{"id":8750,"date":"2026-09-01T00:29:02","date_gmt":"2026-08-31T22:29:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/1nationmedia.com\/?p=8750"},"modified":"2026-09-01T00:29:06","modified_gmt":"2026-08-31T22:29:06","slug":"sport-as-resistance-hassan-howa-and-the-fight-against-apartheid","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/1nationmedia.com\/index.php\/2026\/09\/01\/sport-as-resistance-hassan-howa-and-the-fight-against-apartheid\/","title":{"rendered":"Sport as resistance: Hassan\u00a0Howa\u00a0and the fight against apartheid"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

One Nation Media\u00a0editor, Dilly Hussain<\/em>, reflects on the legacy of Hassan\u00a0Howa, the pioneering anti-apartheid sports administrator who helped transform the playing field into a battleground for resistance, justice and liberation.<\/strong> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hassan Howa was not a politician in the conventional sense, nor was his primary arena of struggle parliament, protest marches or underground political activity. His battlefield was sport.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Born into a working-class family in Cape Town in 1922, Howa grew up in a South Africa where racial discrimination shaped virtually every aspect of life. Educated at Trafalgar High School in District Six, he was an amateur cricketer whose lasting contribution would come not with the bat or ball, but through sports administration. In 1947, he helped found the South African Cricket Board of Control (SACBOC), which promoted cricket among communities excluded and marginalised by South Africa\u2019s racial sporting establishment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As apartheid tightened its grip over the country, Howa increasingly came to regard the struggle for non-racial sport as inseparable from the wider struggle for equality. He became one of South Africa\u2019s most prominent advocates of sporting isolation, eventually helping establish the South African Council on Sport (SACOS) and becoming closely associated with the principle that there could be \u201cno normal sport in an abnormal society.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Chapter 13 of\u00a0Howa\u2019s autobiography provides a fascinating window into how that philosophy developed, and how sport itself became a form of resistance to apartheid.<\/p>\n\n\n

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By the beginning of the 1970s, apartheid permeated virtually every aspect of organised sport. Black sportsmen and women were denied facilities and opportunities, while white-controlled sporting bodies sought to preserve their international standing despite operating within a system founded upon racial segregation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The absurdity could sometimes be brutally literal. In 1963, after the non-racial South African Soccer Federation refused to accept the white football establishment\u2019s approach to integration, the Natalspruit Indian Sports Ground near Soweto was shut on the day professional matches were due to be played. Spectators arrived to find the gates locked and the goalposts removed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was within this environment that Howa emerged as one of the most prominent advocates of non-racial sport.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet what is striking about his story is that resistance did not mean accepting every organisation that described itself as anti-apartheid. Howa initially kept his distance from the Ad Hoc Committee established in 1970 to create a united non-racial sporting body. He objected to organisations claiming to be non-racial while, in his view, continuing to make decisions along racial lines.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It reveals something important about Howa\u2019s politics of resistance: unity mattered, but principle came first.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Eventually, common ground was found. On 17 March 1973, Howa was present when the Ad Hoc Committee dissolved itself and the South African Council on Sport was formally established in Durban. Eight national sporting bodies came together, with Howa becoming vice-president alongside president Norman Middleton and general secretary MN Pather.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

They were taking on something much larger than sporting discrimination.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SACOS operated without the privileges available to white sporting bodies and under a state capable of using legislation, policing and intimidation against those challenging apartheid. Its predecessors had already experienced the consequences: the South African Sports Association had been crushed, while the South African Non-Racial Olympic Committee had effectively been driven into exile.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The question confronting Howa and his colleagues was therefore not simply how to organise cricket, football or athletics. It was how oppressed South Africans could use sport to confront the legitimacy of apartheid itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SACOS<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

SACOS\u2019s answer was uncompromising non-racialism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Its founding objectives committed it to equality and fraternity without discrimination based on race, colour, creed or religion. It sought international recognition for its affiliates while challenging the legitimacy enjoyed abroad by apartheid sporting institutions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This became particularly important as the apartheid authorities attempted to soften their international image.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rather than dismantling racialised sport, the government introduced limited changes which could be presented abroad as evidence of progress. Mixed sport might be permitted in certain circumstances while apartheid remained the reality everywhere else.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For SACOS, allowing selected Black athletes opportunities within a fundamentally unequal system was not liberation. It risked legitimising that system.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The struggle therefore increasingly turned towards isolation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SACOS recognised that international sport was one of apartheid South Africa\u2019s vulnerabilities. Rugby and cricket in particular connected white South Africa to countries such as Britain, Australia and New Zealand. Denying apartheid those relationships meant denying it something it desperately wanted: international normality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As Middleton articulated in SACOS\u2019s early years, meaningful change would come when South Africa was \u201ctotally excluded from all international participation\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Howa would become one of the leading proponents of precisely that philosophy, lobbying for apartheid South Africa\u2019s exclusion from world sport and refusing to accept cosmetic reform as a substitute for genuine non-racialism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Crucially, resistance inside South Africa was reinforced by solidarity abroad.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Australian rugby players who had witnessed apartheid first-hand refused to make themselves available to face the Springboks. Anti-apartheid campaigners mobilised against South African tours. African sporting organisations increasingly recognised the collective power they possessed, while activists in New Zealand pledged to oppose racist sporting teams visiting their country.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By the 1970s, SACOS had played a major role in bringing apartheid sporting tours to a halt, working alongside an international network of anti-apartheid organisations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is perhaps an even broader lesson in Howa\u2019s contribution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SACOS succeeded despite containing people sympathetic to different strands of the liberation struggle. ANC supporters worked alongside adherents of the Black Consciousness Movement and the New Unity Movement. Their political differences were known, but one principle governed their cooperation: SACOS came first.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The wider struggle mattered more than factional interests. Hassan\u00a0Howa\u2019s legacy therefore reaches beyond cricket or even sport.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He belonged to a generation that understood resistance as something that could take many forms. For\u00a0Howa, refusing apartheid\u2019s sporting structures, rejecting cosmetic concessions and campaigning to deprive the regime of international legitimacy were not distractions from the struggle. They were part of the struggle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The playing field had become another battlefield against apartheid, and Hassan\u00a0Howa\u00a0helped ensure that South Africa could not pretend otherwise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

May Allah (SWT) have mercy on him, accept his efforts in resisting injustice and apartheid, and grant him the highest ranks of Jannah. Ameen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hassan Howa’s biography will be available in bookstores in South Africa by September 15, 2026. <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One Nation Media\u00a0editor, Dilly Hussain, reflects on the legacy of Hassan\u00a0Howa, the pioneering anti-apartheid sports administrator who helped transform the playing field into a battleground for resistance, justice and liberation. Hassan Howa was not a politician in the conventional sense, nor was his primary arena of struggle parliament, protest marches or underground political activity. His battlefield was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":8751,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[12,13,204],"tags":[519,921,456,1362,405,455,1368,293],"class_list":["post-8750","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-opinion","category-south-africa","category-top-story","tag-1-nation-media","tag-apartheid","tag-dilly-hussain","tag-hassan-howa","tag-one-nation-media","tag-onm","tag-sacos","tag-sports"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t