By Peter Alegi | December 28th, 2009 | 4 Comments
It is with immense sadness that we mourn the passing of Dennis Brutus, African activist and award-winning poet. The South African sport boycott owed much to his fierce commitment and relentless organizing, from his founding of the Coordinating Committee for International Recognition in Sport (1955) to the South African Sports Association (1958) and its successor, the South African Nonracial Olympic Committee. Dennis connected sport with the quest for human rights in powerful and probably unprecedented ways. Thanks largely to SANROC and its international allies, racist South Africa was expelled from the Olympics and world football. These global indictments of apartheid were huge and often undervalued milestones in the struggle against apartheid. Rest in peace Dennis. Hamba kahle.
Read Patrick Bond’s obituary here.
By Peter Alegi | August 24th, 2009 | No Comments
FIFA’s suspension of South Africa from world football in September 1961 was one of the first international indictments of apartheid. Click here to read a recent piece on this major event in The Financial Times of London. It is a powerful example of how Africans accelerated the democratization of football and made the game more fully global.
RSS Feed
