ABSTRACT
The ‘most damaging blow against apartheid’, the English editor and author Anthony Sampson suggests, was the ‘sports boycott’. In view of the pivotal role that decades of sustained internal opposition, economic sanctions, and diplomatic pressure played in securing a democratic South Africa, it is difficult to regard Sampson’s claims as anything other than an exaggeration. This chapter examines the unique cultural links between the working-class coloured community of the Western Cape and English football clubs. Through a discussion of this mimicry, both in terms of the possibilities it offers and the complex ways in which it is ‘surpassed’, it engages with the significance of the coloured working-class’s singular support for metropolitan cultural institutions. Football was a marker of the ethnic, historical, and ideological distinctions within the white South African community. Afrikaners read football’s preeminence amongst the oppressed as the most culturally explicit evidence of black, coloured, and Indian ‘anglicization’.
