GOOD Statement by Brett Herron,
GOOD Secretary-General & Member of Parliament
20 September 2024
Cricket South Africa’s statement supporting ongoing ties with Afghanistan despite the repression of Afghani women sounds disturbingly similar to Western leaders’ justification for maintaining ties with apartheid South Africa in the 1980s.
Late South African Cleric Archbishop Desmond Tutu won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984 for his advocacy of the boycott and sanction campaign as peaceful means of struggle against apartheid.
Western leaders disagreed with Tutu. The UK’s Maggie Thatcher and US’s Ronald Reagan opposed the sanctions and boycott campaign against South Africa because, they said, they did not want to punish Black South Africans for the policies of the then government. In his support for a boycott breaking rugby tour to South Africa, then New Zealand Prime Minister Robert Muldoon rolled out the convenient: “No politics in sport”.
Yesterday’s statement from Cricket South Africa, that it “believes there is no justification for subjecting Afghan cricket players – both male and female – to secondary persecution for the actions of the Taliban”, would have made those former world leaders proud.
The statement repudiates South Africa’s own anti-apartheid sports struggle, and its slogan, “no normal sport in an abnormal society”. And it goes further to repudiate the use of boycotts and sanctions as legitimate means of non-violent struggle, altogether.
That Australia – which once sent rebel cricketers to South Africa in defiance of the boycott and is not widely regarded as a hotbed of consciousness of matters of social justice – recently declined to play against Afghanistan in order to signal support for gender justice, indicates how far South Africa has slipped in the pecking order of global social conscience.
Morality can’t be selective.
If Israel developed its cricket team, on Cricket South Africa’s argument we’d be playing bilateral series against them, too.
Moral decisions on who our national sports teams are willing to play should not be left to the sports sector; they are national decisions that affect the country’s standing.
Media enquiries
Brett Herron, GOOD: Secretary-General & Member of the Western Cape Provincial Parliament
Cell: 0825183264
Email: bretth@forgood.org.za
Janke Tolmay, GOOD: Media Manager
Cell: 0733671223
Email: janke@forgood.org.za