Boycott All SA Racist Sports: UN Special Committee on Apartheid
(Amended version of the Editorial Notes, “S.A. Racialism and World Sport”, The African Communist, No. 42, Third Quarter 1970).
On 14 April 1970, the United Nations Special Committee on Apartheid urged a boycott of all South African racist sporting organisations and supported the African bloc’s proposal to exclude the country from both the Munich Olympics and the Olympic Movement itself. Subsequently, on 15 May 1970, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) extended the ban, which resulted in apartheid South Africa’s exclusion from the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich, Germany.
1970 became a particularly bad year for the South African racists in their efforts to continue imposing their unrepresentative all-white teams upon the playing fields of international sport. They were ousted from the Davis Cup Tennis tournament and were ultimately expelled by the International Olympic Committee. The bitterest blow was mass pressure in Britain, and from the African, Asian and Caribbean Commonwealth members, which forced the last-minute cancellation of their cricket tour of England.
In each case these decisions were forced upon reluctant sports administrators in the West after prolonged campaigns by the “non-European” and socialist countries, by democratic and working-class movements in Western Europe and in North America, as well as by the national liberation movements and Black sportspersons of South Af
