Items

• These tarnished Olympics

  [Excerpt]: "If anyone does not believe the repercussions of apartheid stretch far and wide, they should be present at the 1976 Montreal Olympics, where it has tarnished the Games as they have never been before. One only had to see last week a departing team from Afria waiting with their baggage for transport to the airport...Everywhere was a feeling of sadness and futility... This was a seminar organised by the United Nations Special Committee Against Apartheid and held in Havana, attended by 200 delegates including the crucial nucleus of leading African sports officials and SAN-ROC. It was at this stage that Dennis Brutus, the president of SAN-ROC, a professor of English in the African Studies Department at the Northwest University of Illinois, threw his own acknowledged ability and experience and that of SAN-ROC unequivocally behind the African protest. Brutus, an exiled coloured South African, who was imprisoned in South Africa as a result of his views on apartheid, was portrayed in oarts of the British and foreign Press last week as a somewhat sinister figure. Yet, it is he who turned to de Broglio in Havana to say: 'If they (the African countries) are prepared to go through all this--which is much more than we would ever ask--who are we to quarrel? We're with them.'"
• Inside track

  [Full text]: "A REPORT from South Africa yesterday that a new non-white sports committee has been formed to work together with the existing white South African Olympic and National Games Association (SAONGA) towards the country's fight for re-entry to the Olympics, was received with surprise and disappointment by anti-apartheid leaders in Britain. Denis Brutus, president of the South African Non-racial Open Comittee for Olympic Sports (SANROC) characterised the move as a blow to black South Africans who want multi-racial sport. There are two black sports groups in South Africa--those who agree with SAONGA president Frank Braun's proposals for organised separate black and white sports activities; and those who will not negotiate on any basis other than multi-racial sport. 'I am afraid,' says Brutus, 'that this means that the first group have agreed to co-operate with Mr Braun on what amounts to an apartheid platform.' Indeed, two members of the black group seeking multi-racial sport have been interrogated by special branch officers, adds Brutus. SANROC are retaliating by lifting their own restrictions on protests against individual athletes and officials as opposed to white South African teams."
• Catalogue of the ridiculous

  [Excerpt] "I have just spent a strange morning in a library. It was the reference section of the Johannesburg Municipal Library: I had entered, handed over my straw bag in exchange for for a disc, made my request to a solicitously attentive woman at the inquiry counter, followed her to a glass fronted case, waited while she unlocked it and removed a large, loose-leafed volume for me. Now I sat down among the other users of the library... My book was Jacobsen's Index of Objectionable Literature, a publication launched a few years ago by an enterprising man who realized that there was money to be made by collating and publishing in book-form the weekly list of South African censors' bannings... Most titles my finger was running down, page after page, were banned by the old Publications Control board, before April. They constitute virtually the entire oeuvre of black South African fiction writers, essayists and some poets, including Lewis Nkosi, Ezekiel Mphahlele, and Denis Brutus, and such individual works by myself, Dan Jacobson, Jack Cope, Mary Benson, C. J. Driver, Andre Brink, and other white South Africans..."
• Apartheid and Sport: The Logic of Denis Howell's Approach

  "If the Minister for Sport, Mr. Denis Howell, has his way we will be deprived next year of the opportunity of seeing the South African cricket team in action. Choosing his words with care, Mr. Howell said in a television interview at the week-end: 'I personally don't think the South African team should come. I Have no time for sport based on racial considerations. Their sport certainly is, and the selection of their team certainly is." ...By this I mean far more than the cancellation of the New Zealand rugby tour in 1964, or the fiasco over the MCC tour last year. I could take the story back as far as 1956, when the International Table Tennis Federation excluded from membership the all-white official South African Table-Tennis Association in favour of an unofficial group whose rules allowed ping-pong across the colour line. But it is best to begin with 1962, when the "South African non-racial Open Committee for Olympic Sports"--Sanroc--was formed. This group worked originally inside the Republic but it has since exiled itself to London since its president, Denis Brutus, left his home country in 1966 after a 22-month term served mostly on Robben Island..."
• Scenes from an unhappy life

  "He has now been banned from his London publishers, Heinneman for 15 months, after a scence during which they tried to withhold his foreign royalties to pay off his unearned advance."
• Banning poetry to ban the bomb

  "Rudolph built up Menard's reputation by publishing translations of such foreign poets like Nadezhda Mandelshtam, Primo Levi, and ex-President of Senegal Senghor in addition to the work of younger British poets."