Pitch Battles

Peter Hain spent his childhood in South Africa. After his anti-apartheid parents were jailed, banned and forced into exile in Britain, he led campaigns to stop all-white Springbok and other all-white sports tours, later becoming a Labour MP and Cabinet Minister, then a member of the House of Lords and author of over twenty books.Andre Odendaal is Honorary Professor in History and Heritage Studies at the University of the Western Cape. A former first-class cricketer and anti-apartheid activist, he is author or co-author of a dozen books on the social history of sport and the history of the liberation struggle in South Africa.

[R]acialised sport was a central pillar of the Apartheid regime’s ideology, with the white sporting establishment and athletes — especially in rugby union and cricket — benefitting greatly from this arrangement. In Pitch Battles, anti-Apartheid activists Peter Hain and Andre Odenhaal give an account of how sport can both uphold the status quo and become a crucial site of resistance.... Sport cannot be separated from wider political struggle, and Pitch Battles is a compelling account of the way that sport was used by the Apartheid regime to launder its image internationally. But the book also documents how sport also became a crucial site of resistance to that regime, helping to bring about its downfall. This should help inspire struggles for a better world, in the face of growing capitalist inequality, COVID-19 and climate crisis.

• 1. ‘Hain Stopped Play’2. Empire and the British roots of sports apartheid3. A matter of life and death: Sport and rebellion4. SANROC in exile: Intensifying the sports boycott5. SACOS and the revival of the sports struggle inside South Africa6. Preparing to govern: Struggle, disjuncture and new strategies for sport in South Africa7. Sport and nation-building: The final push for national liberation and democracy, 1989–968. Making sense of sport and globalisation todayEpilogue