This substantial and enthusiast-driven volume offers a wide-ranging survey of cycling as a sport in South Africa, written unmistakably by insiders for fellow devotees. Cycling has not attracted a large body of historical writing, and where it has, popular narratives—most notoriously those surrounding Lance Armstrong—have tended to dominate. This book sets out to document, in detail, a layered and often neglected local history.
The project was inspired by the late Durban cycling legend and writer Geoff Waters, whose lifelong commitment to the sport is evident throughout. The modular structure allows readers to dip into self-contained chapters, ranging from the evolution of the bicycle to the emergence of organised cycling in South Africa.
Among the most compelling early figures are Laurens Smitz Meintjes, active in the 1890s, and Jack Rose of Cape Town in the same era. Particularly engaging is the chapter on the use of bicycles during the South African War, where the authors show that both British and Boer forces deployed cyclists. This is fertile ground for further research; Jim Fitzpatrick’s The Bicycle in Wartime (1998), with its chapter on the Boer War supported by excellent photographs, would have made a valuable comparative reference.
International competition is addressed through the career of Rudolph Lewis, gold medallist at the Stockholm Olympics in 1912, followed by chapters charting South Africa’s Olympic participation up to 1960. With the onset of apartheid-era sporting boycotts, international opportunities narrowed dramatically. Here the narrative leans heavily toward catalogues of results and medal tallies. While useful as a record, these sections would have benefited from being processed into individual stories that illuminate motivation, sacrifice, and consequence.
Lewis surrounded by team mates in 1912
One of the book’s most original and significant contributions is Waters’s chapter on Sol Plaatje, examining the role of the bicycle within early African political mobilisation and the formation of the African National Congress. This is an important insight that deserves extraction and wider circulation within ANC and broader South African historical literature. Equally valuable is Waters’s chapter on Black competitive cycling on the gold mines—an under-explored field that opens a window onto endurance, aspiration, and organised sport under harsh industrial conditions.
The long years of apartheid administration are treated with a straight face, but one paragraph in particular seriously misfires. Apartheid was not “simply a buzzword, comparable to wokeism”. Such a claim betrays a failure of historical understanding. Apartheid was a legally enforced system of racial domination with deep and lasting consequences for every aspect of South African life, including sport. Readers deserve better than such a glib equivalence; authors writing history must study it more carefully before making so inane a comparison.
The political chapters nonetheless reveal how cycling, like cricket or rugby, became an arena of conflict—fractured into racially defined organisations, riven by struggles for administrative control, and shaped by the moral and practical consequences of international boycotts. Individuals who defied these boycotts to pursue their sporting ambitions faced repercussions at home. Eventually, mergers and reforms moved the sport—belatedly—towards non-racial structures, though the legacy of division clearly persists.
The final chapter offers a lexicon of cycling terms, likely to interest serious cyclists. Yet the book repeatedly sidesteps deeper analytical questions: what motivates cyclists; why cycling becomes intensely competitive; how it compares psychologically and socially with other sports; and why its popularity seems to rise and fall in waves. These are the interpretive questions that would have elevated a strong compilation of facts into a more rounded sporting history.
As it stands, the book is very present-minded and largely a listing of past results across categories at major events. The strongest and most thoughtful chapters are those written by Waters; indeed, the volume would more fittingly have been dedicated to him rather than to a contributor’s mother. The project itself appears to have struggled to secure full buy-in from the cycling fraternity—perhaps unsurprising, given a sport still fractured by the administrative and racial divisions of the apartheid era.
From a scholarly perspective, the absence of a bibliography, standard footnoting, and an index is a serious limitation. These omissions make it harder for future researchers to build upon what is otherwise a valuable body of assembled information.
The broader challenge remains how to sell cycling as a national sport capable of attracting the commitment of indifferent cities and municipalities—though recent city-based cycle races suggest that public appetite can be cultivated with imagination and support.
Kathy Munro is an Honorary Associate Professor in the School of Architecture and Planning at the University of the Witwatersrand. She enjoyed a long career as an academic and in management at Wits University. She trained as an economic historian. She is an enthusiastic book person and has built her own somewhat eclectic book collection over 40 years. Her interests cover Africana, Johannesburg history, history, art history, travel, business and banking histories. She researches and writes on historical architecture and heritage matters. She is a member of the Board of the Johannesburg Heritage Foundation and is a docent at the Wits Arts Museum. She is currently working on a couple of projects on Johannesburg architects and is researching South African architects, war cemeteries and memorials. Kathy is a member of the online book community the Library thing and recommends this cataloging website and worldwide network as a book lover's haven. She is also the Chairperson of HASA.