Fair Play The World Against Apartheid: Have You Heard from Johannesburg?

This programme contains some strong language and scenes which some viewers may find upsetting.

Sport begins with fairness. Fairness.

But most histories of the end of apartheid hardly refer to sport.

White South Africa saw sport as its link to the civilised world.

We understood as South Africans the significance of sport for white South Africa.

It was like a religion.

THEY SCREAM

As opposition to apartheid spread around the globe,

South Africa's presence at international sporting events

would become a key battleground in the struggle against racism in sport.

The opponents of South African knew

that to have a successful sports boycott

would almost be as painful and disastrous as a successful economic boycott.

People kept saying, don't mix sports with politics.

This is not normal politics.

This is an issue of life and death for people.

# Hey, say what's the word?

# Tell me brother

# Have you heard from Johannesburg?

# Tell me what's the word now?

# Oh sister woman have you heard

# From Johannesburg? #

During the days of apartheid,

we had four distinct racial groups in South Africa.

And whites enjoyed all the privileges,

and coloureds had some privileges...

..Indians a few...

..Africans none.

Whether you like it or not, whether the world likes it,

makes no difference.

Ever since sport was played, the whites have always played whites,

the Indians have always played with Indians,

the coloureds have always played with coloureds

and the blacks have always played with blacks.

That's how we develop. That's our way of life.

But a growing anti-apartheid movement was fighting back.

GUNSHOTS

The regime responded with violence, intimidation and brutal crackdowns.

By the 1960s, every major leader of the resistance

was either in jail, banned or in exile.

The campaign against apartheid found other avenues of resistance.

To white South Africans,

sport was a daily demonstration of their racial superiority.

In 1959, a coloured teacher and social worker, Dennis Brutus,

began to campaign against racism in sport.

I went to sport with the sense of its fairness, you know, be fair,

play the game, you know, don't be a cad.

You have all those values,

and then you put those values against the behaviour...

..and see the contradiction.

Of course, discrimination in sport is unfair.

It's only later that I begin to see it as a political instrument as well.

I discovered there were black athletes

who were the best in the country

who could not be on the South African Olympic team

because the team could only have white athletes.

Jake Tuli, still the undefeated champion.

The Olympic Charter said that any country that was

guilty of discrimination should be excluded from the Olympics.

The secretary of the South African Olympic Committee was a man

called Ira G Emery.

I asked to meet him,

and he says, "Come in, my boy, what do you want, my boy?

"There are no black athletes!" And he said, "You're wasting your time,"

and I said, "I'm glad I had the chance to talk to you, and I have to tell you

"I'm going to get you expelled from the Olympics."

And so began a 25-year long battle using sport as a weapon against apartheid.

They say that sport is a danger to the society,

it could undermine the security of the state

if you did not have apartheid in every area of your life.

So I became an organiser.

We have this meeting, and as I was speaking,

I get a tap on the shoulder, and it's a member of the secret police,

and he says, "You're under arrest."

At five o'clock in the afternoon, thousands on the streets,

I had these two policemen with me in plain clothes,

and they say to me, "We're not going to handcuff you

"because we hope you'll try to escape, then we can kill you."

I'm carrying my suitcase and pretending it's very heavy.

It puts me in a position where I'm crouching like a sprinter,

then I take off at such speed that it just leaves them taken aback.

So I get away perhaps as much as four blocks.

I run into one of them and he shoots me instantly.

Ambulance arrived, and then the men got out with their stretcher,

came over to me, took a look at me, got back into the ambulance,

put away their stretcher and drove away.

They said, Brutus, you understand - that's an ambulance for white people,

they would lose their job if they took you in that ambulance.

I was sentenced to 18 months in prison.

I broke stones there with a hammer, together with Mandela and Sisulu.

'It's Japan's turn to be the host nation at the Olympic Games next year,

'and work is well advanced...'

As the world prepared for the 1964 Olympics, Brutus saw his opportunity.

From prison, he began organising a worldwide campaign

to exclude South Africa from the Games.

Dennis Brutus used to write to me,

and I was representing Dennis' organisation abroad.

We managed to smuggle a letter from him from prison,

which was an appeal to the International Olympic Committee

to exclude South Africa.

Now, I had great difficulty in handing this letter over

to Mr Brundage, the president of the International Olympic Committee.

Avery Brundage, an American millionaire, had served on the committee

ever since Nazi Germany had hosted the Olympics in 1936.

For Brundage, politics had no place in sport.

All my telephone calls and attempts to see him were declined,

so one morning at about four o'clock,

I went to his very luxurious hotel and sat outside his door,

virtually on guard.

At about seven o'clock, I knocked on his door,

and he saw this person of colour,

was really, I think, feeling that I was either working in the hotel

or a messenger, but I then handed him the letter and he took it.

Now he is obliged then to take it to the Olympic board.

The International Olympic Committee

is a very weird self-perpetuating organisation of wealthy businessman.

The IOC operated almost like the conclave of Cardinals.

Their minutes were secret. Elections were for life

and you were elected by the other members of the executive.

Brundage and the IOC refused to expel South Africa

for racial discrimination,

but this was the 1960s, and the world was changing.

A small group of white men were not going to find it easy

to have the final say.

It was really that African countries were becoming independent.

Africa is a power. A power in sports.

We aren't a power in the United Nations.

But in the field of sports, we were.

Young men and women in Africa who excelled, and who the international community wanted to see,

so that's one area where Africa was strong and could make a difference.

Wherever South Africa was allowed to take part,

other African countries decided to stage a boycott.

In sport, it was an open activity, it was a multilateral activity,

and although not all countries in the world supported the sports boycott,

the Africans were very, very strong.

The Africans said, if you take part with South Africa,

we're not going to play with you.

Faced with a boycott threat

and the potential collapse of the Tokyo games, the IOC had to act.

South Africa is told they can come to Tokyo provided they give

an assurance that selection in future will be on merit.

They refused to give that assurance, and so they are then excluded from the Games.

But the exclusion in Tokyo is not an expulsion.

It's only a suspension.

The next Olympics were to be held in Mexico City.

To keep South Africa out of the Games,

the campaigners faced a four-year uphill battle with an unresponsive IOC.

Avery Brundage was very clear in support of South Africa.

Our friends on the IOC, and we ourselves, have been fighting

and arguing the case to get South Africa back into the Olympic Games.

I escaped from South Africa, now that I'm out of prison,

we are renewing the campaign,

and prior to the Mexico Olympics,

Brundage calls a meeting of all the IOC members

and invites them to vote on whether South Africa should be invited or not,

and they vote that South Africa should be invited.

And I couldn't believe this,

so I marched up to Brundage and I said to him,

"In spite of your decision,

"we will mobilise and force South Africa out."

He says, "Go ahead and try."

He said, "If I am the only spectator in the bleachers

"and South Africa is the only team in the stadium,

"the Games will still go on."

So I started travelling all over the place, talking to people from all over the world,

and we build the boycott threat,

a coalition of about 40 African countries, Asian countries,

Caribbean countries, Latin American countries,

which was strong enough by '68 to take on Brundage.

The Mexicans can see that a large drop in the numbers of tourists

which would go hand-in-hand with any mass walkout would hit them hard,

but apart from the loss of prestige at staging what would be

perhaps one of the most considerable Olympic fiascos in modern years.

The sportsmen and women of Africa,

sportsmen and women from other countries,

felt strongly about apartheid. They withdrew.

The Mexicans say, "We put 90 million into these games,

"we can't have a fiasco with all these countries withdrawing."

Brundage is confronted with 90 countries saying,

"Either you have us or you have South Africa."

It was extremely difficult, even for those who were normally apologists for the South African government.

They understood if you want a truly international sports competition,

you can't have South Africa.

South Africa was voted out of the Games.

This was the end for South Africa's Olympic ambitions.

Two years later, it was banned for good.

Would you expect the other international federation

to follow the IOC's example and expel South Africa from yet more sporting events?

I hope so, but there are not many left. She's out of several already.

Out of boxing, football, basketball, nearly out of everything.

Judo.

Fencing. Gymnastics. Table tennis. Volleyball.

By the 1970s, South Africa had been banned

from nearly every international sporting competition except one.

To us in South Africa, rugby, it is really our world.

Rugby is probably as well supported in South Africa as baseball

and football and basketball thrown together in the United States.

It's the sport.

The South African national team, the Springboks,

was the number one power in the world in rugby.

They just crushed the opposition.

'South Africa win by 17 points to six.'

'Springboks win an excellent game by 17 points to five.'

'Springboks won 8-3.'

So this was an enormous reinforcement of this Herrenvolk mentality,

this notion of a super race, superhumans, not just white, but supreme white.

The slogan was, you're not the best until you've beaten the Boks.

And just to be chosen,

the thought of putting that green and gold Springbok jersey over your head,

words cannot actually describe it.

It's a magic, magic moment.

Just a year after the Mexico Olympics,

South Africa's rugby team set off on a world tour.

They planned to play against their most important competitors,

New Zealand,

Australia and Britain.

'Heathrow Airport.

'Demonstrators faced a cordon of security staff as they prepared

'to greet the incoming Springbok touring team from South Africa.

'The Springboks captain commented that they'd come to play rugby and not worry about politics.'

When we arrived, they were at the airport already,

holding up banners, you know - go home, and you're not wanted in the UK,

equal rights to everybody, just placards and all that type of thing.

They went out of their way to make our life a misery. And we played our first game against Oxford University.

Supposedly an easy game. And Oxford beat us 6-3.

So the tour got off to a really bad start.

CROWD CHANTS

What had begun as the 1969 Springbok tour

had now suddenly become a battleground

in the worldwide anti-apartheid struggle.

This was a period of student politics,

and the campus sit-ins all over the world.

And there were the Vietnam protests.

And I was becoming engaged in all of that.

And becoming involved in direct action politics.

And I started to think,

we could apply the kind of direct action tactics

to the apartheid fight in sport.

And this is something I always felt we could win.

When I lived in South Africa,

my mother and father were involved in the anti-apartheid struggle.

They were both jailed for periods. They were also banned.

A banning order meant you couldn't take part in political activity.

It meant you couldn't communicate with another banned person.

So when my mother was banned, that was OK.

When my father was banned a year later,

they each had to be given special provision to talk to each other.

This is an Orwellian type of nightmare,

of what apartheid actually meant in ordinary terms.

We were forced to leave South Africa and settle in London.

I went to the London School of Economics,

and it just so happened that there were a whole contingent

of exiled South Africans there.

And they told us that the system in South Africa was wrong,

and it had got to be opposed.

It was actually encouraging racists throughout the whole world.

And the South African exiles were saying,

"If you really want to hurt them, you stop them playing rugby."

It's very difficult to beat a multinational corporation

trading with an apartheid economy.

It's very difficult to buck the world of international finance

which was supporting South Africa.

But sport was out there, was available, it was open,

it was exposed.

And if we applied direct action tactics to it, we could stop it.

# Lay down, lay down

# Lay it all down

# Let your white birds smile

# At the ones who stand and frown... #

To keep the peace at Lansdowne Road tomorrow,

the police are relying on two things. Manpower and barbed wire.

# Lay down, lay down

# Lay it on down

# Let your white bird smile

# At the ones who stand and frown

# Let your white bird smile

# At the ones who stand and frown... #

There were demonstrations outside and inside every rugby ground.

There were demonstrations outside the hotels.

People did incredible things.

On one occasion, in London,

we booked a young girl into the Springboks' hotel.

And in the early hours of the morning,

before an international match, she went round and gummed up

their door locks so they couldn't get out of their rooms in the morning.

They had to break the doors down.

One man dressed up as the driver of a coach.

Got into the Springbok coach, with a full team in it,

drove them off to Hemel Hempstead and left them in a field.

In another case, a man specially bred rabbits,

and arranged with his friends to go with these bags into the rugby field

and then open the bag so rabbits would run all over.

Someone else was breeding moles to release on Old Trafford rugby ground

because the Springboks were going to play there.

There was actually one serious debate

about whether moles or locusts would be the most effective method!

They'd fill a bottle with tacks and then throw it onto the field.

The bottle would break open, and all these pieces of glass

and all these tacks would be all over the field.

Then you'd have to stop the game, and we'd all be picking up

these pieces of glass because if you fell, you'd cut yourself.

In the back of one's mind, you're thinking,

maybe someone's got a gun and they're going to shoot one of us or something.

It wasn't a nice thing to watch.

Because of the intimidation of our sportspeople,

throwing all kind of things on the sports field.

After all, they're participants.

We're not responsible for the policies.

CROWD CHANTS

I think they've been a tremendous success.

The physical effect on the tour has been quite fantastic.

It's been the most disastrous tour ever by a team coming to Britain.

Inside South Africa, the white sports officialdom

and the structure has been thrown into frightened turmoil.

They'd always thought that despite everything,

despite the fact that they were regarded as the lepers of the world,

the pariahs of the world, because of the evil system of apartheid,

that they could still trade, still have their tourism,

they could still do business

and they could still be accepted

as equal and respectable guests in the sports arenas of the world.

And now their sport was being stopped, and they hated it.

Peter Hain was just a person,

who made my life a misery.

He made my life a misery plus 32 companions,

32 colleagues of mine.

Um...

Yes, you reach a stage where, I actually said if I met him

face-to-face, I'd first like to talk to him, but...

I had a huge dislike for him at the time, no doubt.

I felt a lot of anger towards Peter Hain,

being instrumental at the time in bringing about this situation.

REPORTER: What were you instructed by BOSS

to do about Hain? What was your brief?

I can remember the very words.

"Pin that political butterfly to the wall.

"And you will be the pin." Me.

First of all I received a letter bomb, in June 1972,

which fortunately did not go off.

There was a technical fault in it,

and the bomb squad had to come and defuse it.

'My assignment in Britain was to monitor the South African exiles,'

members of the anti-apartheid movement,

members of the ANC, to find out about their private lives,

to uncover skeletons in their cupboards.

Any information which could be slid back to Pretoria

to be used by their disinformation experts.

'And I was told by BOSS to compile a huge dossier

'of hatred against Peter Hain.'

HAIN: 'The second thing that happened to me

'was I was prosecuted in a four-week trial at the Old Bailey

'for conspiracy to disrupt South African sports tours.'

I was the chief prosecution witness for the private prosecution against Hain.

The idea was to get him convicted, to make an example of him.

They had made this a political trial.

And ironically, because of that,

the politics of it stopped the jury convicting me

on what, frankly, was very clear evidence.

'People who stand up and annoy government must be smashed.

'I was a perfect instrument, because I had'

the filth in me that is necessary

to create and cause destruction

amongst ordinary, decent people.

Having failed the first time, Winter tried again.

I'm claiming that I'm not guilty.

And I still can't quite believe that I'm standing here,

facing these absurd charges.

The story of the Barclay's Bank snatch is an extraordinary,

surreal one, to the point where both I and others who look back on it,

a quarter of a century later, almost can't believe it happened.

-REPORTER:

-It was almost comically elaborate.

Using a Hain lookalike, they tried to frame him on a charge

of robbing £490 from Barclays Bank in Putney.

Within 10 minutes of the robbery,

we phoned someone in British Special Branch and said,

"If you look at your files,

"you'll find that Peter Hain actually demonstrated against

"that very bank, Barclays bank,

"they invest in South Africa."

And boom, that's why they rushed to Hain's home and arrested him

on the turn and threw him into jail.

Being charged with criminal dishonesty, to a politician like me,

is extremely upsetting, it's the worst thing that ever happened to me.

Because it's impugning your reputation, your integrity, your character.

What was the feeling then when it failed?

Doesn't matter, the smear stays.

You should know that, you're in the media.

Once you've smeared a man,

there's always people saying, "Yeah, he got off, he got off."

Apartheid!

ALL: Out, out!

-Racialism!

-ALL: Out!

-Racialism!

-ALL: Out, out!

Out, out, out!

We never went back to Britain. Mm-mm.

HAIN: It was a tremendous victory,

born out of a genuinely popular movement.

And it proved a cathartic event.

Direct action had finally stopped something.

But the stopping of the 1970 tour didn't win the argument.

The Springboks were still going to the international

sports fields of the world.

The next stop on the Springboks' tour was Australia,

where a national controversy was about to erupt.

Here are the Springboks.

The athletes and sportsmen from South Africa are ambassadors of apartheid.

I think Mr Balthazar John Vorster, the Prime Minister of South Africa,

said to the rugby team,

he said, "You're honoured because you represent your country in rugby.

"You are doubly honoured

"because you will be chosen to be the spokesmen for our way of life abroad."

The trade union movement here in Australia

got together and said, we have to really take a stand.

And so we got support from workers at the airport.

Any aircraft that carried any of them wouldn't get off the ground.

The trains that carried them wouldn't leave the stations.

At major hotels, if they took the Springboks,

there would be no service.

So there was a whole number of bans put in place.

And as a consequence, when they came here, they were really,

they had to behave like fugitives.

CROWD BOOS

When the Springboks came out,

for some reason, they were installed

in a motel that was two doors away from our big black commune.

So the aboriginal activists' house

ended up being a headquarters for us.

And they were very, very prominent in the demonstration outside.

We were approached by a guy who had played rugby for Australia in South Africa,

and in South Africa had acquired

these three genuine Springbok football jumpers.

He said, "When I was in South Africa,

"the mere proposition that any black person would ever wear this

"revered and hallowed symbol of Afrikanerdom,

"it would make the Broederbond have a heart attack."

So three of us put these football jerseys on,

and all we did was stand at the front of the vigil.

It was worth it just to see the looks on these

big South African rugby players' faces.

They were furious. If there hadn't been police, they'd have killed us.

The protesters had planned a campaign

of non-violent civil disobedience.

But as the tour continued, they were met with

increasingly violent attacks from frustrated rugby fans and heavy-handed police.

In Queensland, a state of emergency was declared

and the army brought in.

Could you be fighting a losing battle by being here?

Oh, I don't think so. I think we've already won the battle.

The sports tour of the South African Springboks stopped a long time ago.

It's now a travelling police circus. The last thing it is is a rugby tour.

1971 was the last time we played against Australia.

The ill-fated tour moved on to New Zealand.

If you want to...

test your own ability, you test it against New Zealand,

when it comes to rugby.

It's their Bible, it's their economy, it's everything to them.

We were the two countries that lead the world in rugby football.

We were way out ahead of the rest.

And so it was a fight for the rugby crown.

In New Zealand,

the first protests against South African racism were in 1921.

Not 1960, '76, or '85.

In 1921, and there were over rugby.

The Springboks came, and they were shocked to have to play with Maoris.

Ka mate! Ka mate! Ka ora! Ka ora!

Tenei te tangata puhuruhuru!

The South Africans were disgusted by that.

They couldn't understand how members of their own race

were cheering on Maori All Blacks to defeat members of their own race.

Our people have always been respected for their prowess on the field.

We were good, we were good at that game. And we still are.

And if you took the Maoris away,

New Zealand would be about bottom of the ladder.

So it's the Maori that actually give New Zealand rugby

the power and dominance that it has in the world at the moment.

# My old man's an All Black

# He wears a silver fern... #

My father was the first person from his tribal area

to become an All Black.

So he was a legend.

He played against the South African rugby team when they toured in 1937.

Two years later, the team was going to South Africa.

And suddenly, because he was brown,

he was forbidden to try out for the All Blacks.

Even though he had been a member of that team

for the three preceding years.

So my involvement in the South African issue

was a direct consequence of the stories that my dad had told us.

Sid Jackson's Maori organisation

joined forces with the local anti-apartheid movement

to keep the South African team out of New Zealand.

Looking overseas, seeing what had happened in Britain in '69, '70,

in Australia in '71, we started saying,

if the '73 Springboks come, we are going to close the country down.

Before Christmas,

the Prime Minister, Norman Kirk, received a report

from the police that essentially said, if the tour went ahead,

it was going to be chaotic mayhem from one end of the country to the other.

We could point to the protests, the demonstrations in Australia

and say, see? That's what we're talking about.

With Kirk, there'd just been this moment

where one man's moral integrity and principles

had shown some leadership.

But then in 1975,

a new prime minister came to power in New Zealand.

Imagine it, coming to power on a policy

of allowing a sporting team back in again.

I believe that at the present time,

political interference into sport in this country

is being carried to absurd lengths.

We've debarred South African sportsmen from coming to

New Zealand, by what I believe to be a disgraceful

and improper use of the powers of the Minister of Immigration.

This man had said, as a major part of his election campaign,

to distinguish himself from the Labour Party,

that he was going to allow tours.

Many blacks are extremely disappointed

that with the change of government in your country,

there has come a change in policy and the All Blacks are going to come.

For my part, I would have wished that they didn't come.

As the All Blacks headed for South Africa,

the protests spilled over into the Montreal Olympics.

We go to Montreal, and the debate rages there.

If New Zealand does participate,

should the African countries participate?

It comes at a crucial moment, because in 1976, June...

GUNSHOTS

'..you had the terrible shooting of all the students in Soweto.'

'When literally, the streets were running with blood.'

GUNSHOT

I was assigned to cover the Olympic Games in Montreal.

We would go to black Africans and ask them

their backgrounds for the broadcasts.

And they would say, where are you from?

We'd say, New Zealand.

And they'd say, we're not talking to you.

This was a great shock to us,

because they were saying to us that, your rugby team is in South Africa,

it's just started the tour there and we don't like you.

I must say, I was confused.

I suppose I assumed that all countries in the world

would regard a New Zealand-South Africa rugby test series

as a great rugby sporting event.

29 nations pulled out of the games.

We protest against the participation of New Zealand who went to

South Africa to make a tour on the rugby after the massacre of Soweto.

We think that is an insult to our continent.

We deny ourselves this chance to run, this chance to jump,

this chance to do anything for the sake of our brothers there.

For the politicians, they made their point.

When they say something is going to happen it is

going to happen but for the athletes it is very discouraging

and there were some of them expressed their disappointment.

It is something you cannot recover. It is one big lost race.

I'm so disappointed.

I'm really very disappointed because I was ready to compete.

They made such sacrifices.

At least four years of preparation in many cases more than that.

It really was an heroic act.

It ends up with the morning

when the march takes place, 29 countries are missing.

We were told that you New Zealanders.

You're the ones causing the trouble at our Olympic Games.

And I suppose for the first time I thought that there was a different

and bigger picture that I should really be thinking about.

And so I found that I had changed my mind completely

about whether we should be playing against this racist society.

There was shock at the outcome of the Olympics.

People could not comprehend what was going on.

They couldn't comprehend the depth of feeling against New Zealand.

This little country that prided itself on racial equality

and fairness and how on earth had we become an international pariah?

Who was this arrogant little country with this upstart little leader?

Who thought that they could do this on the world stage?

Tomorrow, the Prime Minister leaves on a mission which many

people regard as his most important overseas trip to date.

Mr Muldoon's off to the Commonwealth Prime Minister's conference

and there he'll find himself embroiled in controversy over

the sporting contacts issue.

At Gleneagles I persuaded the Commonwealth leaders to take

a Commonwealth stand.

An official Commonwealth stand against sporting contacts

with South Africa.

The Gleneagles agreement said that countries had to take every practical step to stop

sporting links between their sports teams and South Africa.

Muldoon was... didn't want any agreement at all

and fought very hard to weaken it as much as possible

but in the end he signed the agreement.

Yeah. I thought that that was going to mean there couldn't be a tour.

At Gleneagles we said, OK, in the diplomatic way we'll come together.

We'll all say discourage. You'll move from banned to discourage.

We'll move from no interference to discourage.

And we shook hands on it. Went out and had a drink.

But, you know, Muldoon was a five-star manipulative bastard.

So we hadn't won our battle.

He was to be Prime Minister for another five or six years

and there was the '81 tour.

He wasn't going to stop that.

Government has the authority under New Zealand law and the

responsibility under the Gleneagles agreement to stop this tour.

APPLAUSE

I think that 1981 was the last great battle in the war

to determine whose values were actually going to prevail.

Are there any circumstances you could foresee in which the Government

would call the tour off?

No.

None whatsoever?

You never ever ever ever thought you'd won around Muldoon.

Gisborne, the town chosen by the New Zealand rugby authorities

to start the South African tour is a place where the white man

first set food in New Zealand back in 1769.

The anti-racialists are hoping that this coming week it'll be

the place where the Springbok tour ends as soon as it begins.

# One, two, three, four, we don't want your racist tour. #

We had very strong contacts with the aboriginal movement.

In Australia we invited Gary Foley.

Basically we came here to express solidarity with our brothers

and sisters in South Africa.

As well as to express solidarity with those Maori groups

who are opposed to the tour and all anti-racist people in New Zealand.

The Maori political movement

had established themselves very strongly.

When they linked up with the anti-tour movement,

it was a very formidable alliance.

I've never been in a situation like it in all of my travels -

the whole country seemed to divide very dramatically.

There was a huge amount of tension, within families, within communities.

CHANTING: Freedom killed by racist state!

'Everywhere through the country, people were arguing the issue.'

SHOUTING

I had families where Mum half the kids moved out of home during the tour.

The dividing line was down the middle of the dining room table, and they couldn't live together.

We've got to decide which is more important,

the freedom for black South Africans or freedom for New Zealanders.

If we lose our freedom, how will we ever get it back again?

And if we are denied the right to even go to a rugby game,

what sort of freedom have we got here?

-Springboks!

-'We were yelled at. Common things were,

"Get a haircut! Get a job."

And "wanker!"

Wanker! Wanker!

Wanker!

DRUNKEN SHOUTING

Wanker! Wanker!

No tour!

'When we arrived at the demonstration,

'we were told there was going to be a thing called Operation Everest.'

All those people who don't want to be involved in any direct confrontation,

-you march at the back of the march.

-There were 40,000 rugby supporters

at the game that day. It was a huge game.

This was going to be an event that could and should turn the tide

of history in terms of the voice against apartheid in New Zealand.

'There was this wire fence that guarded the outside of the ground

'and all the rugby fanatics were up on top.

'And, suddenly, Rebecca Evans put up a megaphone'

and she said, "Operation Everest - go!"

And the frontline spun left, and all of them jumped up,

grabbed the top of the fence, and pulled.

'So we haul back the fence flat out

'and then just a sea of people storming through the crowd.'

'And then, before we knew it,

'we were in the middle of the lions' den.'

'The consummate South African broadcaster kept saying,

'"Yes, a bit of trouble on the field here at the moment.

'"The game will kick off shortly".'

'Meanwhile, on the screen, all hell was breaking out.'

'Only 400 had burst through the fence.'

'Things were very, very tense.'

My parents were in the stand

as spectators wanting to see the game

when I was in the demonstration.

'The police came out with their helmets on and the sticks,

'which I think is the first time it had ever been seen New Zealand.'

'25,000 people wanted to kill us. I mean, kill us.'

'The crowd screaming for blood, us in the middle,

'and the police between us.'

SHOUTING AND CHANTING

'The police realised that the cameras of the world were there.

'They didn't feel they could baton us out there in the open,

'three o'clock on a Saturday afternoon,

'with half the world watching.'

The gentleman in charge of the police, in my opinion,

let down the whole country very badly.

TANNOY: The game has been officially cancelled.

JEERING AND SHOUTING

The Hamilton game has been called off, and this is the first time that

I am aware in the history of the long campaign against racist sport

that a sporting fixture has ever been called off!

'I never thought we'd ever stop a game, really.'

It was an out-of-body experience. I just thought, "We've done it!

"The whole tour is over! This is it."

My feeling was of total euphoria.

Because we could picture all these rednecks

in South Africa waiting to see their lovely game come

on television, and they weren't going to see a game.

TRANSLATION:

But then there was this other absolute moment of elation,

of the news being a television screen in Britain opening the BBC

World Service with the people standing in the middle of Hamilton.

'Jim Biddulph, BBC, New Zealand.'

It was huge, yeah. Shit! SHE LAUGHS

Good old New Zealand, you know? Yeah!

Yeah, it was. It was that kind of... Because we felt such shame.

So ashamed.

Yeah. So it was kind of... It was a cleansing kind of thing.

'After Hamilton, we were very optimistic.

'But we had not counted on'

the determination of the Prime Minister to see that tour proceed.

The extreme left is taking over the protest movement.

It's made to order for them!

Disruptive, anti-establishment, anti-government,

anti-everything that we stand for!

'A few days after the Hamilton game was cancelled,

'there was the first baton charge on demonstrators in 30 years.'

-Do you have any weapons on you at all?

-No, I don't.

It was just a peaceful match

and look what they've fucking done to me. I'm just a fucking kid.

-How many batons hit you? How old are you?

-I'm 16.

'It was grim.

'The protests and the reaction of the state'

were the closest that New Zealand got to civil war

in the 20th century.

MAORI CHANTING

MAORI HAKA CHANT

I remember at the very end of the tour,

the last demonstration was over, feeling absolutely exhausted,

and someone from one of the Sunday newspapers came up to me

and said, "Well, look, you didn't stop the tour, what did you achieve?"

And I said, "I think what we've achieved is the Springboks

"will never leave South Africa again".

And effectively that is what happened.

So you had a movement that was just a tiny idea,

and ended up being an international political hot potato that moved

the government and moved the United Nations and the Commonwealth to act.

And the first isolation came in sport.

So in my own view, and I admit I'm biased,

I would say that probably the challenge, successful in sport,

made an enormous impact on the whole struggle against apartheid.

I think sport sanctions were very effective

in changing or influencing the attitude

of white South Africans.

And eventually I think there were many, many more people

who would start thinking, you know, that...

"Aren't we perhaps doing something wrong?"

CHEERING

I was part of the main committee for the inauguration of Nelson Mandela

as the first democratically-elected leader of South Africa.

After the election there was a hue and cry especially amongst

black South Africans not to have the Springbok as the emblem

for South African sport because it represented depression,

it represented exclusivity, it represented white domination.

But then Nelson Mandela felt that reconciliation was important.

There is a real possibility, if we review our decision and accept

the Springbok for rugby as our symbol, we will unite the country.

And that a victory will make the achievement even more significant.

That the whole country, black and white, was behind them.

And they must go to the field fully motivated

knowing that they will bring glory to South Africa.

MUSIC: "Xilongo" by Richard Nwabi

CHEERING

And I was there when we won the World Cup.

This extremely excited level of emotion found expression in so many different ways.

As we walked out of the stadium,

you saw hundreds of black people who previously didn't even come to a rugby game

because it was considered part of the white man's apartheid system,

running around just shouting at the top of their voices,

"Ama Boko Boko, Ama Boko Boko".

'We never experienced this.'

This is our best time.

We're very proud of the him and very proud of the Boks.

You have to experience that to really understand

the unifying force of sport.

That occasion where Mr Mandela came out with a number six rugby jersey,

with Francois Pienaar, the captain,

did so much towards racial reconciliation in this country.

By proclaiming the message of one team, one country,

rugby in South Africa, once a symbol of division and exclusion,

had indeed crossed the threshold to a new era

of a united and reconciled nation.

MUSIC CONTINUES

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

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