Physical Education and Physical Culture Matters

Andrew Morris’s Marrow of the Nation (2004) discussed how complex the history of physical culture is. Morris examined the interplay between Anglophone messages on physical culture and peoples outside Europe. Here, Morris made clear the limits of European physical culture, as well as its influence, over Chinese practices and messages. This work was particularly important in affirming that the socio-cultural importance of the trained body was not a European phenomenon. This was not true of the black populace in the Western Cape, South Africa. However, a recurring issue in the historical overview of physical education and physical culture was that more meaning could be attached to the exercises, games and displays than what is generally recognised in traditional literature focusing on South African settings. Such literature tended to present physical education and physical culture without exploring the complex social and political phenomena within a historical-political landscape. Throughout the period under review in this publication, issues of ‘race’, class and gender surfaced as major areas of concern in South African physical education and physical culture programmes. Initially these programmes emanated from sectors within middle-class colonial society attempting to inculcate their values into the urban material poor communities. This must be understood in terms of the racism, classism and sexism in broader colonial and post-colonial society during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Such isms did not remain confined to white and black relations, but colonised people internalised them, with physical education and physical culture programmes being a part of this —a lasting and dirty legacy for twenty-first-century physical education and physical culture practitioners. This publication has helped to shift conversations away from the often unproblematised nature of white physical culture and physical education in South Africa.