The Making of a Nationalist Science at Stellenbosch University, 1935-2019

In this presentation, Dr Anell Stacey Daries offers a nuanced dissection of the rise and development of physical education, later reimagined as sport science, as a department and as an academic discipline at Stellenbosch University from its inception in 1937 to 2019. Located within a complex institutional history, this research foregrounds the extent to which the university’s ethos of conservativism and traditionalist values influenced departmental shifts over the course of eight decades. At its core, the presentation examines the extent to which the university played a crucial role in the politics of nation-building across the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

In the wake of the controversy surrounding the 2019 sport science article, Dr Handri Walters, contextualised the research premise and contended that this was not an anomaly. At a colloquium following the public’s reaction to the study, Stellenbosch Professor of Education, Jonathan Jansen, said: “I am surprised that you are surprised.” He alluded to the university’s history of race science in various disciplines. Moreover, in writing from the standpoint of the Sport Science Department and in direct response to the “vexed article”, Francois Cleophas, who is a Senior Lecture in the Stellenbosch University Sport Science Department, asserted that “the sports science curriculum… concerns itself narrowly with the technologies of sport performance, giving little consideration to the role of ideology and politics in the field…. [the 2019] study…makes the coloured body central to the discipline’s fixation on measurement.” All of this raises the critical question, how did black bodies become a problem in the first place?