A poignant interview with Lord Hain by Don McRae on the Stop the Tour story in The Guardian. Don is a fine writer, and grew up in Apartheid South Africa.
"I was an eight-year-old boy living near Johannesburg when that tour ended and it was the first time I realised the outside world hated South Africa. Our white suburban lives were shaped by racism and privilege and it needed the sports protests and eventual boycotts to force boys like me to wonder what was wrong with our country."
Hain was 19 in 1969 when he confronted white South Africans in the sporting arena to highlight the brutal injustice of apartheid. He became a despised figure in his home country and among conservative British society.“It was startling but I soon realised it came with the territory,” Hain says. “There was no social media in 1969, so it came in different forms of a vicious kind. It started with letters written in green ink and led to direct threats to kill me.”
A new BT Sport film called Stop the Tour, a powerful documentary by the director Louis Myles, captures the impact of the protests. It also explains how Hain’s motivation was to block the South Africa cricket tour of England in 1970 – and how the touring Springbok rugby team became a dress rehearsal of vehement anti-apartheid protests from early November 1969 to late January 1970.