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It has been thirty years since NZ was rocked by the 1981 Springboks tour. Society was divided between rugby fans, who wanted politics kept out of sport, and protesters who believed the rights of black South Africans outweighed Kiwis’ right to watch the rugby. One hundred and fifty thousand protesters took to the streets over the 56 days of the tour and over two thousand of these were arrested. The total cost of policing the tour was over $24 million dollars. Today the wounds of ‘81 have healed, and apartheid is gone from South Africa; but has New Zealand lost its sporting conscience? We continue to play sports against states accused of human rights abuses, such as Fiji and Israel. Critic’s Joe Stockman looks back at the tour, and the state of NZ’s contemporary sporting relationships.

1981

By 1981 South Africa had become an international pariah for its continuing policy of apartheid, the deliberate denial of civil rights to black South Africans through a system of legal racial segregation. In 1977 the Gleneagles agreement had pledged Commonwealth nations to discourage sporting contact with South Africa. Most nations followed their commitment; Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser even refused to allow the South Africans to refuel in Australia, forcing them to travel to NZ the long way round. However, NZ Prime Minister Rob Muldoon refused to allow politics to enter the sporting world. Although he stated that he was against the tour, he deferred the decision to the NZ Rugby Union.

The Union went ahead with the tour, and violent clashes erupted between protesters, police, and rugby fans. New Zealanders were shocked by the scenes of violence that erupted on their own streets. By the time the tour reached Rugby Park in Hamilton, the protestors had taken control of the tour. Four hundred protestors stormed the pitch and stopped the game. Veteran tour protester John Minto describes occupying the field as “one of those intense experiences of extreme excitement and extreme terror, because we had the crowds chanting ‘kill, kill, kill’ and ‘we want rugby’”. The presence of the protestors - and the threat of a Cessna aircraft piloted by an anti-tour protester crashing into the stands - forced the then Minister of Police Bob Walton to cancel the match. Chilling violence erupted outside the grounds as the disappointed rugby fans attacked the protestors. Minto says “It was just bloody mayhem. I got hit by a can of beer as I left the ground. I was knocked unconscious on the field and ended up with some stitches, but that was nothing compared to what happened to other people. We had to run a gauntlet… lots of people got quite nasty injuries leaving the ground”.

It was not in vain. Future South African president Nelson Mandela, at the time imprisoned on Robin Island, described hearing that the game had been cancelled as "as if the sun had come out". If there was any impact from the tour, it was surely the solidarity and support that the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa felt from the protests in New Zealand.

As the tour progressed, more and more police were required to police the protests. The Springboks were forced to sleep under the grandstand at Athletic Park in Wellington the night before the game to ensure that they would make it to the pitch. Their victory the next day to level the series was described as one of the greatest feats in rugby history. By the time the tour arrived in Auckland for its final match, the deciding test at Eden Park, the scene had been set for an almighty confrontation between police and protestors. Manning the impromptu barriers of shipping containers and barbed wire were more than 2000 police officers: half of the total NZ police force, led by the specially trained, and especially brutal, Red Squad.

The protestors had come prepared for battle. Protective padding was piled on, motorcycle helmets and mouth-guards provided protection from the violent blows of the police batons, and timber shields protected the protestors as they drove forward against the police lines. Politics department lecturer Dr Brian Roper, a second year student at Canterbury during the tour, was heavily involved in protest action there. He believes that as the tour had progressed toward this final confrontation, and the reaction by the police became increasingly violent, the make-up of the protesters changed. “By the end of the tour you had a lot of young unemployed working class people who were very unhappy about a broad range of different social and economic issues as well as the issues that were involved in the tour… fewer liberal members of the middle class turned up to those protests and more alienated unemployed young people turned up.”

As the battle commenced both on and off the field, it became clear that the police had the measure of the protestors, and that they would not make it onto the pitch. However, protestor Marx Jones circled the ground in a Cessna, dropping one pound bags of flour onto the field, eventually felling All Black prop Gary Knight. When the referee asked both captains if they wished to continue, the South African skipper replied “Of course”, before drolly adding “Don’t you have a bloody Air Force in New Zealand?”

By the end of the game the scene outside the stadium had been reduced to anarchy. Dr Roper notes that “There were a lot of young people who had had negative experiences with the police, and it became, to some extent, an opportunity for utu against the cops”. Running battles erupted as police chased protestors and were met with flying rocks and bottles. Dozens of protestors and police were injured and over two hundred arrests were made. Within hours of their series defeat, the South Africans had boarded their plane and headed home, leaving New Zealand with an almighty hangover.

Over the 56 days of the tour, 150,000 people had protested in over 200 demonstrations, in 28 different centres around New Zealand. All police leave had been cancelled and officers were required to work 12 hour shifts to maintain law and order. The entire Air Force had been seconded to transport the police from game to game around the country. All up, policing the tour cost the New Zealand government $24 million dollars in today’s money.

Ten years later the apartheid system was falling apart in South Africa. No one is claiming that the NZ protests against the tour were the catalyst for this; but conversations with black civil rights leaders in South Africa, including Nelson Mandela, have shown that the protests gave them an amazing feeling of solidarity and support.

2012

Today, New Zealand maintains no sporting boycotts or embargoes on any other nation (though since the 2006 coup in Fiji, New Zealand has maintained a ban on members of the Fijian military or their families travelling to New Zealand, which has impacted a limited number of individual Fijian sports people). But John Minto, who has gone on to found a group called Global Peace and Justice Auckland, believes that New Zealand should ban sporting contact with states that continue to commit human rights abuses. Following a call by over one hundred and seventy Palestinian organisations for the world to place a boycott on Israel, Minto protested in Auckland against Israeli tennis player Shahar Pe’er’s inclusion in the ASB Tennis Classic. Says Minto “They’re [the Palestinians] not asking us to send guns; they’re saying please put pressure on from the outside through boycotts. And I think we should respond to it. And of all the boycotts you can ever place on a country, the most important is sport… because the whole country views itself through its sportspeople, and if they are locked out of international competition that is an enormous psychological blow.”

Pe’er maintains that “I am not the government of Israel and I not representing Israel in politics. I am a tennis player and that's what I represent now”. However Minto doesn’t buy her argument. “In theory she’s not representing her state, but in practice she is. She is listed on the draw as an Israeli tennis player. She carries Israeli sporting hopes with her. Israelis see her as representing her country just as we see Michael Campbell representing NZ in golf, even though he’s a professional”.

Despite the protests, New Zealanders have failed to rally around Minto in opposition to sporting contact with Israel. There has been for decades a conception of Israel as the ‘good guys,’ surrounded by the sweaty Arab hordes who want to drive them into the sea. There is even an immediate belief that any protest against Israel’s actions is anti-Semitic. Even New Zealand’s liberal media labels Minto’s protests as anti-Israeli, a perversion of their real focus, the horrific and sustained human rights abuses that have occurred under Israel’s continued occupation of the West Bank and the embargo of Gaza.

Minto believes that the view of Israel as victim is changing, and that more people are beginning to view Palestinians as the victims of Israeli repression: “Now people see Israel as the aggressor. There are three things that I think have changed it. First was the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 2006, secondly was the invasion of Gaza at the end of 2008, and then there was the attack on the Mavi Marmara last year. Those three things have increased public awareness that it is not the Palestinians that are the problem; it is the Israelis who occupy Palestinians territory”.
 
When asked whether New Zealanders should be instigating sporting boycotts against other states, for example Fiji, Minto passes the decision to the Fijians themselves: “If there is a call from Fiji, a concerted call from people struggling for democracy, saying hey, look guys, we want real pressure put on this regime and we think that a sports boycott is the way to do this, then we should support protests against the Fijian team during the World Cup.”

The question of the separation of sports and politics is vexing. Sporting contact can play a role in decreasing tension and increasing communication between opposing groups. And maybe sportspeople should be separated from their nationality, and have the right to compete freely throughout the world. But if we have to weigh the cost of denying an Israeli the right to play tennis or denying a Palestinian their basic human rights, surely we must decide that sport is the more suitable sacrifice.