Swirling Shades Of Gray

The only way South Africa gets back into the Olympics is through the bush, with AK-47s.
—A KENYAN DELEGATE TO THE SOCCER WORLD CUP, MADRID , 1982

Every time we clear the high jump, they put the pegs a notch higher.
—A SOUTH AFRICAN CONSULAR OFFICIAL, NEW YORK CITY , 1983

Over the past 10 years, in newspapers throughout the U.S. and Western Europe , certain low-key advertisements have been appearing. Paid for by the South African government, they usually feature a bland message offering "information regarding progress and development in South Africa ." A picture shows black and white athletes in competition together. It is captioned THE CHANGING FACE OF SOUTH AFRICA . If you respond to the invitation from the Minister (Information) of the South African Embassy in Washington, D.C. , you might receive some South African government bulletins, such as No. 8/82, which is entitled Multiracial Sport Is Taken for Granted. This publication makes the claim, among others, that sport in South Africa is "multiracial" at all levels and that sports clubs are free to admit players and spectators "regardless of race, religion or politics." The clear inference is that the world is no longer justified in excluding South Africa from its great sporting occasions.

For more than a quarter century South African sport has been one long, drawn-out war, at its ugliest internationally in the violent demonstrations that have taken place from Scotland to New Zealand . It's a war that started with a shot that was scarcely heard around the world when, in 1956, the International Table Tennis Federation expelled the all-white South African Table Tennis Union but that, in 1964, led to the barring of South Africa from the Tokyo Olympics and suspension from FIFA , which governs international soccer.

By the late '70s, South Africa 's sporting isolation was virtually complete, and for obvious reasons. Whatever sins and excesses were committed by other nations, South Africa , uniquely, had enshrined race discrimination in its constitution, which disenfranchised 80% of its population and bound those citizens in a cruel net of apartheid laws that, as a byproduct, made normal sport impossible.

Slowly, though, and principally in the past four years, the government claims that, in the matter of sport at least, it has set its house in order. Most recently, early in 1982, it amended two keystones of apartheid, the Group Areas Act and the Liquor Act, insofar as they applied to sporting events. The first reform meant, for instance, that a white soccer team could go into a black township to play a game against blacks without needing a permit. The second made it possible for players of different races to have a drink together after the game and to use the same locker rooms and toilets. Combined with earlier easing of government policy, these acts allowed teams themselves to be mixed racially.

Substantial reforms, you might think, but to many South Africans they have been merely cosmetic. The dissenters charge that underneath, South African sport is still the mirror of an evil regime, but a mirror the government has distorted to confuse outsiders into believing that, while things aren't perfect, they are getting better and that South Africa deserves encouragement, not boycotts. And in one respect the opponents of the regime are right. Once in the country the outsider finds, at first anyway, that his preconceptions are tossed into a whirligig of motion and color that resolves itself into a gray, mazy pattern, like a TV with the tube blown.

Because of all you have read, because the name of the place has become a symbol, you go first to Soweto . It's still very hot this Saturday afternoon in the southern hemisphere's late summer, so as you head west out of Johannesburg , past worked-out gold mines and through a kind of DMZ of empty, scrubby country, there's no sign of the great pall of smoke that, you have been told, hangs for much of the year over South Western Townships, a.k.a. Soweto , where, officially, a million and a half blacks live and, unofficially, many thousands more reside. Each tiny gray matchbox of a house sprouts a stovepipe to carry away the smoke of winter fuel. In most of Soweto there's no electricity.

But the streets are electric enough. Streaming down the dirt road that leads to Orlando Stadium are thousands of fans heading for the big soccer game, the local Orlando Pirates vs. the Iwisa Kaizer Chiefs for the Champion of Champions—their Super Bowl championship for all South Africa . On this afternoon Orlando is their Disney World . Joyfully they chant and sing the Orlando club song, Baba Monomzana Sivulele Singene (Sesame, Open the Door). It takes some effort to recall that the stadium is near the school where 10,000 black students demonstrated in 1976 and triggered more than a year of riots that left, it's thought, more than 600 people dead—no official figures were released.

By game time more than 55,000 people will be crammed into the stadium (capacity: 45,000), with thousands more left outside. Drums beat, not to the joyful samba rhythm of Brazilian soccer drums, but with the kind of menace that put 19th-century explorers off their campfire suppers. Entirely African, also, are the dancers. No cheerleaders these, throwing high kicks. These girls shuffle rhythmically in the dust, wishing, with their feet, a hard time on the Chiefs.