote 65
The connection between anti-Thatcherism and the Gleneagles Agreement can be seen most vividly in the engagement of the Black British community. A growing number of Black Britons came to identify with the mission of the AAM and how it compared to their own struggles under a Thatcher government intent to “balance the books” by reducing expenditure on public provisions and swelling the funding for “law and order.”Footnote 66 Black Britons easily connected Tory commitments to constructive engagement with a White supremacist regime—confirmed by Thatcher’s decision to host Botha for a state visit in 1984—to patterns of prejudice in Britain. “We as black people, are facing daily in our lives, white racism and therefore appreciate and identify with the feelings and indignity that institutionalized racism in South Africa has over its non-white population,” declared the Black educator and activist, Paul Stephenson, at a UN meeting in New York in 1982.Footnote 67 Before long, the AAM’s annual report noted that the sporting boycott had become a “crucial area” of Black involvement in the movement’s campaigning, signifying the overall expansion in the cause during the mid to late 1980s, and how discussions on “every practical step” played a part in motivating Britons from all walks of life to oppose apartheid.Footnote 68
Commonwealth Relations and International Sanctions
Many, if not all, Commonwealth leaders followed the same line of thought as the anti-apartheid lobby in Britain. In doing so, they also struggled to get Thatcher to toe the line on sanctions that were directed at South Africa, something that led to a series of explosive meetings throughout the 1980s. When Thatcher took office in 1979, no major international sanctions—with the exception of some restrictions on the export of military goods and the cessation of cultural and sporting contacts—had been agreed on. By the conclusion of Thatcher’s first term as Prime Minister in 1983, however, international efforts to expose the plight of South Africa’s Black population started to reach maturity. Within the framework of the UN, the European Union, and the Commonwealth, Thatcher’s Conservative government faced heightened pressures to support an array of hard-hitting financial sanctions. Despite the continued intransigence of Britain and its ideological allies, a growing international consensus held that disrupting South Africa’s economic interests stood as the only effective means to force an eventual democratic transition.Footnote 69 Thatcher disagreed. She parried mounting international criticism by declaring that full economic sanctions against South Africa were “immoral.”Footnote 70 Following another stormy session at the Vancouver CHMG in 1987, sections of the Commonwealth communique outlining decisions on South Africa included the caveat, “with the exception of Britain.”Footnote 71
It is against this background that Commonwealth attitudes to Britain and Gleneagles must be understood. Thatcher may have insisted to Commonwealth leaders that the British government was “fully committed to the Gleneagles Agreement,” but it is doubtful whether any of them seriously believed it.Footnote 72 At times this frustration bubbled to the surface and led to action against British athletes and teams. The push for this approach, often pursued with great vigor from African states, came with equal force from the Caribbean. One flashpoint occurred in the early months of 1981 as a result of an English cricket tour to the West Indies. When the injured fast bowler, Bob Willis, withdrew from the touring party due to injury, the English selectors called upon Robin Jackman to join the team for the upcoming test match in Guyana. A delighted Jackman told the press that he was ready for the hot conditions due to his experience playing in South Africa for the previous 12 years. When the Guyanese Prime Minister, Forbes Burnham, learned of Jackman’s close ties to the Republic, he issued a deportation order for the English bowler, citing the Gleneagles Agreement as justification. Following a long debate at Lord’s, the Cricket Council informed the English team not to play the test match. Only the intervention of the Prime Minister of Barbados, Tom Adams, and his decision to allow England (and Jackman) to play the next scheduled game in Bridgetown saved the tour.Footnote 73
Still, the issue of applying Gleneagles would not go away. After the release of the first UN register in 1981, a full Irish rugby team visited South Africa during May and June, followed by a Springbok tour of New Zealand from July to September. The New Zealand tour, in particular, witnessed some of the most violent anti-apartheid protests in the history of the global movement.Footnote 74 With British and New Zealand rugby at odds with the boycott, angry Commonwealth leaders remonstrated that Gleneagles needed strengthening—specifically citing the implementation of visa regulations—at the next Commonwealth meeting in Melbourne, at the end of 1981. Determined to force a firmer stance from Britain and New Zealand, they also threatened to boycott the 1982 Commonwealth Games in Brisbane to force the point. British officials monitored the reaction in the Commonwealth carefully and knew that New Zealand Prime Minister Robert Muldoon was certainly not in the mood to change a single word of the agreement if it made the document firmer. A typical government brief on the issue noted that although the government desired to “recognize progress” in South Africa, the New Zealand tour had made any “dilution” of the Gleneagles Agreement “inconceivable.”Footnote 75 Thatcher knew that the best she could get was to maintain the status quo and conveyed this message to the Australian Prime Minister and conference host, Malcolm Fraser, telling him that she would prefer there to be no conversation on the topic at all.Footnote 76 After much hyperbole and some defensive words from Muldoon during the discussions, the Commonwealth leaders agreed to reaffirm the existing agreement in Melbourne and, with that, the calls to boycott the Brisbane Games dwindled away.Footnote 77
A relieved Ramphal wrote to Thatcher that Gleneagles remained “an important safeguard” against breaches of the boycott and reminded the British Prime Minister about her obligations to enforce it. As usual, Thatcher claimed to be doing everything within her power, but the feeling persisted in the Commonwealth that Thatcher’s interpretation of “every practical step” was far different from that of the majority, leaving Britain isolated at meetings and especially so when Muldoon was defeated in 1984 by the more liberal David Lange.Footnote 78 After 1981, attempts to reword the agreement never gathered any steam in the Commonwealth. Instead, attention turned to improving the methods to punish transgressions. During a meeting of the Commonwealth Games Federation (CGF) in October 1982, member countries instituted a Code of Conduct mandating all national Commonwealth Games Councils to discourage sporting contacts with South Africa for all national sports, even those not on the program of the Commonwealth Games. “The constitutional changes,” explained Ramphal, empowered the “Federation by special procedures to exclude a country from the Games in the event of a breach of the Gleneagles Agreement which is so gross as to threaten the next Games themselves.”Footnote 79 The English abstained, justifying that they had no right to tell sports not under the umbrella of the CGF—such as the English RFU or the English Cricket Council—who to play against.Footnote 80
The idea behind the Code of Conduct was all well and good, but the Commonwealth did not seem to have the conviction to follow through. Rarely did any Commonwealth state try to hold the British government accountable. There were murmurs about banning England from the 1986 Games in Edinburgh due to an English rugby tour to South Africa in 1984, but how could the Commonwealth punish English athletes for the sins of rugby players, especially when the British government had asked the rugby team not to go? As in the past, the British benefitted from a familiar failing of the sports boycott, a transnational network of individuals, groups, international organizations, and nations that had always suffered from internal disputes, strategic differences, and problems of unity. They could wield the boycott to devasting effect, as they did in 1976. At other times, reaching this kind of consensus was just impossible.
When action did come, it was not over Gleneagles. Thatcher’s ongoing intransigence over economic sanctions, not British sport, pushed some Commonwealth states over the edge. Citing Thatcher’s stance on sanctions being “immoral,” in 1986 Nigeria and Ghana withdrew from the Edinburgh Commonwealth Games in protest. By the time that the festival opened, more than half of the teams (32) had withdrawn (only 26 attended). With the Edinburgh organizers already struggling to cover the financial cost of hosting, the boycott devastated the event and undermined many of the competitions. “The Commonwealth Games have been wrecked by the British Government’s unwillingness to take action against the Botha regime,” blasted Brian Filling, the chair of the Scottish Committee of the AAM.Footnote 81 When Thatcher showed up at the athletes’ village as part of her ceremonial duties, nearly all of the athletes refused to greet her. One of the few that did, the English rower, Joanna Toch asked her why she was happy to ask athletes to boycott the Moscow Olympics in 1980 but not to cut links with South Africa. “I left you free to choose, dear,” Thatcher sternly responded. Later in the day the Prime Minister moved on to watch some of the track and field program at the nearby Meadowbank Stadium. Safeguarded by a huge police presence, around 500 anti-apartheid protestors greeted Thatcher by pelting her car with tomatoes and eggs. After evading the demonstration, she entered the stadium and took her seat in the VIP box, only to be booed by a large contingent of the 20,000 people who were in attendance.Footnote 82 “I did not disagree with Denis when he remarked that this was ‘one of the most poisonous visits’ we had ever made,” Thatcher later wrote in her autobiography.Footnote 83
Conclusion
All of the parties we have discussed in this article rallied to the issue of Gleneagles again in January 1990. The British sporting community broke the boycott once more, when a group of rebel cricketers, captained by Mike Gatting, embarked upon a tour of the Republic. John Carlisle and the FIS immediately cheered the decision. The Thatcher government called on the team to cancel the trip, as it violated Gleneagles. Anti-apartheid groups and Commonwealth leaders demanded that the government do more. The government said it had followed its obligations. Attitudes were polarized. Some queried whether “every practical step” had been taken, and others lectured that none should be taken at all.
Before long, it no longer seemed to matter. With the apartheid regime reeling from decisive geopolitical shifts, a waxing transnational anti-apartheid movement, a debilitating raft of sanctions, and an almost perpetual state of civil war, Britain’s support was not enough. Although Thatcher and other bridge-builders clung grimly to their dogmatic arguments about constructive engagement and all else besides, the tumultuous events that both foregrounded the Gatting tour and cascaded over it finally forced the National Party to start negotiating the end of apartheid rule and, within this process, the cessation of sporting isolation. With the blessing of the ANC and its released figurehead, Nelson Mandela, in 1991 South Africa began returning to international sport. The following year, the formerly exiled country sent a squad—including Zola Budd—to the 1992 Barcelona Olympics.Footnote 84 Thatcher, of course, believed that constructive engagement had inspired these developments. When the decisive moments came, however, she would not be the Prime Minister. After more than a decade in office, Thatcher resigned in November 1990, forced from power by her own Party.Footnote 85
What is perhaps the most remarkable feature of the debates surrounding Thatcher and Gleneagles, at face value a discussion about the playing of games, is the sheer number of interconnected and conflicting ideas, relayed through national and transnational circuits, that they collided with. The sporting boycott of South Africa, from only the British perspective, is hard to untangle and understand. It disrupted old and established ideas on the role and function of sport, it blurred the traditional separation of sport from the state, it intersected with domestic politics and highlighted the difference between liberal and conservative world views, it involved regime change in a country halfway around the world, and was further complicated by its relationship with global antagonisms, ranging from decolonization to the Cold War. The sports boycott was thus never, at any single moment, just about sport. Thatcher’s method of applying Gleneagles therefore reveals why most sports boycotts tend to fail and why efforts to isolate South Africa were all the more impressive because they did not.
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