'Don't play with apartheid': anti-racist solidarity in Britain with South African sports

This essay will explore one of the critical points of solidarity for the British (and international) Left during the radical sixties – the Anti-Apartheid Movement – but focusing in particular on the question of mobilising against racism in South African sport in Britain. This movement reached its high point of militancy with the Stop The Seventy Tour Committee masterminded by Dennis Brutus and Peter Hain which successfully halted the South African cricket tour of England in 1970, but that campaign and the existence of other related groups such as the West Indian Campaign Against Apartheid Cricket and the work of earlier organisations such as the Campaign Against Race Discrimination in Sports and the Movement for Colonial Freedom remain little known and generally marginalised in the literature of the radical ‘long 1960s’. This essay will attempt to recover some of what David Featherstone has called ‘the hidden histories and geographies of internationalism’ in relation to the politics of South African sport in 1960s Britain, and situate the interconnections between these campaigns and wider radical activism in this tumultuous decade.