Creating a decolonising South African physical culture archive: A case study of Ron Eland

Abstract

attention of an informal nature directed at creating decolonised South African physical culture narratives (Cleophas, 2018c). This is best done through the culling of data from private archives. Archives and decolonisationTraditionally, state and official archives provided primary sources for South African sport research. Such archives are however limited in their capacity to constructing decolonised sport narratives. Despite certain limitations that underexploited private archives hold, they constitute a valuable body of evidence (Odendaal, 2018:2). The researcher, however, not the owner or donor, creates the private archive from loose materials. Therefore, what we call private archives today was previously referred to as private manuscripts, historical manuscripts or manuscript collections. The evolving terminology is not without polemics for archivists today, considering the impact and influence of their motive and thought on archives. 'Private archives' is both a more inclusive term than manuscripts in that it more readily encompasses digital records and non-textual media and also expressly applies the word 'archives' to fonds of private provenance, something beyond 'historical manuscripts'. Then there are grey areas that dwell between public and private archives, and personal and corporate archives. Nowhere else, other than the private archive, do black weightlifters, who were and remain marginal figures in South African sport history, get to tell their story in detail and thereby allow historians a glimpse of their lives (Fisher, 2009:7). The aim of this chapter was to create such an archive by discarding and ignoring what has been wrongly written about black sport. Such an attempt is undertaken by an examination of Ron Eland's private archive.Traditional South African weightlifting (the modern-day version of physical culture) narratives reveals a white bias (see Leach & Wilkins, 1992:141-144). During the colonial and apartheid eras, public archives supported this biasness, which therefore limits their usefulness for decolonial sport history research (Lalu, 2008:158). Public archives also no longer hold the sole authority over creating physical culture narratives because they are "processes of preservation and exclusion" (Booth, 2005:85). Private archives, on the other hand, reveal the conditions under which marginalised communities conducted physical culture programmes.Although there is some scholarly interest (Cleophas, 2009;Snyders, 2018) in South African physical culture, it remains a neglected field of research among scholars. However, the participation of William Ron Eland, a black South African weightlifter in the 1948 Olympic Games and a member of the British contingent, is drawing some interest in South African mainstream printed and digital media (Cleophas, 2018c:9;2018d). Eland's sport career is tied up in his private archive that reveals how he reached the highest echelons in international sport -the Olympic Games, the Commonwealth Games and Mr Universe -but remains an unknown entity in his c...