Twenty-five years ago, New Zealand was swallowed by unrest sparked by sporting contacts with apartheid South Africa.
The arrival of the South African Springboks rugby team on July 19, 1981, kicked off two months of mayhem in the country set in the South Pacific and peopled by quiet, conservative men and women.
New Zealand was racked by argument and violence, fear and dissent at a level not seen since indigenous Maori tribes fought European colonists more than a century earlier.
PHOTO: EPA
It saw the nation divided, setting neighbor against neighbor, friend against friend, brother against brother and father against son. To this day, debate on the issue can revive bitter family arguments.
It saw children and grandmothers joining protest groups that opposed helmet-clad police in riot gear and wielding long batons. It saw 150,000 New Zealanders take to the streets and mount a campaign of civil disobedience on a massive scale
It saw airports, motorways and bridges blocked, television trans-mitters sabotaged, running battles in streets barricaded with barbed wire and more than 2,000 people arrested by the biggest regular and volunteer police force ever mounted in the country.
"It was like a war," Member of Parliament Marian Hobbs said this week, recalling the "fierce hatred" and adding, "Things you thought only happened overseas were happening in our own country. The fact that no one died was more luck than anything else."
A nation in which white Europeans had long lived harmoniously with brown Maoris and Pacific Islanders was brought to flashpoint by conflict between a national passion for the sport of rugby and an innate sense of fairness in a multicultural and multiracial society.
The flames were fanned by the prime minister of the day, Robert Muldoon, a diehard conservative who saw votes in pandering to New Zealanders' near-religious devotion to rugby and their desire to see an epic clash with their traditional rivals despite South Africa's racist apartheid regime.
To rugby fanatics, there was no debate. Politics, they said, should be kept out of sport.
But thousands more ardently believed that multiracial New Zealand -- which had prompted a boycott by 26 black nations of the 1976 Montreal Olympics by sending the All Blacks to South Africa -- should have nothing to do with the all-white apologists for apartheid and were prepared to stand up and be counted.
"If I'd thought New Zealanders were going to be bludgeoned by riot police, then I would have said ... `Jesus, the philosophical argument is not worth the blood of Kiwis,'" Aussie Malcolm, the then-minister of immigration, who personally approved the visas for the South Africans, said later.
The games were played at rugby grounds barricaded with barbed wire and resembling war zones. The scene was set at the first match on July 22 in Gisborne when a vehicle evaded a police cordon to drive around the grounds as protesters spread broken glass on the pitch.
Three days later, hundreds of protesters invaded a field in Hamilton, and the outnumbered police, told that a tour opponent had stolen a light aircraft and was threatening to crash it into the grandstand, called the game off.
"New Zealander turned against New Zealander that night," recalled veteran journalist Geoff Chapple, who wrote the book 1981: The Tour.
"Animal guts in your letterbox, milk bottles through your window, obscenities on your house, death threats through your phones, shop windows smashed, an ambulance wrecked," he said.
"You defended your turf that night with baseball bats. Pro-tour people invaded and wrecked houses, left anti-tour people unconscious on the lawns," he said.
Things went from bad to worse as the tour progressed. Police laid into 2,000 protesters outside parliament in Wellington, where "the batons started flailing and the air was filled with the sound of wood whacking unprotected bones and flesh," the Evening Post reported.
The rugby tour ended, eight weeks after it began, with violent scenes in Auckland, where cars were overturned in the streets as a light aircraft buzzed the stadium, dropping flour bombs on the players.
New Zealanders on both sides claimed victory, rugby fans pointing out that only one game was canceled and the protesters saying they had put an unprecedented international spotlight on sporting contact with the apartheid regime.
The Springboks did not leave South Africa again until apartheid was ended and president Nelson Mandela, who had been incarcerated under apartheid, later personally thanked New Zealanders for their contribution to ending it.
He was quoted as saying that when he heard about the protests in New Zealand, "The sun shone through the dark corridors of the cells."
Kehinde Sanni spends his days smoothing out dents and repainting scratched bumpers in a modest autobody shop in Lagos. He has never left Nigeria, yet he speaks glowingly of Burkina Faso military leader Ibrahim Traore. “Nigeria needs someone like Ibrahim Traore of Burkina Faso. He is doing well for his country,” Sanni said. His admiration is shaped by a steady stream of viral videos, memes and social media posts — many misleading or outright false — portraying Traore as a fearless reformer who defied Western powers and reclaimed his country’s dignity. The Burkinabe strongman swept into power following a coup in September 2022
‘FRAGMENTING’: British politics have for a long time been dominated by the Labor Party and the Tories, but polls suggest that Reform now poses a significant challenge Hard-right upstarts Reform UK snatched a parliamentary seat from British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Labor Party yesterday in local elections that dealt a blow to the UK’s two establishment parties. Reform, led by anti-immigrant firebrand Nigel Farage, won the by-election in Runcorn and Helsby in northwest England by just six votes, as it picked up gains in other localities, including one mayoralty. The group’s strong showing continues momentum it built up at last year’s general election and appears to confirm a trend that the UK is entering an era of multi-party politics. “For the movement, for the party it’s a very, very big
ENTERTAINMENT: Rio officials have a history of organizing massive concerts on Copacabana Beach, with Madonna’s show drawing about 1.6 million fans last year Lady Gaga on Saturday night gave a free concert in front of 2 million fans who poured onto Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro for the biggest show of her career. “Tonight, we’re making history... Thank you for making history with me,” Lady Gaga told a screaming crowd. The Mother Monster, as she is known, started the show at about 10:10pm local time with her 2011 song Bloody Mary. Cries of joy rose from the tightly packed fans who sang and danced shoulder-to-shoulder on the vast stretch of sand. Concert organizers said 2.1 million people attended the show. Lady Gaga
SUPPORT: The Australian prime minister promised to back Kyiv against Russia’s invasion, saying: ‘That’s my government’s position. It was yesterday. It still is’ Left-leaning Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese yesterday basked in his landslide election win, promising a “disciplined, orderly” government to confront cost-of-living pain and tariff turmoil. People clapped as the 62-year-old and his fiancee, Jodie Haydon, who visited his old inner Sydney haunt, Cafe Italia, surrounded by a crowd of jostling photographers and journalists. Albanese’s Labor Party is on course to win at least 83 seats in the 150-member parliament, partial results showed. Opposition leader Peter Dutton’s conservative Liberal-National coalition had just 38 seats, and other parties 12. Another 17 seats were still in doubt. “We will be a disciplined, orderly
RSS