1981 Springbok tour 40 years on: '1981 was the battle for the soul of New Zealand'

Friday, 9 July 2021

Forty years ago this month the Springbok rugby team started their controversial tour of New Zealand. The series of matches across the country caused division and riotous violence, but also triggered change. And, as Brad Flahive and Alex Liu discovered, the protest movement against apartheid-era South Africa had laid its foundations years earlier.

It was almost impossible to see the line of nightstick-wielding police officers charging after Will’ Ilolahia.

His heavy nervous breathing was misting up the visor on his borrowed, bright red motorcycle helmet as he scrambled to find the new rally point outside Auckland’s Eden Park.

The helmet and the padding on his arms and legs were necessary protection but useless if he couldn’t see where he was running.

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**

He dropped the helmet and found his way to the rallying point on Dominion Rd where hundreds of people like him, were ready to sacrifice their freedom and risk serious injury to halt a racist and inhumane ideology from permeating New Zealand society.

This was 1981.

A rugby team from apartheid South Africa was touring New Zealand and the country violently split in two factions.

New Zealand’s love of rugby led many to ignore the atrocities and racial oppression inflicted on black people in South Africa.

On the other side, organised local opposition had joined the calls from the international community to stop sporting contact with South Africa.

Among that determined group were the Polynesian Panthers; they had battled racial oppression in Aotearoa for more than a decade and instinctively knew the dangers of willful ignorance.

“After what we had seen in New Zealand, we could see [apartheid] coming here,” says Polynesian Panther Tigilau Ness.

That fear stemmed, in part, from the 1975 general election, where Robert Muldoon and the National Party won with a campaign that stoked fears of Communism creeping into New Zealand, a promise to kick out Pasifika communities, and resume sporting contact with apartheid South Africa.

In the years leading up to the 1981 tour, Muldoon’s Government brought back dawn raids on Pasifika families. The police task force targeted Polynesian neighbourhoods and, despite international condemnation and Olympic boycotts, the Springboks weren’t stopped from touring the country.

“All this talk about the best race relations in the country was just lies,” says Ness.

“If we don’t deal with this [apartheid] - this country? We’re done.”

Back at the rallying point, Ness, ‘Ilolahia and the other revolutionaries prepared to regroup after the police had splintered their protest action.

What happened next is detailed in Stuff’s latest podcast, Once a Panther.

Once a Panther is a podcast about the work of the Polynesian Panther Party, a New Zealand-based activist group inspired by the Black Panthers in the United States.

The Panthers were ahead of their time on several fronts: No possession of drugs or alcohol during movement time; no using the name of the movement in public for self-glory; equality of the sexes.

They were outspoken and visible – their berets and black uniform adopted from their counterparts in the United States – they appeared to threaten white middle-class New Zealand.

But in contrast to their militant structure, the Panthers’ roots were in community work.

The movement started homework centres, organised a food co-operative, created a legal aid booklet with future prime minister David Lange, kept an aggressive police force accountable, facilitated prison visits and campaigned for the rights of tangata whenua.

‘Ilolahia puts it more simply: “What was it all about being a Polynesian Panther? Standing up on behalf of our people, being good to your neighbour, don’t take no s… and stop this racism.”

So, when the Springboks arrived in 1981, the Panthers were trained and ready to lay their lives on the line.

If you look at photographs from the tour protests and riots, you’ll see people from all walks of New Zealand life – people from organised groups like the Panthers and Halt All Racist Tours (Hart), but also others from religious groups, and mums and dads who felt a moral obligation to take a stand against a brutal political regime.

“1981 was the battle for the soul of New Zealand,” says Trevor Richards.

Richards, the Hart movement chairperson, is probably better known as that “moustachioed bastard” and was a critical figure that led the opposition against Muldoon and the New Zealand Rugby Football Union (NZRFU), as it was then known.

“[Through] snipes at African leaders and Māori’ radicals’, [Muldoon] built a coalition of supporters, known commonly as Rob’s Mob, by appealing to those blue-collar Labour voters who felt threatened,” says Richards during an episode of Stuff podcast Once a Panther.

“They were the core of the pro-tour movement.”

A lot of fuss is made about the 1981 anti-apartheid movement, which irks Richards a little “because a hell of a lot of protests went on before then – the first was in 1921”.

“Māori were strongly opposed to New Zealand teams going to South Africa in 1949 and 1960 because Māoris weren’t allowed to go because the South Africans wouldn’t accept them.

“The NZRU was quite happy to say if you don’t want them, we won’t send them, so they sent all-white teams ironically named All Blacks.”

In 1973, Hart successfully helped to stop the Springboks from touring New Zealand.

“I don’t think enough credit is given to [former prime minister] Norman Kirk for stopping the 1973 tour,” says Richards.

“In the context of the time, it was huge.

“The chairman of the Wellington Rugby Union said it was the biggest disaster we had faced since Neville Chamberlain had come back from Munich in 1939.”

During the heady days of the All Blacks/Springboks rivalry, the post-war generation prioritised colonial ties over all else.

In the ideal post-war New Zealand home, families sat around the table with mum and dad on each end, ruling over etiquette and manners with a wooden spoon.

Mum and dad had survived World War II through sacrifice and rationing; thanks to them, New Zealand was safe from an alien antagonist.

But it was also bland and unexciting – and that’s how they liked it.

Little did they know their next adversary peered at them over the corned beef, boiled silverbeet and mashed potatoes.

Aotearoa’s baby boomer generation would demand change.

“Post-war New Zealand was insular, conservative, stifling, racist,” says Richards.

“[Former prime minister] Keith Holyoake told us we had the best race relations in the world, but I doubt if many Pākehā knew the difference between a pōwhiri and a waiata.”

“It was good race relations if you were Pākehā, assimilation was the official policy, but it didn’t take long to discover it was a hoax.”

In the late 1960s, activist groups sprouted throughout the country; the panthers, Hart and Ngā Tamatoa, to name a few.

When this enlightened generation learned of revolutions happening around the globe, pickets were a regular feature.

“You would walk down Queen St on a Saturday night and ask the person next to you what we were protesting about tonight - there was always something to picket,” remembers another Hart leader, John Minto.

Minto, another trailblazer for human rights, notoriously became the face of police anger during the tour – squads infamously named their long batons ‘the Minto bar’.

He joined Hart in the mid-1970s, and by that time, movements like Hart and the Panthers were perceived to be such a threat that the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) was spying on them.

Despite the dangers, Minto was determined joining Hart would make a difference.

“I felt like this was one issue where New Zealand could punch above its weight,” Minto says.

“We had this most important link that South Africa wanted with the outside world, which was playing rugby, Springboks playing All Blacks.”

In the leadup to the tour, Hart organised the most significant national mobilisation the country had seen - more than 30,000 in Auckland alone – in a last-ditch effort to oppose the tour.

The NZRFU were still deciding if the tour would go ahead, and Muldoon continued to argue that the government would not intervene in sporting contact decisions.

“We delivered 100,000 leaflets to letterboxes across Auckland city… telling people to come to the big mobilisation, and it was translated into the Pacific Island languages and Māori,” Minto says.

“The following week, we got the most appalling amount of racist stuff about Māori and Pacific Islanders sent to us in the mail, people furious this multilingual thing had arrived in their letterbox from these people who wanted to stop the tour.

“People did crazy things like go to the toilet and wipe themselves with the leaflet and sent it back to us in the mail – it was amazing.”

The mobilisation reached far and wide, and even in places like Eltham, the middle of rugby-loving Taranaki, 12 people turned out for a protest march.

“You have to take your hat off to those people as hundreds came out to abuse them; they were the real brave people because this was heartland New Zealand.”

Meanwhile, Muldoon targeted Hart in the press and labelled them treasonous for allegedly telling lies to international media about his government’s policies.

“It was tough for Muldoon,” says Richards. “His policies had directly led to 28 countries boycotting the Montreal Olympics.”

When it was likely the Springboks would come in 1981, Hart announced it would disrupt the tour.

“The feeling throughout the whole movement as if the Springboks are playing in Hamilton, we are not going to all descend on Hamilton, we’re going to have major demonstrations where we live and stretch the thin blue line,” recalls Richards.

“The police couldn’t send all their folks to Hamilton; they had to stay where they were based to cope with the protests there.”

Despite knowing how divisive the tour had become, the NZRFU announced the tour was on. It had received assurances the team had been selected fairly, not based on race.

“We took our lead from the non-racial sporting associations who assured us there was no change, but the NZRU was easily bought off by baseless assurances,” says Richards.

“There were 366 days on which the NZRU could announce the tour; they chose to do so on the third anniversary of the death of Steve Biko.”

Biko was a political activist in South Africa in the 1960s and 1970s who died while in police custody.

An inquest would later reveal Biko died from traumatic brain injury, not a hunger strike as announced by the South African Minister of Police.

Accidental or not, Richards says it was a signal of what was about to come.

For 56 days in July, August and September, the country was bitterly divided. More than 150,000 people would take part in 200-plus demonstrations in 28 centres.

“You had major mainstream opposition, with the need for social change pushing it, and rugby just happened to be the issue that caught the wind of that social change the most because it was something to which all parts of the country could relate to and was important to them,” says Richards.

“It would be the closest we would come to civil war since the New Zealand Wars.”

Once a Panther can be found on Stuff or through podcast apps, including Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or an RSS feed.