Sport, Power and Dependency in Southern Africa

Abstract

While much of the literature on South African sport has contributed greatly to our understanding of the close relationship between sport and politics in the South African context, there is an important sense in which many of these studies have been deficient. It is the major contention of this chapter that much of the writing on South Africa has tended to revolve around the question of race and that consequently the analysis of sport has been reduced to a question of racial prejudice or the interaction between racial and class dynamics. The questions that are raised here about South African sport are essentially theoretical and, as such, this analysis does not attempt to provide an historical or developmental narrative which attempts to situate the analysis of sport within the broader context of South African society. However, the chapter does try to outline a broad set of contours upon which such a study might rest. The questions I want to raise about South African sport emanate from several years of work with the anti-apartheid movement and as a social and political theorist attempting to map out some common ground between forms of Marxist cultural analysis and Eliasian sociology. To date, both schools of thought have tended to view each other as anathema.