South African rebel tours

The South African rebel tours were a series of seven cricket tours staged between 1982 and 1990. They were known as the rebel tours because the international cricketing bodies banned South Africa throughout this period because of apartheid. As such the tours were organised and conducted in spite of the express disapproval of national cricket boards and governments, the International Cricket Conference and international organisations such as the United Nations. The tours were the subject of enormous contemporaneous controversy and remain a sensitive topic throughout the cricket-playing world.

Until the D'Oliveira affair and Olympic exclusion in 1964, only white athletes had been allowed to represent South Africa in international sport. This position reflected their apartheid society (1948 onwards) and racist social conventions pre-dating apartheid. In 1971 an international sports boycott was instituted against South Africa to voice global disapproval of their racist selection policies and apartheid in general. South Africa became world sport's pariah, excluded from the Olympics, the FIFA World Cup, Test cricket and a host of minority sports.

The boycott effected measurable change on policy and opinion in sports selection – and cricket in particular. In 1976 the South African Cricket Union (SACU) was created to administer the game in the republic on a multi-racial, meritocratic basis: so-called "normal" cricket. However this was insufficient to ensure South Africa's re-admission to international cricket. Inside the republic, many non-whites resented "normal" cricket, which was a feeble concession in the wider context of life under apartheid, and declined to take part. Outside the Republic, the ICC bloc of India, Pakistan and the West Indies refused to countenance re-admission until apartheid itself was dismantled.

After a decade's isolation, cricket in the Republic was weak. Standards, attendances and child participation were all falling. Overseas the game had been revolutionised by the World Cup and World Series Cricket but isolation had deprived South Africa of these commercial and competitive engines. Then in 1979 Doug Insole, an English representative on the ICC, told SACU's Ali Bacher: "Until apartheid goes, you can forget about getting back into world cricket."

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