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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 April 2022
The history of sport in South Africa is about more than mere games. Within the preface to his study of The Games Ethic and Imperialism, J.A. Mangan expressed the wish that he:
Would not like [the] study of cultural diffusion to be naively and erroneously catalogued under “Games”. It is concerned with much more: with ethnocentricity, hegemony and patronage, with ideals and idealism, with educational values and aspirations, with cultural assimilation and adaptation and, most fascinating of all, with the dissemination throughout the Empire of a hugely influential moralistic ideology.
Arguably, nowhere more than in South Africa have such processes been played out through sport. This makes the country an ideal case study for sports historians. Based on experiences from my Masters and PhD studies, this paper will provide a contemporary perspective of studying South African sports history as well as form part of the discussion at the June 2011 SCOLMA conference, ‘Sport in Africa: History, Politics and the Archive’.
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14 Sandiford has shown how Victorian cricket was never governed by the MCC to the same extent as soccer, for example, which fell under the control of the Football Association after 1863. Reluctantly taking charge of the county championship in 1894, it was not until 1903-04 that the first fully-fledged MCC team was sent abroad (to Australia). See K.A.P. Sandiford, Cricket and the Victorians (Aldershot: Scolar, 1994), pp.73-76. As my PhD reveals however, the South African Cricket Association did have a higher degree of involvement in South Africa's international tours during this period.
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30 Access was granted for the first time to Logan's personal collection within his house. These items included trophies, personal mementos (including items from the likes of Rhodes and Kipling) as well as Logan's own private photo albums. Logan's scrapbook had been the only item that had previously been made available by the family to other researchers.
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41 B. Stoddart, & K.A.P. Sandiford, (eds.), The Imperial Game, 1998.
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74 A. Marwick, The New Nature of History (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), p . 26. The distinction is further compounded by Robin Winks: “By a “source” the historian means material that is contemporary to the events being examined. Such sources include, among other things, diaries, letters, newspapers, magazine articles, tape recordings, pictures and maps. Such material may have appeared in print before, edited or unedited, and still be a source. The term is meant to be restrictive rather than inclusive, in that it attempts to indicate that works of secondary scholarship, or synthesis, are not sources, since the data have been distilled by another person.” R.W. Winks, (ed.). The Historian as Detective (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), p.xx.
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