Africa Is a Country

What would Mandela do

Africa Is a Country Podcast
African Five-a-Side Podcast

What would Mandela do

By
Sean Jacobs

The South African struggle suggests that sports boycotts are effective at forcing change. For white South Africans (and their apologists), sporting isolation was a bitter pill to swallow.

Still from "Invictus." Nelson Mandela (Morgan Freeman) celebrates with Francois Pienaar (Matt Damon).

Earlier this week FIFA President, Sepp Blatter, defending the world’s footballing body’s decision to not rescind its decision to award Russia the World Cup in 2018, said “… boycotts in sport never has had any benefit.” Watch it here for yourself. As 101GreatGoals.com, a site not usually know for its progressive politics (they usually line up behind the worst aspects of US foreign policy) when they’re not sharing videos of goals, wondered: “Would Mandela agree?”

In fact, some Belgian fans thought the same over the summer when they pressured the Belgian FA to cancel last Sunday’s European qualifier against Israel in Jerusalem. In the end, the game was moved to Cyprus, but we don’t think that will be the end of calls for boycott of Israel’s football team. (Meanwhile, it just so happens that on September 18th, political scientist Hlonipha Mokoena from Columbia University, historian Dan Magaziner from Yale University and myself (my day job is as as an international affairs scholar) will revisit the legacy of the 1980s cultural boycott against white South Africa during a panel at The New School in New York City’s Greenwich Village. UPDATE: The video of the panel is here.)

One point I will make is that when international diplomacy and common sense have failed, the threat of withdrawing a rogue nation from the community of sport carries a lot of power. In South Africa, the slogan “no normal sport in an abnormal society” encapsulated the conviction that as long as the apartheid regime excluded the majority of its people from participating in society as equals, it should be excluded from participating in international sports competitions as equals. For white South Africans (and their apologists), sporting isolation was a bitter pill to swallow. Israel knows that. The Israeli government and sports associations’ responses to recent threats of Israeli expulsion from UEFA and FIFA, suggest they are worried about such a course of action.

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