Unpacking Nelson Mandela’s Sports Legacy: An Examination of Press Discourses During the FIFA 2010 World Cup in South Africa (original) (raw)
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After an absence of 32 years due to its apartheid policies, South Africa could again participate in the Olympic Games in 1992. The 1992 'friend ship' Games were not only a first for many athletes, but also for media co verage of a major international sporting event in which a non-apartheid South African team could participate. This article does not deal with the de vastating effects of apartheid per se. Its main concern is to focus, in a quali tative manner, on the first major international sports event in which South Africans were allowed to compete, namely the 1992 Olympic Games in Barcelona, and more specifically the South African media coverage thereof.
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The South African government’s discriminatory policy of apartheid has caused tremendous external, as well as internal, pressures to develop in an effort to reverse its in-humane treatment of its repressed populace. None of the pressures have been more forceful than those evoked by the sporting world and the United Nations. In recent years, these forces have virtually eliminated South Africa from most international sports com-petitions, including the Olympic Games. A number of recent events seem to indicate that a new policy and perhaps attitudinal posture in regard to sport and apartheid may be formulating, a process which may permit sport to shape its own destiny. Time, however, is of the essence not only in regard to equal opportunity and availability in regard to sport, but in South Africa’s all-encompassing racially repressive apartheid practices. It appears that unless the South African govern-ment initiates swift apartheid extirpation as appears to be occurring in sport, the a...
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During the last 2 years the campaign against apartheid sport has taken a new turn, shifting from the blanket boycott of “no normal sport in an abnormal society” to a more carefully nuanced “two-track” strategy, which attempts to strengthen nonracial sport in South Africa while maintaining the international quarantine of proapartheid establishment sport. These efforts are being mounted within the highly fluid dynamic of a society-wide assault on the structures of racist domination. This paper examines ongoing changes in South African sport, the new strategy and organizations developed by the liberation movement in response to the changes, and the promise and problems of the future. It is argued that the antiapartheid campaign provides an important example of effective human intervention in the sphere of modem sport.
Nelson Mandela’s “Show Trials”: An Analysis of Press Coverage of Mandela’s Court Appearances
Critical Arts, 2020
The figure of Nelson Mandela looms large in twentieth-century history. Beloved by celebrities around the globe, critics have noted his unique charismareferred to as "Madiba magic"-and his ability to enchant audiences. Despite this, there have been few analyses of his construction as a celebrity politician, most likely because of celebrity's association with frivolity and lack of substancewhich sits poorly with our sense of Mandela. There have been particularly few examinations of his portrayal prior to imprisonment, when the seeds of the Mandela myth were sowed. This paper examines some of the early press coverage, focusing on Mandela's "performances" in court. The paper argues that Mandela, helped by others, had a canny ability to preempt reactions to his appearance, and worked hard to direct his own image for political purposes. In addition, while Winnie Mandela's role in raising awareness of her husband's fate is well known, the paper shows how, even at this early stage, Mandela's prominence and machismo depended on her feminine visibility. Mandela's famed speech from the dock also founded a new moral tradition of protest and set the stage for his resurrection as the symbol of the Anti-Apartheid Movement.
Mandela and Beyond: Thinking New Possibility in the 21st Century
Routledge eBooks, 2020
To map my way, I'd like to begin with two recent cultural texts or events featuring the name and biography of South Africa's first democratic president. One is an exhibition, the other a poem. Both after their fashion approach Nelson Rohihlahla Mandela as a symbol that, though built on a twentieth century base, also bears reference to twenty-first-century culture and politics. The texts allow me to ask something I have asked before, in my short 2008 biography Nelson Mandela, but to angle that question to the decades that lie ahead. 1 The question probes the value of Mandela's career and life's work as an ongoing object lesson or theory-in-practice. How did his way of doing politics, his almost charmed facility of interacting evenhandedly with political enemies and friends alike, lay down a model for South Africa in the future? In particular, what might Mandela's story continue to teach us, further into the twenty-first century-especially when that story is re-evaluated, freshly interpreted and historically re-angled, as in this special issue? My first 'text' is the Nelson Mandela Official Exhibition that ran at the Leake Street Gallery in London from 8 February to 2 June 2019, and then travelled internationally. It was supported by the Robben Island Museum, the Mayibuye Archives at UWC, and others, including Zelda La Grange, Mandela's long-serving personal assistant, and members of the Mandela family. The exhibition sought to represent the life of the statesman through photographs and video clips, as well as a selection of his treasured objects, ranging from handwritten letters through to his watch. But it also had an interest in calling visitors to a sense of moral action by insistently reminding them of the values of justice, peace, reconciliation and humanity for which Mandela stood. 2 My second text is '1994: a love poem', a hard-hitting, witty lyric by the Cape Town poet-activist Koleka Putuma. In the 21-line poem, she calls for someone to love her adoringly, even abjectly, fawningly, 'the way that white people look at / and love / Mandela'. 3 She wants, she quips, 'a TRC kind of lover'. The poem threads together a series of loose couplets linking white 'love' for Mandela to 'betrayal', 'fuckery' and living in the past, culminating in an intentionally shocking charge-that white