The Springbok tour

Rugby had been tangled up with race for decades before 1981. The New Zealand Rugby Football Union picked no Māori players for tours of South Africa until 1970, and even then they were admitted only as 'honorary whites'. A petition against the all-white 1960 tour gathered 150,000 signatures. In 1977 New Zealand signed the Gleneagles Agreement, under which Commonwealth governments undertook to discourage sporting contact with apartheid South Africa. Even so, when the Springboks were due to tour in 1981, Robert Muldoon's government let the tour go ahead, with Muldoon insisting that 'politics should stay out of sport'. Critics said it was courting rural and provincial voters ahead of that November's election. The team arrived on 19 July.

The first match, at Gisborne on 22 July, put protesters and rugby crowds in direct confrontation. Three days later at Rugby Park in Hamilton, several hundred protesters pulled down a fence and occupied the pitch before a packed stadium. On word that a stolen light aircraft was heading for the ground, police called the game off. Furious spectators turned on the protesters as they were led away, and gangs of fans waited outside the police station for those who had been arrested. In his cell on Robben Island, Nelson Mandela later said, the news of the cancellation lifted his spirits.

After Hamilton both sides hardened. On 29 July police used batons on marchers in Molesworth Street outside Parliament, the first time in the tour they had done so. Two special riot units, the Red and Blue squads, were issued with visored helmets and long batons that protesters nicknamed 'Minto bars', after the organiser John Minto. A second game, at Timaru, was cancelled, and the remaining grounds were ringed with razor wire and shipping containers. Before the second test in Wellington, 7,000 people tried to blockade Athletic Park. At the third test, at Eden Park on 12 September, a Cessna flew low over the pitch dropping flour bombs while fighting outside led to 201 arrests. The All Blacks won the series two tests to one. Across 56 days there were more than 200 demonstrations in 28 towns and cities, involving over 150,000 people, about 1,500 were charged, and policing the tour cost an estimated $15 million.

In the short term the tour's supporters got what they wanted. The tour finished, and National held its marginal provincial seats and kept power with a one-seat majority. But many New Zealanders date a change in the country from that winter. Māori joined the protests in growing numbers and turned the argument back on New Zealand itself, asking how a country so concerned about racism in South Africa was treating its own people. In the historian Jock Phillips's reading, the tour was a clash between an older New Zealand, loyal to Britain and to rugby, and a younger, independent Pacific nation. Within three years Muldoon's government had been swept from office. Mandela, who had heard about Hamilton in his prison cell, was freed in 1990 and became president of South Africa in 1994.