A ‘Rebel’ on the Run: Kenyan Gambles on Intercollegiate Athletics, Apartheid Sport, and US Road Racing of the 1980s–The Case of Samson Obwocha

In 1988, a solitary Kenyan runner joined a ‘rebel’ track and field tour of South Africa: Samson Obwocha, a ten-time NCAA Division II and junior college national champion who was then maintaining a precarious, post-collegiate running career on the US road race circuit. Obwocha sought to achieve his vision of his own excellence by way of athletics, yet the pursuit of a livelihood from that vocation ultimately put him in conflict with his own nation’s efforts to end the tyranny of apartheid rule in South Africa. Either by happenstance, choice, or bad luck, Obwocha’s efforts to express himself through the vehicle of athletics from the late 1970s to 1990 left him entangled with the major controversies of the era, from the contentious issue of international athletes competing for US colleges to the changing economics of track and field to the zenith of the boycotts that prevented South Africa from participating in most international sporting contests to force the regime to dismantle apartheid. His extraordinary story illuminates the history of African athletes competing for colleges in the United States and of one of the most-discussed contours of sport and political history, the anti-apartheid struggle, and its intersections with the precarity of professional running in the 1980s.