DENNIS BRUTUS - QUOTATION

South Africa, it is generally admitted, is sport mad. The extensive daily press and radio coverage, the intyerminable arguments in bus and bar, and the thousands who flock to the sportsgrounds all testify to this. . . White South Africa must, of course, do everything in its power to seal up this small crack in the grim edifice of apartheid [the sports boycott of South Africa by the West Indies Cricket Board]. Once this fissure grows, the entire indivisible structure of racial rule is threatened by collapse. For once White South Africans can be influenced in their judgments by merit, they will certainly come to think seriously of White and Black sportsmen alike. And in a country which eats, drinks, lives and sleeps sport, the entire mental climate of the country could be changed. Sport dramatizes their dilemma and exposes the anachronism of apartheid as few other things do: White South Africans must not only succeed in imposing their racial lunacy on the entire population of the country, they must also succeed in selling it to the entire world at international sporting events. The sporting world is, in conscience, bound to reject it eventually, and apartheid may well face its severest test then. For South Africa's sport-mad White population will either have to conform to the principles of international sport or be doomed to dispirited games of jukskei in its own backyards.

- Dennis Brutus, "Sports Test For South Africa." Africa South, July-September 1959.