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This paper explores Duncan Bell's heuristic of the mythscape as a means to conceptualize the nationalistic narrativization of the sporting past. Bell approaches the forging of national identity through evocations of the past as mythologized: that is, partial, contested, power-laden, and perpetually mutating. First, we introduce Bell's concept as a means to evaluate the selective, contested and shifting construction of the sporting past through the prism of nationalism. We first chart the narrativisation of the New Zealand – South African rugby rivalry within popular literature during the apartheid era (1948–1994). This was characterized by the production of 'governing' myths and oppositional narrations from the 1960s onward. We then evaluate subsequent post-apartheid narrativizations (1994 onwards) within popular rugby histories, focussing on the 1986 Cavaliers rugby tour to South Africa – the final event in apartheid-era rugby ties between the two nations. We explore how writers use particular narratives, and what they have chosen to exclude, and how it informs a national mythscape. We find the rehabilitation of governing myths that sanitize and redact connections between New Zealand rugby and apartheid. This is symptomatic of a selective construction that valorizes rugby as a idealized national institution. Finally, we offer comments on the utility of the mythscapes concept. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article traces the response of the New Zealand government to successive military coups in Fiji in 1987, 2000, and 2006 in the specific context of rugby contacts between the two countries and the strong nexus between rugby and political power in Fiji. It argues that the emergence of market-driven and globally focused sporting structures over the last three decades has fundamentally altered the relationship between sport and politics in New Zealand and the nature of sanctions it is willing to deploy--especially when compared with earlier debates over bilateral contact with apartheid South Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author, the fourth Secretary General of the Commonwealth and a former Foreign Minister of New Zealand, reflects on his encounters with Nelson Mandela. He sums up Mandela’s relationship with the Commonwealth in three phrases borrowed from Mandela’s biographer, Anthony Sampson: ‘a master of symbolic images’; determined ‘to lead from the front’; and when emerging from gaol as an overwhelming icon presented himself ‘as a fallible human being’. The author also considers New Zealand’s attitude to apartheid South Africa, and Mandela’s Commonwealth role after apartheid when, as South Africa’s new President, he made a powerful contribution to the development of the Commonwealth as a values-based association, upholding democracy and human rights. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this article, the author reflects on his time representing New Zealand in East Africa as New Zealand diplomat. Topics discussed include diplomatic relations of New Zealand with Tanzania and Kenya; meeting with Tanzanian President Julius Nyerere about diplomatic relations during the apartheid state and an increasing number of student scholarships to New Zealand from Kenya to arrange.

One of the major manifestations of sport-centred activist political struggles in the latter half of the twentieth century centred on the demand for the sporting and broader cultural, social, economic and political isolation of South Africa during the apartheid era. The struggle saw apartheid-endorsed South African sports organizations expelled from international bodies beginning in the 1950s, with the South African National Olympic Committee being the only one ever to be expelled from the IOC. The sports boycott was one of the major successes of the international anti-apartheid campaign, yet the existing literature on boycotts is only marginally relevant to cultural (including sports) boycotts. Furthermore, the existing literature dealing with sports boycotts, with its focus on the multilateral politics of Olympic boycotts, is of minimal use in explaining mass activist campaigns such as the anti-apartheid movement. This essay centres on the campaign against the 1981 South African rugby tour of Aotearoa New Zealand to explore the multiple significances of sport in the target (South Africa) and sender (Aotearoa New Zealand) states, and the character of the mass movement to argue that the cultural significance of both sport and the politics of 'race' and colonialism are vital to an effective understanding of mass movement supported bilateral cultural boycotts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information regarding the protests on the political system of apartheid in South Africa which occurred in the 1981 tour of the South African rugby football team to Aotearoa/New Zealand. It mentions that the political system of apartheid was a system where the subjugation and segregation of black South Africans were ensured by the most notorious race laws in the post-World War two. It states that the pronouncement of Treat of Waitangi signing by Governor William Hobson was brought by the protests at Waitangi Day celebrations. It adds that the Springbok Tour resulted to the economic hardship and fear of communism.

In this article the author endeavors to show the extent to which New Zealand Prime Minister R.D. Muldoon's actions from the time he became leader of his party in 1974 were directly responsible for the withdrawal of African countries from the Olympic Games. On the 29th of November 1975 Muldoon's National Party won the elections, within hours of the General Assembly of the United Nations passing without dissent a call for a worldwide boycott against apartheid sport. Events moved quickly. Shortly after the election, the invitation was given to the South African softballers, to be followed promptly by an appeal from the United Nations Special Committee Against Apartheid for the boycott of the World Softball Tournament if South Africa competed. Several countries withdrew but Muldoon stated that he was sure that the South Africans would be welcomed by the public. These events had not gone unnoticed by the Supreme Council for Sport in Africa which, first in Kinshasa and later in Nairobi, warned of the possibility of an African boycott of New Zealand at the Olympic Games if the New Zealand Government maintained its support of sports exchanges with South Africa.

The article focuses on the topics discussed by United Nations Global Compact advisor Prakash Sethi at a conference by the Council for Socially Responsible Investment in New Zealand in April 2008. He says that nvesting responsibly is not an option but an imperative, Sethi spoke from a wealth of experience advising on societal issues as diverse as the Exxon Valdez oil spill, anti-apartheid in South Africa and ethics and work practices in China and other parts of the world.