Sport, Thatcher and Apartheid Politics: The Zola Budd Affair

Matthew P. Llewellyn and Toby C. Rider

Journal of Southern African Studies, 2018, vol. 44, issue 4, 575-592

Abstract: On 23 March 1984, Afrikaner teenage running sensation Zola Budd boarded a KLM flight at the Jan Smuts airport in Johannesburg bound for Britain. Through the manoeuvrings of the London-based Daily Mail newspaper, Budd fled apartheid South Africa for the opportunity to compete on the international stage under the representative colours of Great Britain. To forward his own commercial agenda, Sir David English, chief editor of the Daily Mail and a personal friend of the British Home Secretary, Leon Brittan, pressured the Home Office into awarding British citizenship to the 5000-metre world-record holder. This article seeks to examine the Zola Budd affair in four interrelated ways. First, we argue that it should be read within the context of the Thatcher government’s pursuit of ‘constructive engagement’ with South Africa and its concomitant opposition to growing international calls for economic sanctions and firmer cultural boycotts against the country. Second, the Zola Budd affair revealed the growing tensions in the British Conservative Party and among officials within different branches of government regarding engagement with the South African regime. Third, the government’s handling of Zola Budd exposed an arbitrary and unfair immigration system that legislated in favour of white migrants from the Old Commonwealth. Under the government’s redrawn immigration policies, Zola Budd fitted seamlessly within the racial and cultural image of Thatcher’s modern Britain. Finally, this article argues that the Zola Budd affair further aligned anti-apartheid and anti-Thatcher activists who grew to become virtually synonymous with one another during Thatcher’s premiership.

Date: 2018
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/03057070.2018.1464297 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:cjssxx:v:44:y:2018:i:4:p:575-592

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/cjss20

DOI: 10.1080/03057070.2018.1464297

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Southern African Studies is currently edited by Ralph Smith

More articles in Journal of Southern African Studies from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().