Saleem Badat

Today the All England Lawn Tennis Club, hosts of the famous Wimbledon Championships, pledges to be diverse and inclusive.

But in 1971 an 18-year-old university student, Hoosen Bobat from Durban, was excluded from achieving his dream of becoming the first black South African to play in the Wimbledon men’s junior tournament. 

This was due to apartheid, and the collusion of the all-white tennis union in South Africa and the International Lawn Tennis Federation, with Wimbledon toeing the line.

I tell Bobat’s story in the new book Tennis, Apartheid and Social Justice. I am a scholar who has published numerous books and papers on the histories of black exclusion and organised black resistance during apartheid, and on social justice and transformation.

My book documents the historic 1971 first international tour by a squad of black South Africans who played tennis under the auspices of the non-racial Southern African Lawn