The weight of history and the way it segregates SA sport need to be lifted
ON MAY 28, 1948, the Daily News newspaper announced that the Reunited National Party had won the whites-only general election in South Africa.
On August 10 of the same year, at the Olympic Games at the Empress Hall in Earl’s Court, London, William Ron Eland, a South African weightlifter, represented not his own country, but Great Britain in the lightweight division.
Although segregation had always kept black sportsmen and women from representing South Africa at national and international level, it was the National Party, as the RNP became known, that took sport in South Africa to a disgraceful new level. It introduced a racist policy dubbed apartheid, that left an enduring legacy of black exclusion, which persists in the 21st century.
One means of redressing this exclusion is the writing and rewriting of black sport history narratives within current decolonisation themes. Such narratives should not be apologetic given the plethora of white sport histories and biographies that emerged post-1994.
Unashamedly, many of these post-1994 sports narratives have a common thread running through them: that the white sports fraternity was a victim of the overall racist system and that they are devoid of any complicity in apartheid and segregated sport.
The present dominant historical discourse of weightlifting in South Africa, with its racial bias, proves this otherwise.
Rugby, cricket and football history writing has gone a far way in producing key academics who have exposed racist intent of the pre-1994 white sports fraternity.
Here the names of Albert Grundlingh, André Odendaal and Peter Alegi come to mind.
With the exception of Hendrik Snyders, very little attention has been directed at “Cinderella sports”. Yet, a historical account of “Cinderella sports”, such as weightlifting, brings home the potency of sport as a tool of resistance against racism in South Africa on the one hand and, on the other the deliberate act of making black people invisible in colonial, post-colonial sports history and even in post-apartheid society.
Weightlifting grew out of 19th and early 20th century physical culture where strong men picked up heavy weights, women and all sorts of objects. Bernarr Mcfadden, initially in America but later in Britain, popularised physical culture with his five-volume Encyclopedia of Physical Culture.
It was a work of reference, providing complete instructions for the cure of all diseases through physcultopathy, with general information on natural methods of health-building and a description of the anatomy and physiology of the human body.
This indicated a broad scope of physical culture.
With the advent of sportification in the early 20th century, South African strongmen and health practitioners evolved into weightlifters and health entrepreneurs.
In South Africa, Tromp van Diggelen, a white physical culturist, evolved into a health entrepreneur. However, Coomerasamy Gauesa (Milo) Pillay, a South African-born Indian, originally from Queenstown, but who later settled in Gelvandale in Port Elizabeth, promoted weightlifting. He started training on November 29, 1920 with some train rails and two 50-pound block weights used for scales.
This was after he witnessed Hermann Görner’s (a German strongman) feats of strength in the visiting Pagel’s circus, and after he had watched Elmo Lincoln in the film Tarzan of the Apes.
In 1929 he established the Apollo School of Weightlifting that was open to all “races”. Four years later, it became known as the Herculean Weightlifting and Physical Culture Club, and was the first health and strength club in Port Elizabeth.
This was also the first weightlifting club in Port Elizabeth. The following year it became known as the Milo Academy and from it emerged the Eastern Province Weightlifting Union and the SA Weightlifting Federation (SAWLF).
Unconfirmed reports indicate he was the only weightlifter chosen at the SA Olympic Games trials out of 17 competitors, but owing to the colour bar was not included in the team that represented South Africa in Berlin in 1936.
Although he retired from active weightlifting in 1935, with a torn leg muscle, he was appointed technical adviser to the Eastern Province Weightlifting Union. Thereafter, reports indicated he was selected to represent South Africa at an international weightlifting contest in Lourenço Marques (present-day Maputo) as an official Springbok athlete in 1937.
It is significant that Dennis Brutus, the well-known anti-apartheid activist, stated in Time with Dennis: Conversations, Quotations and Snapshots by Cornelius Thomas (Selbourne: Wendy’s Book Lounge, 2012) that it is possible that the non-racial sports movement in South Africa started with Pillay.
The Milo Academy opened the way for black South Africans to enter the Olympic Games when Pillay wrote to the South African Olympic and British Empire Games Association (SAOEGA) in 1947, informing them that they intended sending some “non-European” amateur boxers, wrestlers, weightlifters and athletes to participate in the Olympic Games the following year and requesting official sanction.
The SAOEGA’s dismissal of Pillay’s request resulted in one of the Milo Academy weightlifters, William Ron Eland, successfully seeking admission to the Games under the British flag.
Here, Eland competed against his fellow countrymen, Issy Bloomberg and Piet Taljaard.
Eland, unfortunately, had a burst appendicitis and could not complete his lifts. Bloomberg and Eland remained on friendly terms, while Taljaard committed suicide the following year.
On occasion, Bloomberg acted as a judge at “coloured” bodybuilding competitions. Although Eland proved superior to both lifters, he never bore a grudge and pursued a path of reconciliation, maintaining a welcoming attitude to Bloomberg. In fact, Eland was a member of the liberal Teachers’ Educational Professional Association (TEPA), instead of the more outspoken and radical Teachers’ League of SA (TLSA).
Despite this more “liberal” approach, Eland was stunted by a racist white political order that in turn was supported by white sport federations. Like other black South African sports people, he had to leave South Africa to pursue his career. He immigrated to North America in 1970 and served as a technical coach for the Canadian team at the 1976 Olympic Games and at the Commonwealth Games two years later.
Eland died on February 12, 2003 while on a visit to Cape Town.
Seventy years after Eland participated in the Olympic Games, South Africans are left with the official version in the Human Sciences Research Council report of 1982 that Oliver Clarence Oehley “can be regarded as the father of South African weightlifting”.
As late as 1992, the publication, Olympic Dream. The South African Connection, ignored Pillay and Eland, and claimed instead that Bennie Oldewage (a white lifter) was “South Africa’s greatest lifter”.
A decolonised historical narrative shows that although sport has been integrated by law, it remains segregated by history. Economic segregation has not evaporated in 21st century society.
The meaningful portrayal of Milo Pillay and Ron Eland, 70 years after the introduction of apartheid and the London Olympic Games, in the South End Museum in Port Elizabeth provides some hope that past prejudices in sport will not be forgotten in current narratives.
Hopefully, decolonised narratives will provide a new generation of historians with a template for writing and rewriting sports narratives.