No normal sport in an abnormal society
For many people, being denied access to certain commodities is less painful than being excluded from the international sports community
South African apartheid became an international issue for the first time when the interim Indian government in 1946 requested that the inaugural session of the United Nations General Assembly include discrimination against Indians in South Africa on its agenda. Six years later, in 1952, the UN General Assembly declared that “a policy of ‘racial segregation’ (apartheid) is necessarily based on doctrines of racial discrimination.” Then in 1963, the UN Security Council called on member states to halt the sale and shipment of arms, ammunition, and military vehicles to South Africa. The exiled African National Congress (ANC), which dominated resistance politics outside South Africa from 1960 to 1990, spearheaded this boycott strategy against South Africa, initially focusing on economic and military sanctions. Gradually, the resistance movements became convinced of the power of culture as a “terrain of struggle.” For example, the ANC started its own choir, founded a radio station, and worked with South African musicians like Hugh Masekela, Miriam Makeba, and Abdullah Ibrahim to raise awareness of South Africa and build mass solidarity for its struggle back home. As literary scholar Rob Nixon notes, “The historic attempts to vindicate apartheid by way of cultural argument made [culture] a symbolically crucial sphere for disruption.”
Nixon traces the first public resolution supporting the cultural boycott to 1946, when the Actors’ Equity Association, an American labor union representing theater artists, discouraged its members from performing in South Africa. In 1954, Trevor Huddleston, an English priest close to the ANC, appealed for “a cultural boycott of South Africa” in a leading British newspaper. A few years later, in 1956 and 1957, Equity (the British Actors’ Union) and the British Musicians’ Union banned their members from performing in South Africa. Then, in 1963, dozens of British playwrights followed their actor counterparts and signed a declaration that prevented agents from touring their shows to theaters “where discrimination is made among audiences on the grounds of color.” British filmmakers joined the declaration in 1964. That same year, Irish filmmakers (encouraged by the Irish Anti-Apartheid Movement) followed suit, as did the British Screenwriters Guild in 1965. Over the next decade and a half, a range of British television and film unions added their voices to a boycott call.
Meanwhile, in the United States in 1965, more than sixty artists and musicians, including many leading stars, signed a declaration sponsored by the American Committee on Africa, barring them from performing in apartheid South Africa. By the mid to late 1970s, anti-apartheid protests forced the closure of South African performances, such as the popular musical Ipi Ntombi, in New York City. Later, in 1981, the largest federation of performing artists’ unions, the Associated Actors and Artistes of America, decided its nearly 250,000 members could not perform in South Africa.
The cultural boycott against South Africa received an early boost when in December 1968, the United Nations adopted a resolution “to suspend cultural, educational, sporting and other exchanges with the racist regime and with organizations or institutions in South Africa which practice apartheid.”
However, several prominent American and British entertainers, including black American musicians and actors, still traveled to South Africa, sometimes even performing for segregated audiences. Many artists defied declarations from their trade unions, which could not effectively enforce solutions. Compounding this predicament, the South African government and its allies in the local entertainment industry offered inducements that these artists, some of whose careers were in decline at the time, found hard to refuse. This continued well into the 1980s when the cultural boycott had been mainstreamed in the West.
The real turn came more than a decade later, in December 1980, when the UN General Assembly passed a tougher resolution urging member states to take direct steps to adopt the boycott. The vote was mostly supported by Third World countries, while the United States and Canada voted against the resolution, and Western European countries abstained. As a consequence, the UN Special Committee Against Apartheid began compiling names (a “blacklist”) of performers and entertainers who had traveled to South Africa. The intention was to shame artists who defied the boycott, make them targets of protests, and even affect their bottom line. Initially, the blacklist had little public traction. Then, in 1985, a group of prominent American musicians, including Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, George Clinton, and Lou Reed, organized by guitarist Stevie van Zandt (of Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band), made a music video highlighting apartheid conditions in South Africa, “Sun City”. The song’s title referenced the holiday and gambling resort in a South African Bantustan–one of many ersatz “independent homelands” set up to exclude blacks from desirable land, urban areas, and political representation–where most visiting artists who broke the boycott, went to perform. In the wake of the song’s release and popularity, the campaign succeeded in discouraging artists from performing in South Africa.
The cultural boycott was successful to the degree that it was largely because, by the late 1970s, there was widespread popular consensus about “the evil of apartheid,” especially in the United States and Britain. The movements for economic and military sanctions against South Africa were already well established. The strategy to “isolate” South Africa had already succeeded in effecting an arms and oil embargo and a sports boycott.
Secondly, the boycott succeeded because white South Africans suffered culturally. For many white South Africans, the country was an outpost of “Western civilization” in Africa, and their cultural universe was oriented toward the United States and Europe. Sanctions cut them off from those worlds. South Africa’s pariah status as a racist, authoritarian state also clashed with the false view that white South Africans had of themselves as cosmopolitan and open-minded.
Thirdly, when official sanctions and industry-led boycott efforts dating back to the 1960s and 1970s failed to deter artists from traveling to South Africa, peer pressure or shaming served as a more effective form of community regulation among performers (especially American performers). Campaigns like “Sun City” were successful largely because performers appealed directly and emotionally, in song, rather than a UN committee or a trade union making an explicitly political, often formulaic, statement.
After the popularity of the campaign, when artists disregarded the boycott and traveled to South Africa, public showdowns between the artist and supporters of the boycott attracted widespread media attention. Paul Simon, most famously, faced public scrutiny even before he traveled to South Africa in 1986 to record his album Graceland. Such showdowns became major media events that often dominated the news cycle for days. In the process, they focused attention back on apartheid as a form of systematic oppression and provided prominent forums for opponents of the apartheid regime to articulate their struggle, where they may have experienced media blackouts before.
However, the boycott faced a number of obstacles and challenges. For one, the question of whether to maintain a “blanket boycott” or to selectively target artists who broke the boycott was never resolved. A related critique, leveled from the right and from liberals, both in Europe and South Africa, revolved around whether a political institution–the UN–and a political movement–the ANC, which created a “cultural desk” for this purpose–should have the right to police the behavior of artists. Some South African artists with close ties to the ANC also objected to either the UN or the ANC (which was then operating at a distance outside South Africa) deciding where and with whom they could perform, countering that art should be produced “for art’s sake” and not subject to political interference. Other local artists who openly opposed apartheid and suffered for it also took exception to the boycott because it negatively impacted their long-term career prospects, as artists in their prime then whose visibility and potential revenue streams were limited to South Africa because of the boycott. As Nixon notes, “It often proved difficult to back the ban’s symbolic importance with strategic precision, not least because it was the most exacting boycott to define, monitor and coordinate.” Nixon continues:
Culture is pervasive, ordinary and conflictual; this makes it an exasperatingly baggy and diffuse political target. Even if one considers culture in the limited sense of the arts, each artistic medium has distinctive forms of creation, distribution, and reception which from the boycotters’ standpoint, demand discrete strategies in response.
Second, while artists were barred from traveling to South Africa, their music–and the same was true of books and some television programs–was still available in South Africa. Record companies continued to operate there, sometimes through local subsidiaries, or the music of affected artists continued to be distributed there by other means.
In addition, well-funded lobbying and propaganda of the South African state and its business allies undermined the boycott. Their tactics included luring prominent entertainers to South Africa despite the threat of shaming or isolation of artists who broke the boycott (which often turned out to be brief). For example, the American singer Linda Ronstadt was paid $500,000 when she traveled to Sun City in 1983 to play only six concerts, and Frank Sinatra “earned a reported $1.5 to $2 million for a brief visit in 1981.”
The boycott has a complicated legacy, especially in how it affected South African music. This is most obvious in the case of Paul Simon’s Graceland album. Even though Simon broke the boycott, and despite what we make of him–he comes across as naïve and priggish–the South African artists who worked with him received a considerable boost in international visibility, as did popular attitudes against apartheid.
In terms of the long-term results of the boycott, its most far-reaching legacy is probably the widely accepted idea that culture and politics are interconnected. Furthermore, the cultural boycott emphasized that culture could be politics rather than merely responding to political situations. In other words, it cemented the idea of culture as an agent of politics and not just a reflection of politics.
Second, the cultural boycott contributed to the moral isolation of apartheid and, more directly, exposed the systematic workings of apartheid to a popular audience beyond the racist violence that surfaced in the news now and then. For example, the “Sun City” song had a tremendous impact in raising awareness of the apartheid regime’s Bantustan or “homeland” policy among young people in Reagan’s America.
Finally, and crucially, the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement (BDS), which includes a cultural and academic boycott, is another obvious legacy of the South African cultural boycott. BDS leaders and their allies have emphasized these connections in publicity materials and campaigns. For example, Desmond Tutu, a leading ally of BDS, in 2010 used this logic when discouraging the Cape Town Opera from performing in Israel: “Just as we said during apartheid that it was inappropriate for international artists to perform in South Africa in a society founded on discriminatory laws and racial exclusivity, so it would be wrong for Cape Town Opera to perform in Israel.” Similarly, more than one hundred artists based in the United Kingdom, including Roger Waters and John Berger, explicitly connected BDS to the South African cultural boycott when they announced their intention to boycott Israel in a 2015 letter sent to The Guardian:
During South African apartheid, musicians announced they weren’t going to “play Sun City.” Now we are saying, in Tel Aviv, Netanya, Ashkelon, or Ariel, we won’t play music, accept awards, attend exhibitions, festivals, or conferences, run masterclasses or workshops until Israel respects international law and ends its colonial oppression of the Palestinians.
As the success–or possible shortcomings–of cultural boycotts continue to be debated, the South African case points to another form of boycott and its impact on political attitudes and reform. Possibly more decisive than economic, military, and cultural sanctions, which apartheid regularly bypassed, was, in fact, the sports boycott.
Apart from “the narrow focus and strategic clarity” enjoyed by sports protesters, one reason that sports boycotts seem to work particularly well–when international diplomacy and common sense have failed–is the perceived gravity of the threat of withdrawing a rogue nation from the community of sport. The Israeli government and sports associations’ indignant responses to recent threats of Israeli expulsion from the European (UEFA) and worldwide (FIFA) associations that govern soccer, for example, are particularly instructive. People have strong feelings about sports, closely tied to national achievement and nationalism. Furthermore, the causes and effects of sports sanctions may be more palpable than those related to economic sanctions; for many citizens, being denied access to certain commodities is less painful than being excluded from the international community of sports. Up to now, BDS has paid less attention to a sports boycott, so it remains hard to gauge what the effects of a sports boycott would be. The South African experience, however, has shown that sports boycotts can be very powerful tools for international solidarity groups. If BDS is to learn from its antecedent in the anti-apartheid movement, it would do well to place more emphasis on the arenas–the sports stadiums–where apartheid came into global focus decades ago.
This is a lightly edited version of an essay first included in the book “Assuming Boycott: Resistance, Agency and Cultural Production,” published in 2017.