ABSTRACT
The fiction of racial purity, the "undilutedness" of blackness and whiteness, is especially strong in societies, such as the antebellum American South and colonial Africa, founded on these binary oppositions. South African colouredness is, arguably, best understood as a quasiethnic identity: a racially indistinct—including in its ranks several different physical "types"—community bound together by cultural practices, mores, values, and traditions, all of which have evolved in the face of racist white hostility. Midfielder's Moment demonstrates how nonracial sport resisted the strictures of apartheid by reaching outside the geographical boundaries of South Africa to the football culture of the English metropolis. The highly politicized role of sport in South African society has always been recognized as crucial, especially in terms of the efforts to isolate apartheid codes conducted internationally by South African Non-Racial Olympic Committee and internally by South African Council on Sport.
