4 Aug 1996: Josia Thugwane of South Africa celebrates as he enters the stadium during the men's marathon at the Centennial Olympic Games in Atlanta, Georgia. Thugwane won gold. (Mike Powell /Allsport via Getty Images)
The Olympic marathon, which was run on 10 August by the men and 11 August by women, is much different to what it was 120 years ago.
But the modern Olympics shared some of the exclusionary history of its ancient predecessor that disallowed women and slaves from participation, with women first being permitted to participate in the Olympic marathon from 1984.
The South African Review reported on the first Olympic Games in 1896 as an event that “the South African sportsman knows so little about”.
No Africans were represented.
The 1904 Olympic Games was initially scheduled for Chicago but the St Louis World Fair’s physical culture director, James E Sullivan, convinced the International Olympic Committee to move the spectacle there.
Only a small number of European athletes attended the Games because of the high costs of the trip and accommodation. A quarrel between St Louis and Chicago city officials also dissuaded many athletes from attending. As a result, the Olympics were regarded as a side-show to the fair.
But South Africa was present, unofficially, at the 1904 Games, becoming the first African nation in modern day Olympic history to participate.
The athletes in the marathon race on 30 August 1904 were Len Tau, Jan Mashiani and a settler athlete, BW Harris.
These athletes have been forgotten by sport administrators and historians.
South African indigenous Olympians need to be included in narrative writings.
The Jameson Raid of 1896, South African War (1899-1902) and post-war economic depression in 1904 were factors that prevented South Africa participating in the Olympics.
This was the situation until 1908, when South Africa entered an all-white male team at the Stockholm Olympic Games under the organisation of the South African National Olympic Committee.
The entry was a colonising venture because black people were excluded and the team was represented by a British Red Ensign flag with a Springbok in the corner, while athletes wore a green sweater with a Springbok symbol. South Africa’s Charles Hefferon won silver.
South African Kennedy Kane McArthur won the Olympic marathon in 1912 in Stockholm, Sweden, and his Springbok teammate, Christopher Gitsham, won the silver medal.
Incidentally, when South Africa re-entered the Olympic Games in 1992, under an apartheid government, there also was no official national unity flag.
Much has been written about South Africa’s participation from 1908 till 1960 and then again from 1996 onwards.
Modern media has published extensively that Josiah Thugwane was the first black South African marathoner to win a gold medal at an Olympic Games that year.
The 1904 Games coincided with the Boer War Show” as part of the Anthropological Fair in which various competitions were held for indigenous people of different continents.
The ““Boer War Show” was also orchestrated by the South Africa circus entrepreneur Frank Fillis. South Africa participated as the “Boer Team” in the Olympic tug-of-war competition, held from 31 August to 1 September 1904.
These participants, as well as Tau and Mashiani, were also part of the “Boer War Show” of the South African Boer War Company, with its racial problems, that lasted from 17 June until 2 December 1904.
The Anthropological Fair was also a reflection of the eugenic and social Darwinism atmosphere of the time and visitors could view “6 000 photographs of unique phenomena, places and people from Africa”. Indigenous participants in the fair had events such as throwing stones at one another.
Pierre du Coubertin, who played a part in reviving the modern Olympic Games in 1896, condemned this abuse of the Olympic name as “inhuman”.
The marathon was a relatively unknown event to South Africans at the time.
(Graphic: John McCann/M&G)
Tau and Mashiani thus had no coaching or training for this event. While running near the front, Mashiani was attacked by a large dog that chased him a mile off course.
Nevertheless, he finished 12th and Tau finished ninth. Harris dropped out after 24km.
It was a race that took place in 32°C and very dusty conditions caused by bicycles and cars, resulting in most athletes withdrawing. This happened before the first official marathon in South Africa, held on 22 April 1908 in Cape Town.
How Tau and Mashiani came to have a presence at the 1904 Olympic Games shows us the underside of colonialism and colonisation. Whereas the key figures in the “Boer War Show”, the Boer generals Ben Viljoen and Piet Cronjé, have been well recorded in formal studies and novels such as Boeresirkus, Tau and Mashiani remain obscure figures for modern readers.
Yet, it is believed by some historians that they accompanied Cronjé to St Helena Island as part of the prisoner of war encampment and were his “messengers during the war (if true), their stamina have been legendary and widely known”.
Professor Floris van der Merwe has conducted detailed research on Tau and Mashiani’s participation in the marathon.
It is this research that can be used to create a sport-historical narrative about them. Such a narrative must be one where the colonised subjects are placed at the centre of research.
It is one, as described by the African novelist, Chinua Achebe, and quoted by historian and author André Odendaal, where “in the colonial situation, presence was the crucial word [and] its denial was the keynote of colonist ideology”.
Therefore, my narrative differs from Van der Merwe, who asserts that “it seems that Tau and Mashiani’s achievements during the Olympic Games of 1904 had no immediate impact on the history of South African athletics”. Rather, their achievements are an indication of the state of black athletics in South Africa at the time.
That same year, the South African governing bodies for athletics and cycling amalgamated to form the South African Amateur Athletics (AA) and Cycling Association (CA). In November the Orange River Colony AA and CA inquired about the participation of black people in competitions. The national body discouraged the provincial body from including such events in meetings. There would therefore have been no future career as athletes for Mashiani or Tau in South Africa if they returned home.
But research by Douglas Coghlan, author of The Development of Athletics in South Africa: 1814 to 1914, has shown that black people in South Africa had reached a considerable level of athletic and cycling competition organisation finesse by then.
Mark Leach and Gary Wilkins in Olympic Dream correctly state that Harris, Tau and Mashiani were unaware of the great historical moment they were making. Many settler writers downplayed Tau and Mashiani’s presence and misspelt their names and cultural identities. Writers referred to them as Zulus whereas Van der Merwe pointed out that a historical record of them shows they were Tswana.
By 2024, usage of the term “kaffir” is outlawed and punishable. This was not so at the 1904 Olympic Games and the term was used in official programmes.
What happened to Tau and Mashiani? No evidence exists other than a report that a number of black people had been fired from the Boer War Show in August 1904. They apparently then started working for a construction company in St Louis. The reason for their dismissal had been given as: “They had become sufficiently civilised to shirk work.”
Tau and Mashiani leave a legacy of Olympic participation that begs us to ask: “What is happening to our sport civilisation in the 21st century?”
Francois Cleophas is an associate professor in sport history at Stellenbosch University.