South African Review of Sociology

ISSN: 2152-8586 (Print) 2072-1978 (Online) Journal homepage: www.tandfonline.com/journals/rssr20

Taking South African sport seriously

Chris Bolsmann & Cora Burnett

To cite this article: Chris Bolsmann & Cora Burnett (2015) Taking South African sport seriously,
South African Review of Sociology, 46:1, 1-6, DOI: 10.1080/21528586.2015.1028710
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 EDITORIAL

TAKING SOUTH AFRICAN SPORT

SERIOUSLY

Chris Bolsmann
California State University Northridge
[email protected]

Cora Burnett
University of Johannesburg
[email protected]

Twenty years on, the image of Nelson Mandela, wearing the number six jersey of
the white Springbok captain, Francois Pienaar, remains a poignant moment in South
African and global sport. The 1995 Rugby World Cup victory by the overwhelmingly
all-white Springboks remains a powerful symbol in post-apartheid South Africa. Clint
Eastwood’s (2009) Hollywood film, Invictus, based on John Carlin’s Playing the
enemy: Nelson Mandela and the game that made a nation (2008), has dramatised the
significance of Mandela wearing the jersey and the South African victory. The formerly
exclusive symbol was seemingly appropriated and made socially inclusive and became
part of the lexicon and rhetoric of nation building post-1994. For Ashwin Desai (2010:
1), rugby had become ‘the sport that would help to catalyse the building of a “rainbow
nation” predicated on a common identity, a common sense of “South Africanness”’. Jay
Coakley (1994: 5) noted that ‘sports cannot be ignored because they are such a pervasive
part of life in contemporary society’, and the same holds true for South Africa.
Douglas Booth (1998: 93) warned that ‘that sport can integrate society and
eliminate racial prejudice is a speculative proposition which ignores the origins,
functions, and practices of racism and fails to explain the precise properties of sport
that make it the medium of integration’. Despite the overtures to a common identity,

university
of south africa

South African Review of Sociology DOI: 10.1080/21528586.2015.1028710

Volume 46 | Number 1 | 2015 Print ISSN 2152-8586 | Online 2072-1978
pp. 1–6 © South African Sociological Association

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 Bolsmann and Burnett Taking South African sport seriously

‘race’ matters in South Africa and ‘race’ in sport remains a dominant feature of South
African society. The three most popular played and watched male sports in South Africa
are cricket, football and rugby (see Desai and Nabbi, 2007). Yet any casual observer
will not fail to notice the racial composition of each of these teams. The cricket and
rugby sides remain overwhelmingly white while the football team is primarily black
(see Carrington, 2010 and 2012). Moreover, when one inserts gender and class into
the sporting equation, the layers of inequality and exclusion multiply. For Grant Jarvie
(2006: 2) ‘It is impossible to fully understand contemporary [South African] society and
culture without acknowledging the place of sport’.
The study of sport remains marginal at best within South African academia in
general and in sociology in particular. This is so despite the fact that sport is a key
component of popular culture. The sociology of sport is still seen in some academic
quarters as ‘not serious and political enough’. This is not limited to sociology alone.
John Nauright makes a similar point in reference to historians in South Africa (2014:
563). Despite its apparent marginality, studying sport sociologically provides a valuable
lens through which to consider ‘race’, gender and class in South African society. In
2004, Peter Alexander suggested the sociology of sport remained ‘worryingly weak’,
and this is still the case. He predicted studying sport ‘will gain greater prominence with
the World Cup coming to South Africa’ (Alexander 2004: 321), while John Nauright
(2014: 564) remarked ‘there has also emerged a new “scramble for Africa” to write
about the continent and the world’s most popular sport’. Moreover, he also suggests
many of these writers and scholars have already moved on to forthcoming mega-events
in Rio de Janiero, Russia and Qatar and others. Desai (2010: 11) succinctly noted that
‘in a country that has trumpeted sport as a symbol of redress and nation-building, the
lack of critical analysis of sporting activities is startling’.
A cursory overview of the South African Review of Sociology and one of its
predecessors, Society in Transition, reveals that between 1997 and 2014 three articles
were published related to sport: historian Goolam Vahed’s research on South African
cricket in 2001, sociologist Jacklyn Cock’s 2008 article on golf and sports anthropologist
and sociologist Mariann Vaczi on Basque football in 2011. Between 1970 and 1997 the
South African Journal of Sociology (the predecessor of Society in Transition) published
three articles on sport (see Williams 1978; Bester and Weyers 1982; Bester 1984). At
the South African Sociological Association’s (SASA) annual conferences from 2001
to 2009, three papers on sport were presented. During the FIFA World Cup in 2010,
encouragingly, over 30 papers addressed issues related to sport, with the World Cup being
the primary focus. The conference theme in 2010 was ‘Sport, Leisure and Development
in the 21st Century: Opportunities and Challenges’. However, since 2010, five papers in
the sociology of sport had been presented to SASA conferences. Moreover, Stewart and
Zaaiman’s (2014) textbook Sociology: A South African introduction barely mentions
sport. Encouragingly, Jay Coakley and Cora Burnett (2014) have published a South
African edition of Sport in society: Issues and controversies. To our knowledge, no

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 Bolsmann and Burnett Taking South African sport seriously

sociology of sport courses are offered by departments of sociology at South African

universities. Rather, departments of sport and movement studies in South Africa offer
general sport studies courses. An advantage of teaching the sociology of sport is that
current sporting events both on and off the fields of play can be used in our classrooms,
while sport as a social institution can offer valuable insights into contemporary society.
Despite the relative paucity of studies on sport within the discipline of sociology in
South Africa, there is a long academic tradition of studying South African sport. South
African sociologist Leo Kuper’s An African bourgeoisie: Race, class, and politics in
South Africa is one of the earliest studies to reference sport. Kuper drew from Bernard
Magubane’s University of Natal master’s thesis, ‘Sport and Politics in an Urban African
Community’, which was completed in 1963. Internationally, a significant body of
academic and popular literature was published by activists and scholars from the early
1960s onwards that critiqued apartheid sport (see in particular Thompson 1964; De
Broglio 1970; Lapchick 1975; Brickhill 1976; Archer and Bouillon 1982; Ramsamy
1982; Jarvie 1985).
In the 1980s papers from the South African History Workshop conferences began
to address South African sport (see in particular Couzens 1983; Jeffrey 1992). During
the 1990s, four important academic books on South African sport were published by
historians Albert Grundlingh, André Odendaal and Burridge Spies (1995), David Black
and John Nauright (1997), John Nauright (1998) and Douglas Booth (1998). After 2000,
a number of academic books, chapters and ground breaking journal articles appeared
primarily but not exclusively published by historians (see Hargreaves 2000; Desai et
al. 2002; Odendaal 2003; Alegi 2004; Gemmel 2004; Murray and Merrett 2004; Pelak
2005a; 2005b; 2006; Merrett 2009; Desai 2010 and Grundlingh 2013). The 2010 FIFA
World Cup proved to be a catalyst for a number of journal articles, special issues and
edited book collections (see in particular Pillay, Tomlinson and Bass 2009; Alegi
and Bolsmann 2010; 2013; Cottle 2011). This highlights the salience and relevance
to studying South African sport. There are, however, only a few sociologists either in
South Africa or abroad dealing with issues related to South African sport.
The six articles in this edition contribute towards the further development of the
sociology of sport in South Africa. In excess of 40 abstracts were submitted for this
special issue from scholars across the world speaking from different standpoints. We
were particularly pleased with the wide range of sociological themes authors addressed.
The first contributor, Leitisha Brown, uses the case studies of two South African
athletes, Caster Semenya and Oscar Pistorius, to explore the notion of sporting space
invaders in which the transcendence of the two-category model of gender and ability
occurs. For Brown, the sporting imagination (space) affects power dynamics and set
boundaries in terms of normative ideas and notions of fairness. Just as Semenya is
a space invader transcending engendered sport spaces, Pistorius, as paralympic sport
person, invades the space of able-bodied sport. Brown’s contribution combines an
analysis of the sociology of the body understood through the lens of sport. Cassie

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 Bolsmann and Burnett Taking South African sport seriously

Ogguniyi’s article demonstrates how female footballers in Cape Town and Johannesburg
challenge hegemonic masculinity. Her work builds on an emerging scholarship that
considers female football in South Africa. She argues for nuanced and longitudinal
studies in which the experiences of female football players contribute to changing
social relationships at the household and institutional levels. Marc Fletcher’s article
considers football fandom in Johannesburg and how this is mediated by ‘race’ and
social spaces. His analysis opens up a potentially rich vein for further research in South
African football and sporting fandom more generally. Laurenz Langer’s article maps
the field and subsequent discourses of the terrain of Sport for Development and Peace
(SDP). He critically examines and reflects on the depth of impact assessment in SDP
research. He argues for additional layers of analysis, inclusive of the sense making
of target populations within their real lived contexts as it articulates with poverty
reduction and the discourse of the quality of life. The 2010 FIFA World Cup in South
Africa provided an international platform for sport-for-development interventions and
research. In the paradigm of mega-event legacies, Maikel Waardenburg, Marjolein van
den Bergh and Frank van Eekeren take a critical stance towards World Cup legacies.
Their article discusses influential and innovative frameworks for the conceptualisation
of legacy and how storytelling informs this process. In the final article in this special
issue, Marizanne Grundlingh explores ideas of memory and the commercialisation of
sporting heritage. Her case study of the Springbok Experience Rugby Museum in Cape
Town provides valuable insights into the contested nature of museums and memory in
the contemporary South African sporting landscape.
In conclusion, the studies in this collection demonstrate that sport is significant and
pervasive in South African society. We maintain that South African sociology is ideally
located to provide unique and original insights into understanding sport in South African
society in particular and across the globe more generally. Research is being done but
we need to offer courses in sport studies at sociology departments around the country.
Moreover, we need to build research capacity by encouraging postgraduate research in
the field and acknowledge that sport matters and can be studied seriously. In so doing,
it is hoped this will ultimately assist in further understanding the contradictions and
complexities of South African society in different ways.
Finally, our thanks to the many referees who helped bring this project to fruition.

Chris Bolsmann
Cora Burnett
Guest editors

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 Bolsmann and Burnett Taking South African sport seriously

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