Separating sport from politics is impossible

Bafana Bafana star Teboho Mokoena didn’t have to say EFF leader Julius Malema was his “favourite president in the country”. He then raised his hands, as if to say: “I can’t help it. Do what you want!” It was his choice.

While his conduct appeared extemporaneous, it opened an age-old debate about the interface between sport and politics. What is the sociopolitical responsibility of those who have achieved excellence in their sporting fields to those who have no access to the media attention that comes with victory?

Let’s think, for a second, about African-American sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos raising their black-gloved fists on the 1968 Olympic Games podium, a gesture that became front-page news worldwide.

“If I win, I am American, not a black American. But if I did something bad, then they would say I am a Ne**o. We are black and we are proud of being black. Black America will understand what we did tonight,” Smith said later, adding they were concerned about the many challenges faced by black people in the US. They were hounded and banned but lauded years later for taking a stand. Statues and murals have sprung up in their honour across the US and Australia.

Should the duo have called a press conference after their victory and hoped a tenth of the world media gathered at the Olympics would cover the event — or should they have used the podium to bring attention to a social injustice? They chose the latter. More recently, Manchester United stars Paul Pogba and Amad Diallo raised a Palestinian flag after an English Premier League match in 2021.

Many remember Muhammad Ali refusing to participate in the US war in Vietnam. He said at the time: “I ain’t got no quarrel with those Vietcong ... no Vietcong ever called me a ni***r.” He was stripped of his championship title but regained it after a lawsuit in 1970. Even then, he defiantly said: “I don’t have to be what you want me to be.” There is nothing more political.

Sport doesn’t exist in a vacuum, even though we

Sport doesn’t exist in a vacuum, even though we occasionally pretend it does

occasionally pretend it does. The humanness of sporting achievement, the ability to achieve feats that increase a nation’s happiness levels, must not be tainted by our political divisions. We want the theoretical to be real, but life doesn’t work like that.

The players are not apolitical. They are intricately enmeshed within the context of their times, affected by potholes and load-shedding. But when they are on the field of play, especially when representing their countries, we imagine they represent something pure, above our petty politics and the minutiae of our daily lives.

The performances of these players invoke in nations feelings and aspirations tied to political contexts.

Mokoena is an embodiment of what has made him the person he is. His community. The area he grew up in. Access to sporting resources, limited though it is for many. It is this that makes it hard to divorce sport from its social grounding.

Those growing up in townships and villages or living in the shacks that adorn our land, as Siya Kolisi once did, get filled with hope — an important ingredient of our politics — when they see him compete with the best around the world. They hope they too will transcend their immediate challenges.

When we watch basketball greats such as LeBron James, Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, Magic Johnson and Shaquille O’Neal, it changes what we believe to be humanly possible — that man can walk on air.

For many of us, these politically conscious sportsmen and women embody selflessness, for the ideals they pursue will benefit others in areas they have already conquered. When players take a knee, for example, in support of Black Lives Matter, they make a political statement in a social context. They’re saying to their fans: “Don’t be bigoted in our name.”

So Mokoena wanted to use Bafana’s great performance to make a political statement he believes necessary, given where we are as a country. He is perfectly entitled to do so. The hate he has been subjected to online reflects our dirty politics. Other players who feel that Zizi Kodwa is the best minister in the country are also free to say so. But to argue that sport must be separated from politics is to ask for the impossible.

Kutte Jonsson, a sports philosophy professor at Malmo University, notes: “They [political problems] are still right in front of us, even when we are watching the games.

And, as always when we are watching sport, we are also watching politics.” Some hold different political views to Mokoena’s, but that is no reason to lambast him. He, like all of us, votes, and in doing so we express our politics. Ali and many others taught us that sportsmen and women’s politics don’t have to be private.