Physical education and physical culture in the coloured community of the Western Cape: Areview

Cleophas, Francois Johannes; Merwe, Floris J.G. Van der

doi:10.4314/ajpherd.v15i1.44644

Cited by 8 publications

(6 citation statements)

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“…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).…”

Section: Archives and Decolonisationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…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).…”

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

Cleophas¹

2021

Critical Reflections on Physical Culture at the Edges of Empire

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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...

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Section: Archives and Decolonisationmentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Cleophas¹

2021

Critical Reflections on Physical Culture at the Edges of Empire

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“…There is also in SU research a more recent shift from merely describing the miserable conditions of some coloured people to explaining their conditions of deprivation and poverty in relations to systems of power. 90 People from low-income communities were not born poor, nor are their struggles because of something inherent in colouredness. Coloured people -like black people more generally -were made poor through damning racial legislation, 91 even as "poor whites" were uplifted through pro-white government policies long before the inauguration of apartheid in 1948.…”

Section: Misery Research and The Compulsion To Comparementioning

confidence: 99%

A Century of Misery Research on Coloured People

Jansen¹,

Walters²

2020

Fault Lines: A Primer on Race, Science and Society

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“…The same Act proved to be the forerunner of race-based education legislation that affected the provision of physical education (and education in general) to children of colour. 36 The authors of the alcohol and drug use study cited above and the retracted Sport Science article 37 reveal alike a lack of understanding of the socially and politically constructed nature of race classification, as shown, for example, by their references to "mixed races". Thus, Meyers et al assert that:…”

Section: They Further Statementioning

confidence: 99%

Race and the Politics of Knowledge in Sports Science

Cleophas¹

2020

Fault Lines: A Primer on Race, Science and Society

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Introduction Sports science in South Africa was initially a neglected backwater in academic studies, undertaken by an eccentric group of tenacious dissidents. 1 Previously the term "physical education" had been used, but in 1985 the discipline's name was changed to "human movement studies". 2 The sports science curriculum, to this day, concerns itself narrowly with the technologies of sport performance, giving little consideration to the role of ideology and politics in the field. Two exceptions are the recent book Sport, Physical Culture, and the Moving Body: Materialisms, Technologies, Ecologies, 3 edited by Joshua I. Newman, Holly Thorpe, and David Andrews, and Malcolm MacLean's article challenging the hegemonic practices of sports science, "(Re)Occupying a Cultural Commons: Reclaiming the Labour Process in Critical Sports Studies". 4 While there has been some attention paid to the politics of knowledge in physical education at school level, 5 this is not the case in the university discipline known as "sports science". As a consequence, most sports science students have not engaged critically with "racial science", which, as this chapter will show, remains a powerful legacy of colonial and apartheid sport into the present. The vexed article 6 emerged from the Department of Sport Science of Stellenbosch University that had only recently, in 2018, been reassigned from the Faculty of Education to the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences. It is a study that makes the coloured body central to the discipline's fixation on measurement; so, for example, the study cites theories that ascribe "the accelerated and unfavourable

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Physical education and physical culture in the coloured community of the Western Cape: Areview

Cited by 8 publications

References 29 publications

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

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

A Century of Misery Research on Coloured People

Race and the Politics of Knowledge in Sports Science

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