Fair play? Reading between White lines at South African school sports days

In the spirit of Max Gluckmans’s 1940 ‘The Bridge’ paper, this paper offers a situational analysis of the Kylemore versus Groendal High School Derby Day in the Western Cape’s Dwars River valley in 2014. I compare this Derby Day with an athletic event at my Former Model C (Whites-only during apartheid) school in 2004. Situational analysis allows us to track persistent racial disparities over time and ask how time is figured differentially in relation to belonging. I show how historically contingent stereotypes of Coloured people were actively gainsaid, and subjectivities that are subversive and plural were enacted at the former. At Sutherland High where pupils ‘reach for the stars’ by drawing on a repertoire of colonial tools of distinction, the future was optimised in reference to the ‘rainbow nation’. In both cases symbols of modernity were drawn on in the practice of enacting belonging. These sites share a foundational logic that operates differentially, maintaining and creating unequal terrain for play. This logic can be observed by considering and questioning White lines and the iterative process of drawing, ignoring, and challenging them. order to study social change in South Africa the sociologist must analyse the equilibrium of the Black-White community at different times and show how successive equilibria are related to one another.” “College math evokes a Midwesterner’s sickness for home. I’d grown up inside vectors, lines and lines athwart lines, grids – and, on the scale of horizons, broad curving lines of geographical force…” and responding to boundaries and White is an iterative process that is normalised in the context of sporting universals, masking the uneven terrain of social life in South Africa. This paper compares these two events to show that while the terrain is unequal, the underlying logics at play at South African sports days share a foundation, usefully demonstrating larger patternings

"In order to study social change in South Africa the sociologist must analyse the equilibrium of the Black-White community at different times and show how successive equilibria are related to one another." (Max Gluckman 1940:29) "College math evokes a Midwesterner's sickness for home. I'd grown up inside vectors, lines and lines athwart lines, gridsand, on the scale of horizons, broad curving lines of geographical force…" (David Foster Wallace 1991: 68)

Introduction
We grow up inside vectors, parameters. When I walked along the corridors at Sutherland High School in urban Centurion, Gauteng, in 2004 I did as my sprinting coach had instructed me: I looked down at the row of tiles and matched my step to its arrow-straight path. I was correcting my 'pigeon toe' in-step because it was carving crucial split seconds off my 200m time. I had to recalibrate my movement, so that from the second the starting gun burst, the sides of my feet would follow the track's inside curve tightly and then sprint dead parallel with the straight White lines painted on the track. Done correctly, the crowd would roar, and wave their South African flag props in unison. The podium was the end goal, and a cabinet containing all thirteen trophies (including the 'spirit' trophy) was the school's zenith.
A decade later I stepped through a securitised gate into a bounded, guarded space at the annual Kylemore versus Groendal High Schools Derby Day in the Dwars River Valley in the Cape Winelands as an anthropological researcher. The same geometric arrangement of lines was laid out on the sports fields. However, the entrance was strictly policed, the spirit was buoyant (if not officially rewarded), rules were bent, and the aspirational symbol of the day was a ceremonial toast of wine. Beauty pageant queens, headmasters and rugby captains raised stemmed glass to their lips in the opening ceremony before the first team boys' rugby match.
Attention to sport makes lines vivid -social lines, geopolitical cross-sections, the horizons that mark home and belonging, and lines that designate person, race and place. Setting up and responding to boundaries and White lines is an iterative process that is normalised in the context of sporting universals, masking the uneven terrain of social life in South Africa. This paper compares these two events to show that while the terrain is unequal, the underlying logics at play at South African sports days share a foundation, usefully demonstrating larger patternings of power. In this paper I apply Gluckman's (1940) situational analysis method to the 2014 Dwars River Valley Derby Day. I precede this with a retrospective account of my own school sports experience. This allows me to describe demarcations, boundaries, rules and rituals that suggest 'matter out of place' as described in the 'bridging' between the two situational descriptions. The town of Kylemore was historically designated Coloured, and Sutherland High, though racially diverse when I attended, is a 'former model C' school, meaning that during apartheid it was Whites-only. 1 The analysis shows how formulaic connotations of development, belonging and race (instituted by modernity, colonialism and apartheid) are maintained, edited, and temporally reckoned. Gluckman argued that this method was useful to consider race relations over time (1940). I agree, but extend and apply this method to question how time, and tense, are figured differentially in social discourse and narratives thereof.
Why these choose two sporting events as sites, and why situational analysis? The genesis of this paper lies in a particular bracket of time, a deadline, really -that public health has drawn around infants and their caregivers. The 'first thousand days of life' has been demarcated as a seminal period in which exposure to a variety of effects shapes lifelong health, potential and development (Pentecost 2016). It was an interest in this bracketing of time that bought me to the Dwars River Valley with its mountainous horizons, and unexpectedly, to the Kylemore VS Groendal Derby Day, in the spring of 2014. Not being hip to the sociological relevance of sports I had not planned to attend such events (I mostly spent time with women and families in Kylemore, often at a soup kitchen) but was invited by a research participant, Antie Sara, and was curious as I had heard much talk of it. In my research on the first thousand days I set up a framework of nourishment, and asked how it was sought and enacted. Consequently, the analysis of the Derby Day became crucial to my argument that belonging is a central aspect of nourishment, particularly in this so-called postcolonial, post-apartheid valley characterised by precarious livelihoods between pockets of extreme wealth.
Situational analysis recognises that groups and individuals can have many different kinds or forms of relationships within 'the social unit'. A well-selected situation demonstrates the particular shape of those relationships, at that particular time. My research enquired into the 'space between' public health discourse and everyday life, showing how legacies of Othering are visibly and 1 I capitalise racial signifies in recognition that they are abstract categories with fraught political histories. In my research in Kylemore many of my participants expressed discomfort with these categories in terms of their own identities. The category White was considered least flexible, the foundations of which can be read here in terms of the history of modernity, coloniality and apartheid.
implicitly embodied and expressed. I was thus interested in the underlying logics of relations of belonging in this space. Situational analysis helps ask what aspects of racialised relationships are being actualised, and what aspects excluded (van Doorne 1981:484). Gluckman stressed the selection of situations to demonstrate the reduction of conflict between people (ibid). For example, at the opening of the bridge that his seminal "The Bridge" paper centres on, he describes cooperation (and mutual co-option of cultural signifiers) between Zulu people and White officials. This was radical at a time when governing political interest was served by ideas of irrevocable difference between White and Black people (Morreira 2016:287).
Conversely, it is precisely the notion of sports as a site where difference is evacuated that makes it so well-suited for situational analysis today. Consider the well documented notion of sports as a panacea for a wounded nation, emblematised in Nelson Mandela's 1995 donning of rugby jersey and backing of the Springbok rugby team in the 1995 Rugby World Cup final as the exemplar (see Grundlingh 2013). Similarly, much sports-for-development rhetoric promotes sport as 'feel-good', 'uplifting' and empowering (Kaur 2016), often ignoring structural violence and allowing paternalistic developmental interventions to operate as if across and beyond the lines that designate the Other. Finally, universal codes for sport disguise social contexts and the imposition of certain rules and particularities (Bale 2008). They espouse a kind of intrinsic, natural set of properties that disregards how "the ability to jump or run in a particular way is meaningless outside a particular socialized experience and function" (Bale 2008: 332). As a method, situational analysis helps unpick these seemingly innocuous events, with the attendant theoretical contribution that reveals the dynamics of relations that undergird them. While I use situational analysis specifically here, the outlook is ethnographic overall. The analysis demonstrates both how useful sport is as a topic for ethnographic attention, and how useful an ethnographic eye is. The choice of a sporting event as a site of social analysis remains undervalued -as the edited volume by Ashwin Desai (2010) attests. This is possibly due to the supposed association of sport with 'frivolity' as Hamayon (Puett 2016) demonstrates. As Maclean argues in relation to the questions of cultural values of certain sports in subaltern contexts -we need to think like anthropologists "with skills in the exploration of both ethos and world view" (2010: 103) (See for example Grundlingh, Odendaal andSpies 1995, Nauright 1998 as examples of the strong tradition of sporting analysis in South Africa).
The history of sport is also an useful field for anthropology to reckon with its disciplinary origins. Pre-Boasian anthropologists made a currency of Otherness in the 1904 Anthropology Days and Olympic Games. Indeed, "sports and anthropology were nodes in an interconnected network united by a shared ideology of civilizational progress" (Brownell 2008:19). The spectacle of physical anthropologists pitting seemingly bounded races and cultures against each other to prove the superiority of Whiteness reminds us of the links between knowledge production and the ordering of bodies. Evolutionary ideology was premised on the hierarchy from 'savage', towards the 'civilised' and 'physically superior' White man. This is embedded in the hubris of development. If we think of the notion of modernity as that which operationalises linear time as a figure of the West, and which rests upon a violent territorialisation that displaced people from space (Mbembe 2000), then we find in sporting situations the scope to unpack historical imaginaries and the implications of the shifting horizon of the future that modernity heralded, and continues to herald, if vaguely and obtusely so.
As Quijano (2002: 75) describes the sense of the future horizons that weaves modernity and progress in the last five centuries:" [there] has always been a brilliant horizon visible to everyone around the world, shining with promise at certain times: modernity, rationality, progress, liberalism, nationalism, socialism". This shifting horizon has always promised hope and change, but -and the particularity is important as this imaginary comes to rest differentially -it has "created a different meaning for each history, in each space/time" (ibid). Such categorised and differentiated temporality (segmented past, present, future) is not necessarily taken up in postcolonial Africa (Mbembe 2001cited in Morreira 2017. We should thus attend to how notions of development, and logics of belonging depend on this segmented articulation of temporality.
Arrangements of White lines on sports fields are not incidental but are part of the tradition of sportification and geometrification that uses spatialised rubrics of Whiteness as the criteria for development (Fusco 2005). While a great tradition of sporting resistance to colonial and apartheid control existed at the same time as the management of Black bodies through sport and state control, (see Sikes, this issue) Booth and Nauright (2003) argue that a particular 'habitus' has been embodied in South African sporting culture. 2 I take the idea of this conflicted habitus, alongside the habitus of anthropologists as preoccupied with difference, as an invitation to pay very close attention to the 'White lines' constructed geometrically on fields, and the White gaze that tries to interpret sport in universal terms. Such White lines reference the normalised, assumed centrality of Whiteness as a pervasive form of Eurocentric racialised domination and sociality (Fusco 2005: 284 During the summer term school lessons were shortened to add a period at the end of the day, a few times a week. The time was set aside for relay athletes to perfect our handovers. During this period it was compulsory for non-athletes to take to the stands and cheer while we trained. They were mandated to sing for us.
We were being primed for PEMHSAA -the annual Pretoria English Medium High School Athletics Association meeting. Our school was after the elusive 'spirit' trophy and anxious, as always, to win the relay race trophy.
The 'spirit' effort was very strictly coordinated, with songs being composed (normally riffs of popular songs), props purchased, and the appointment of official cheerleaders.
In "the year we finally won the spirit trophy back" the opening ceremony was kept a secret until the last minute. That morning, the cheerleaders' 'walkin' dance was accompanied by a crowd spectacular: in perfectly synchronised verbal and visual motion, sections of the crowd seated in a block opened up. With each chant a section of Coloured umbrellas was unfurled-Black, yellow, green, White, red, and then blue. The chorography was perfect -the stand was decked in a composite of the South African national flag.
Triumph! The elusive spirit trophy was back in the cabinet.
In this formula of school sport you rocket your body forward, parallel to White lines towards a finish line, a medal, a podium, an ovation. The sea of rainbow nation umbrellas was the ticket to victory. This is a single description of one popular discourse dramaturgy, or tone, of postcolonial, post-apartheid South Africa, in 2002Africa, in -2005. Social discourse, visible in songs, in conversations, and movement should be taken, following Mbembe, as "active statements about the human condition" that "contribute integrally to the making of political culture in the postcolony" (1992:7). South African sport has been significantly shaped by colonialism, imperialism, coloniality, capitalism and "racially and genderbased social ideologies" (Nauright 1997:6) and was included in imperial sporting networks within 40 years of British settlement in the Cape. This was twinned with education -sport was used in schools to "instil values of British elite culture" that was seen as naturally superior, the purpose being to demonstrate "solidarity, superiority and apartness" (Nauright 1997:25).
Gluckman, who pioneered sports sociology years after 'The Bridge' paper, was a stellar school soccer player himself: Gluckman's energetic obsession with sports goes back to his school and student days…[Unlike] most other anthropologists of his era, Gluckman always listed his school, King Edward VII (KES) in Johannesburg, on his CV. Clearly he felt that it was important both in shaping him and as a status symbol. When it was founded in 1902, Lord Milner, the British High Commissioner, wanted it to be another Winchester College by stressing values, manners and that difficulty to define quality, 'tone', generally taken to mean courage and self-control, best developed institutionally through Houses, Prefects, cadets and sport (Gordon and Grundlingh 2016:21).

By standards of historically 'old' schools such as Gluckman's KES, Sutherland
High was a relatively new school, established in 1986. Yet it took its name from the nearby named Sutherland Ridge in rapidly urbanising Centurion in Gauteng, so named after a Scottish regiment that operated in the area around 1901 in the First World War. 3 The school took 'Sutherland' as its motif, cladding women in tartan skirts, all of us in (expensive) tartan ties, and dividing us into school houses (or 'home rooms') in the British school mould. We were not taught any of the relevant Scottish history or the legacy of the tartan and so forth. I was familiar with these imperial relics, having gone to an Anglican primary school complete with straw hats ('bashers') nuns, daily chapel and strict rules concerning skirts and knees, and having read Roald Dahl's biography Boy (1984) that describes his schooling at Repton in England. Analysts of race in South African sport have demonstrated the centrality of sporting performance as a method of distinction (understood within Bourdieu's framework) that was part and parcel of the 'civilising' mission towards notions of respectability (Booth and Nauright 2003) Sutherland High fetched its repertoire of distinction from the colonial canon at its inception (despite its proximity in time to the legal demise of apartheid), and the ticket to victory from the rainbow-nation rhetoric of democracy in 2004.. While it borrowed from this particular historical imaginary of a distinctive legacy from the past, the school's ethos was guided by looking to the future.
The school played on its nominal association with Sutherland, a small town in the Karoo in the Northern Cape that is renowned for star-gazing. The school motto, in Latin, (a subject obviously not taught in 2004, nor in 1986 at the school's inception) was 'Ad Astra': 'to the stars'. The road to the stars (the official version) was thus via excellence in academic, culture and sport categories, all hemmed in by Latin mottos, a Christian school song (despite a large number of pupils being either Muslim or Hindu). You might think it a picture of modernity with neat categories, hierarchies (not only blue, trimmed blazers, but also White ones with gold trim, and then later red ones, as 'leadership' was added to the categories of distinction). In our tartan uniforms and 'houses' with far-fetched Scottish names we were individuals competing within standardised White lines for prowess, with our supporters recruited to cheer for us, to win a trophy in return for their scripted exultations.
What are the foundations of such categories of distinction, based as they are on a historical imaginary of success? They look to the future, to 'excellence' and tack between past and future selectively. The 2018 matric motto is "When excellence is available, good is not good enough." The school draws on a repertoire of tools of distinction based on ideas of modernity and colonial notions of development and respectability. When I attended, individual performance was rewarded with recognition, and tight hierarchies and rules allocated the playing field. Even the non-athletes had to cheer. This reminds me of Mbembe's (1992) accounts of Cameroonians being called/ coerced out from their government offices into the streets to cheer and celebrate when a member of the commandement arrived, or died. In response to such coercion, Mbembe describes the artful, playful and satirical responses by homo ludens (from Huizinga's concept of play). While not all pupils at this school would have rolled their eyes in the face of 'due decorum', an example of homo ludens from this particular event follows: popular songs and tunes were often adapted to lyrics suited to cheering and support. The original lyrics of the popular song that formed the basis of the 'opening song' at PEMHSAA that year were by Lil Jon and The Eastside Boyz: "Three, six, nice, damn she fine, Hopin she can sock it to me on mo time Get low get low get low get low To the window, to the wall (to dat wall)

To the sweat drop down my balls (MY BALLS)
To all these bitches crawl (crawl) To all skeet skeet motherfucker (motherfucker!) all skeet skeet got dam (Got dam)" Whilst the school version of the song included 'your sweat drips down our walls, all you schools you lose' supporters in the audience sometimes selected to sing the original song lyrics as above. An open secret, you could choose which words you hurled at the athletes scurrying on the pitch. The politics of belonging were encapsulated under a sea of rainbow nation umbrellas where the scope for humour and resistance lay in misogynistic, sexist song lyrics. The singing crowd had one song that let them go off the script 'for the stars' (for if the adjudicators heard, the trophy would be lost). Notwithstanding the perversity of the alternative, subjectivities were being shaped and not received as prescribed. This follows Mbembe's argument that there is no singular 'postcolonial subject', rather, the practice of homo ludens "enables subjects to splinter their identities and to represent themselves as always changing their persona; they are constantly undergoing mitosis, whether it be in 'official' space or not" (1992:5). Just so, there is no singular or distinct 'modern' or 'postcolony'.
In the school's ethos we find one iteration of the good life, and one script to follow to embody a particular notion of good, of success. The cues for excellence were an adorned blazer, a podium finish, and a trophy in the cabinet for 'spirit', even though cheering was compulsory. My school was not majority White, but it aspired to the kind of tone that Gluckman's KES exemplified. This vignette gives one perspective of the kind of sportification common in South African school sports, demonstrating the individualised focus on excellence, the rainbow nation tactic, and the stakes of athletic prestige in modernity. How do neoliberal politics of respectability and progress (extensions of modernity) take hold in contemporary sporting aesthetics? What conditions of good are made available by particular social and environmental terrains? I had little inkling of the implications of the quick leap to Scotland for some symbolism. I mispronounced Derby as 'Dirby' for years, but in the dramaturgy that was PEMHSAA I was active in social discourse that yearned 'for the stars', and celebrated in popular terms Quijano's argument that democracy is the ultimate expression of modernity (2002:77).
I have briefly sketched an example of how we continue to embody the fraught racialised subjectivities learnt during apartheid and colonialism -of which sport and bodily performance are central (Nauright 1997:21). Modernity's version of sportification thus propels us toward development in a certain habitus. I have sketched this in order to describe what is, in part, my habitus -when I arrived at the Derby Day in the Dwars River Valley it was these 'White lines' I looked through, or looked for. The logic of the White lines that I learnt to sprint between, and think between, was to act in the present -to optimise (implying resources) to secure the future (Adams, Murphy and Clarke 2009).

The bridge
This section is not a bridge between the two sites of analysis -one characteristically 'modern' the other not, but a space to think of the constitution of the 'Other'. It is preferable to think of this as a bridge rather than a boundary. In 'The Bridge' paper Gluckman (1940) was making a retort to functionalist notions (mirrored in ideas of Othering and modernity) that designate cultures as discrete, bounded wholes that maintain an internal equilibrium. He was also responding to the political argument of the day that relied on the designation of a vast chasm of difference between Black and White for the maintenance of colonial order (Morreira 2016:287). Racial separation and discrimination and Othering endured in the Dwars River Valley, as it did at Sutherland High School and does nationally and globally. The idea that race can be determined by 'the look' is founded in Eurocentric epistemologies (Erasmus 2017:41). One key way in which the violence of colonial territorialisation was justified is based on "the racial denial of any common bond between the conqueror and the native" (Mbembe 2003:24). This mode of Othering was the foundational imaginary in the imposition of a jurispolitical system (that allocated territory, person and rights) that denied indigenous people personhood (Povinelli 2011:16). It was foundational in the sense that it implicates both settler and indigenous, who are irrevocably interlaced through their shared foundation, but kept operationally distinct (ibid) as made visible by the skewed demographic composition of the valley and its schools where racial distribution continues to mirror socio-economic status.
Boundaries as impositions of colonialism are often reduced to legal and spatial demarcations of 'space', ignoring the diverse political imaginaries that imposed and moved boundaries. A boundary is not a simple extension of sovereignty, nor is it (or was it prior to colonialism) arbitrary (Mbembe 2000:262). Mbembe argues that globalisation takes a vantage point of Africa as marginal, and imposes homogenous space-time configurations upon it. The African subject is seen to be void of time. As Povinelli (2011) argues, the settler is interpolated in the tense of the future anterior, and the indigenous in the tense of 'prior'. In spite of universal sporting codes (and human rights charters) that may seem to 'level the playing field', we see that geopolitical location matters. Geography -the lines on maps, the topographies of place, the demarcations of home and belonging -is indeed force, as suggested in the quote from David Foster Wallace's essay that opens this paper. 4 In her ethnographic exploration of the intersections of race and space in characteristically Canadian and North American university sports locker rooms 4 The title of Wallace's essay is "Tennis, trigonometry, tornadoes: a Midwestern boyhood". The essay enfolds, as this paper does, political and geographical context, ideology and inner world as bodily experience to sketch the dramaturgy of a 'Midwestern boyhood' that inspired much of my thinking here Fusco (2005) demonstrates how the hidden logics of modernity operate to make ideas of respectability, civility, and purity (a rubric for Whiteness) appear as the normative ideal. It is in this sporting space that seems to hide the logics of modernity in universal formats, that we might ask how the formations of space and time operate .
The foundational political imaginary that binds settlers and indigenous is extended in the use of narrative and the tense of the Other (Povinelli 2011:22). In Truyts (2017) I draw on this and other data, to show how ontological difference often assumes a radical, impoverished other, and creates and perpetuates hierarchy through representation. I argue that narrative and representation matter, just as social grammar does, in actual processes of belonging and praxis of nourishment. Inasmuch as residents of Kylemore and Groendal forged belonging in the marginal spaces available to them, they are constantly interpolated in the tense of the Other -that is -the prior Other. Social belonging is distributed along those fractures. (I use data from this Derby Day to interrogate the notion of space and territory in relation to labour, belonging and the obligations of theory in Truyts 2017). Quijano (2002) locates the historical imaginary that sketches the future as "the continent of hope" in a European milieu where the past as 'golden age' was surrendered to an ever-hopeful future premised on a need for change. The notion of modernity as progression is tied into this historical imaginary alongside the premise of democracy as the ultimate expression of modernity (Quijano 2002: 77). The idea of the West, and modernity, as being located in Europe, promotes a strange notion of the West constructed outside Africa (see also Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2013, Mbembe 2000. The production of modernity, as Mitchell argues, relies first on the notion of the West as distinct from non-West, and second on the modes of representation that consistently stage the difference between the West and non-West (2000: 26). The Western notion of historical time that foregrounds Europe orders modern geography (Mitchell 2000: 8).
By asking about tense and temporality in sports we challenge an articulation of the West that reifies itself as central. We cannot look for modernity simply in the blazers and podiums of former model C schools, or in the national flag, or in gestures towards a hopeful future that resembles modernity's promise. It is important to talk about sport, temporality, and the dynamics of race relations from both these places -and ask what links them. In simple terms, I have chosen a method that situates my perspective between the two, and offer an account that makes it clear that my reading is shaped by a White gaze (extending Gluckman's observation of himself as researcher as a link to consider my own habitus). As Morreira writes of anthropologists who worked for the Rhodes Livingstone Institute, anthropologists both partook in and resisted colonialism. That one can resist, question and critique whilst also being complicit evidences the heterogeneous nature of colonialism and terms such as modernity (Morreira 2016). To this Morreira offers anthropology as "a tense engagement between individual stories and broader political economies" (2016:281). This is move that situational analysis makes possible. We move now to another situation in order to demonstrate some of the shared foundations and racialised dynamics of settler colonial logics as exemplified through attention to sport.
To give some context on the Dwars River Valley I draw on Kees van der Waal's (2014) edited volume "Winelands Wealth and Work: Transformations in the Dwars River Valley, Stellenbosch'. As the title suggests, the valley is characterised by acutely unequal geopolitical spacing: lavish winelands and precarious and paternalistic labour relations (see also Du Toit 1993) are spatial representations of capitalist, racist forms of labour production. Kylemore, an extension of Pnïel (where the Derby Day was hosted) that historically housed Coloured farm workers, is one node in a patchwork of land units that have historically been segregated on the basis of race and class (Van der Waal 2014:9). Competitive relations continue in the valley, and are famously made visible in sporting competition (ibid).
The Dwars River Valley is predominantly White-owned. Coloured farm workers provided long and short-term labour as slaves, indentured workers, and then workers with restricted access and nominal personhood during apartheid. Their labour was integral to the establishment of the wine industry. Today, the legacy of the 'dop system' (and its correlates in high levels of alcoholism and Foetal Alcohol Syndrome) persist (See Levine 2013, London 2000, Du Toit, Kruger and Ponte 2008. The historical continuity is significant -in his seminal 1993 paper on the micro-politics of paternalism on wine and fruit farms in the Western Cape, Du Toit demonstrates the imbrication of labour and social life in relation to home and belonging. He writes "these are the consequences of workers' living on the farm: every aspect of life is bound up with the world inside the wit hekke (White gates)" (Du Toit 1993: 315 In an EWN opinion piece Danielle Bowler (2015) writes of the stereotypical representations of Coloured identity that sweep Coloured people into an homogenous, monolithic entity, "people simply become gangsters and violent thugs, promiscuous and lewd, uneducated and loud, constantly drinking and drugging, and with no front teeth". She continues "the function of these stereotypes is that they masquerade as 'natural' and inherent aspects of being Coloured that are entirely accurate and can be applied to all". They create a "predetermined script both to follow and understand". Sanitation laws and segregation laws were often made in reference to the corrective missive of the 'lazy' and/ or 'drunk' farm labourer (Kaur 2017: 292). Reckoning the Derby Day against such a script requires analysing the creation of order. Consider the R20 entrance fee, the gate, the conditions of entry. The space was deliberately sanctified of all that marks enduring, racist stereotypes. Instructions were clear: No alcohol. No smoking.
This space was not created for anyone else but the attendees. It was not created for a Western gaze (myself and one netball coach I saw briefly the only Whites in attendance). However, the R20 and travel to Pnïel would have excluded many. The space was aspirational, its designation sacred. Hamayon writes that "all specialized games find a sacred aspect as long as they are performed in a specific time and place, in a festive atmosphere with spectators, and alongside other forms belonging to the sphere of play: music, costumes, prize giving" (2016:62). However, this was not just sacred because of the props of a festival or games. It was sacrilegiously protected, patrolled, and ordered as a powerful marker of place and belonging in a valley that continues to be marred by socio-economic exclusion, and where the host school would take pride in demonstrating prestige.
The creation of this sacred space at the Derby Day has come about historically in relation to sporting tradition (the history of school sport as twinned with modernity divided the players and non-players, named the games, divided genders, etc.) but was not a production specifically for the Western gaze (in the present). However, it is significant that the subjectivity cannot be made outside of the reference to the West. Ndlovu-Gatsheni quotes Butler's (1997) response to the double-bind where "the subject is the effect of power in recoil" (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2013: 106) that 'imprisons' the African subject within the power relations it must endure and try shake off. Attempts to shake off the past thus cannot be made outside of engagement with it -that is an embedded logic of domination, that may march under the name 'development' (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2013:108).
The safe, sacred, jubilant space was made possible by putting up certain boundaries (a sign: no drinking, no smoking), and loosening others. Those boundaries signal deliberate actions that refute stereotypes that deal with the baggage of the past -the 'dop system', paternalism, narratives of want -that remain evident in the everyday. The Derby Day deviated from the school sport script I was familiar with -but more significantly perhaps -it deviated from the stereotypes of poverty, drunkenness, and abjection that the communities at play (and historically 'Othered' under the Coloured designation) are often painted with. Representation matters, as Bowler (2016) and Majombozi (2015) argue.
As soon as we enter we veer right, to the netball. We stand around the edge of the court, part of a human hem that is clearly partitioned into green (Groendal) and yellow (Kylemore), whom we cheer for because that's my fieldwork site and I know a few of the players through their relatives. The Under 17s win their game. They dance ecstatically, supporters flocking on to the field when the final whistle blows and joining in the jubilation. The whistle blows starting the second quarter, some players have changed positions. A pupil in yellow (for Kylemore) standing close by asks "Who is our goal scorer?" "I don't know, I don't know her", her friend replies with a sharp intake of breath.
They play on. Kylemore is fighting back. The new scorer, whoever she is, is good. The hoop catches one whooshing ball after another, and the defenders tire.
Then the whistle blows again. The umpire (a woman with brisk Black tracksuit pants, and a half-peak hat) blows her whistle. The coaches are called up. They stand on court and confer. The brilliant goal scorer is called up, a brief interlude. She shrugs. Is sent off, disqualified. The coach shrugs.
"She isn't in Kylemore [High]", I hear someone whisper. The old scorer comes back, they play on. I wonder how the word reached the official. I sense that it travelled from a comment like the one I heard, around that tight chain of people closely connected, to reveal that the new 'doel' was probably an expupil, a relative, or a friend. No one seems particularly bothered. I don't think the score even changes to deduct her goals.
Later in the week I discussed the netball match with Antie Sara. She told me that the goal scorer's disqualification was truly unfair -the match was "between Kylemore and Groendal". The point was not about being in school or not (she did not even discuss school teams, ages and so on). According to Antie Sara, the disqualification was unfair because the girl was from Kylemore, and should thus have been allowed to play: "It's not about the school you go to, it's where you are from," she told me. Echoing my research on nourishment and childcare, the social capital of belonging was both highly significant, and fraught.
A few weeks after the Derby Day I would learn that Antie Sara, who had lived in Kylemore all her life and who was born in one of the original homes, spoke Afrikaans and was widely known as a 'pillar in the community', had been forcibly removed from the Coloured school in Kylemore as a child because her skin was too dark a shade of brown. The disqualification of the Kylemore player was as arbitrary as that displacement. It imposed a set of conditions of belonging/ suitability to play that ignored what the yellow flags and unified song sang. What an arbitrary rule -to discriminate against a player from Kylemore on the basis of school enrolment! We want to see what is happening with the rugby so we walk over the wooden bridge, along the path, to the main pavilion. Buy a R10 cooldrink with our small change.

The stand is partitioned -green and yellow. The crowd swirls. Fragments of conversation rush past my ears. Prefects sell boerewors rolls under a gazebo.
We find a place in the shade but end up going back to the netball -it was more riveting and personal than the rugby game where the field is separated from the stands by a solid fence which makes the game feel distant, dissonant. We check the score on arrival. 23-15 to Groendal (maybe they did deduct the illicit goals, we wonder).

This is a very different presentation of Kylemore than the one I find in the soup kitchen and streets on most weekdays. This is jubilant. There is dancing, hugging, spontaneous celebration. Kylemore would win the spirit war if there was one -their 'gees' is something special (although Groendal clearly has the best 'doel' and a significantly better first team).
When we return to the rugby game shady seats are in high demand -tension is building for the first team match and the stands are packed. We sit one row from the front. Many pupils sit with their families, behind us. Large families, each person decked in yellow. A woman with an oversized yellow ribbon in her hair, babies in yellow Babygros. One particularly enthusiastic supporter has 'Kylmore' shaved into the hair on back of his head (I don't think the middle 'e' would fit).
I have never experienced such robust, consistent and boisterous support. The speakers are shut down. Music is made with one White drum (skilfully beaten) and a chorus of voices. Security guards and the neighbourhood watch take their work seriously. A guard stops the drumming at one point. The entire crowd roars at this, a unified insistence that the drummer be allowed to play.
Everyone stands for the school song as if it were the national anthem at a state event. We stand, too. Everyone sings. The school children falter at one point; their elders carry the tune perfectly. They know all the words. I do not recognise a single face from the soup kitchen, or even a child from the crèche. Not one. The R20 entrance must exclude many. I wonder about those who didn't come? Aren't interested?
No one was drunk or drinking. And I saw only one man who was smoking, off to the side. There were hundreds of people and only one cigarette.
And then there were the pre-final rugby match rituals. The headmaster calls for a moment of silence for an old pupil who passed away and was buried in Pnïel that day (we passed the funeral on the way). The crowd does not observe the minute of silence, with bursts of laughter and chatter rolling around and growing momentum as the minute wears on. The headmaster admonishes those in the crowd who didn't hush.
Subjectivities take form in a context that is historically, environmentally, and socially imbricated. The skewed distribution of life and death are scattered throughout the story. Coloniality and apartheid regimes championed a natural order, and so, relegated Black bodies as worth less, or nothing, compared to White ones. People were valued in relation to labour. They were not allowed to represent the country in sports, their bodies subject to state power, state surveillance, state torture. It was homo ludens again, laughing, refusing to be quiet, albeit here in the request to recognise death.
Then the name of each rugby player is read out. On the Groendal side, the crowd cheers after the full team has been announced. When the Kylemore team is called, every boy receives a personal crescendo of cheers when his name is called. Then the players run on to the field to a great roar. Some kneel (seem to pray? Kiss the pitch? Pick off a piece of grass?) then join the line of players facing the crowd.
Then, to my surprise, a trumpeting announces the next event. Necks crane to view two young women emerging from the bleachers: Miss Kylemore, and Miss Groendal. They walk onto the field in their full pageant regalia -tiaras, dresses, sashes, high heels (slightly troubled by the soft grass). The pageant queens shake hands with the headmasters and team captains as the crowd applauds. An assistant in school uniform proffers a tray that holds six champagne flutes, and a green wine bottle. Liquid is poured from the bottle into the six flutes. (Is it wine? Is it grape juice? There is speculation in the crowd). The two pageant queens raise their glasses in salute with the headmasters' and the rugby captains'. They toast, sip, (do they sip? The crowd members behind me suggest that if it was indeed wine, the school learners would only touch it to their lips, not swallow). After this toast the non-players leave the field, and the starting whistle blows.
It is in the context of a toast of wine at Saturday morning school sports that Ndlovu-Gatsheni's argument that Africans have "remained hostage to invented colonial discourses" (2013: 104) springs to mind. Yet toasting with wine in the Dwars River Valley on a Saturday afternoon is not inherently strange. Undoubtedly, glasses were clinking all over the wine and fruit-growing region, albeit in tasting rooms not on sports fields. Tiaras at sporting events? It was a tradition of the classic Olympics, and in 1896 as the modern Olympics came about, to have royalty at the opening ceremony: "the band played the royal anthem, the crown prince made a speech addressed to the king, the king proclaimed the games open, and the band and choir performed the newly composed Olympic Anthem" (Brownell 2008: 43).
The wine industry's history is founded on dispossession. 5 The ancestors of many present on that day were enslaved, first, then indentured under the 'dop' labour system, resulting in a tradition of alcohol consumption and high rates of foetal alcohol syndrome. Since the 'new dawn' of democracy, no agricultural land has been given to these people (with the important exception of Solms Delta (see Jackson 2014)) and their own village risks being 'developed' into further elite housing estates, and is being cut off from the agricultural land conservation area up in the valley. The wine industry institutionalises precarious labour, and wine itself, though commonly consumed, is also known as a scourge and source of social ills. Abuse due to alcohol was common, and I knew babies who had wine in vitro, and then with milk. It was 'papsak' wine, however -cheap, sweet, potent. It was not drunk in stemmed glasses. Those glasses were 'high class' as one woman 5 See Waldman (1996), Bolt (2017) told me. Civilised. Modern. I argue in "How ingestion edits life: Nourishment in the Cape Winelands" (Truyts, forthcoming) that consuming wine can be many things all at once: an injury to a foetus, a site of commensality, a physical addiction inherited from generations of violent exposures to extractive patterns of labour and payment, a powerful social gesture, and, if consumed in a stemmed glass as this was -a mark of respectability and upward mobility. We might read this social discourse as belonging to the valley, to the lush green hills, to the industries, to the prestige of drinking in stemmed glasses.
The Riviernuus (the valley newspaper) reports that Kylemore has lost every year for the past seven years. This does not diminish the status of these heroes, nor quell the furore when Kylemore scores the first points -from a free kick. The other teams' tries are met with boos (by young children) and complaints of a blind referee. We share a boerewors roll. Tomato sauce and barbeque sauce. Delicious. Behind us is a new-born baby (one month old), who sits in her mother's arms, then her aunt's lap. The women tell me that they live in Groendal, although they were born in Kylemore, and will support Kylemore till they die. The father curses the referee beautifully, and provides hilarious commentary: "dis 'n ou man daai, wat nou ge-tackle is" -that's an old man that, who just got tackled.
In concluding this section, I want to pause and ask what this means in temporal terms as relates to intergenerational inheritance: social belonging is, after all, first preoccupied with the families we grow in, or nearby. The discourse of the first 1000 days, on epigenetic premises, demands a form of 'optimisation' -acting in the present to secure the future (Adams et al. 2009, see Truyts 2016. The rhetoric is that in this crucial period of brain plasticity the infant body is particularly vulnerable to exposure (environmental and 'cultural' -for example including both food and exposure to stress). Action is demanded now to secure that future -and because the focus is the mother/ child dyad, it is largely the mother's responsibility to foresee care. We see at this Derby Day an effort to shun the enduring stereotypes of the past. The mother who sat behind me, thus, who would support Kylemore until she died, was charged with navigating life and death in a green valley with few labour prospects, second-hand stereotypes, and a national rainbow-nation rubric of belonging that has not made good on promises of freedom, economic and otherwise. She, and many others, have to do the double-work of refuting the past in real and symbolic terms while simultaneously securing the future for their children.

Conclusion
The conventional boundaries of athlete/ spectator were disturbed at the Derby Day. At the Sutherland High School athletic sporting events the distance between athletes and spectators was often strictly spaced (for example, I remember not being able to talk to or touch my sister in the stands after my races, and waving at my parents from the pitch). At the Derby Day, however, the spectators were close to the field (figuratively and literally -the audience toed the White boundary line of the netball court). At the netball one spectator crossed the line, put on a uniform, and for a little while, participated. The security guard was shushed. The protocol of applause after the whole team announcement was disregarded. There was potential to disregard conventions around who is allowed on field, and who can play. If we follow Fusco's argument that "the rational, straight-lined, and quantified landscapes of modern sports inevitably support(ed) the production and performance of White(ned) hegemonic masculinities" (2005:286), these transgressions (if read through 'White lines') may refute, or ignore these geometric prescriptions, even while adopting other symbols of respectability that toast (or co-opt?) Whiteness, modernity, as contested as these terms are.
Racialised inequity can be traced along visible and invisible lines in sporting competitions. The side-by-side analysis shows how the schools and crowds at the Derby Day deliberately and actively refute stereotypical burdens from the past, while my former schooling system expended much effort reaching for the future, armed with tools drawn selectively from both colonial repertoires of distinction and the rainbow-nation rhetoric of belonging.
I had no intention of examining sports as part of fieldwork, but attendance at this Derby Day ended up being critical to my analysis of belonging as a crucial vector of nourishment. It was very useful in helping me think the political economy of the valley in relation to the obligations of theory, and the discourse of everyday life -that is, how people make sense of their worlds . Of course, it helped me make sense of mine, too. There remains a sense that progress brought in the name of science (marched in on the arm of modernity) will lead to optimum bodies, healthy citizens, and fair play. While these aspirations and success are not necessarily ideals that ordinary people do or should not aspire to, we need to ask how, en route to this rubric for good, the imposition of standards, rules and recommendations that stem from so-called Western thinking limit the possibilities of the conditions for 'fair play', 'good' care, and consequently, 'good life'.
In these investigations I have learned that in order to understand the shapes of race relations, the conditions of belonging must be brought forward. Situational analysis helps do this. Victory, play, and social discourse is conditional.
It is conditional on terrain, and on what conditions of good the terrain makes possible and vice versa. Colonists bought sports (already sequestered from play) and schooling conventions to South Africa. But as much as sporting codes can be regulated, formalised, universalised, it is not 'fair play' for as long as one constituency must look ever backward to shed imposed baggage from the past, while also looking forward, while the others (at former Model C schools for example) sprint 'to the stars'. That 'spirit' was more genuine in one than the other says more about the import of belonging than about the good of sports-fordevelopment for 'social cohesion'.
In the Dwars River Valley people must refute the stereotypes of the past before looking to a future shaped by modernity, while the pupils at Sutherland High School, sprinting under a banner 'Ad Astra' ('to the stars'), draw selectively on prestigious tokens drawn from the colonial 'cadet' canon, in a future-oriented approach. It is this unequal footing that makes us question the ways in which sports limit and allow certain subjectivities -in health as on the pitch, the terrain is uneven. Historically spatialised patterns of distribution continue to make their way into bodies. As uneven as racial relations remain, not at Sutherland High nor in the Dwars River Valley can we repel the inertia to draw and follow White lines. The same logic -a foundational violence -underpins the mode of Othering made so visible when situational analysis attends to sports events. We might imagine the idea of the modern as occupying the space between White lines -hemmed on either side by settler and indigenous imaginaries, by constructs of West and Non-West, each plural, heterogeneous, constituting itself and the other line as they materialise. The lines move in parallel toward a future horizon; this formation makes it seems unlikely they will meet. But we live in that space between, and must ask after its origins, logics and promises. Such work might lead us to imagine how those lines could shift, change track, bend, or falter.