In St. Louis, Missouri, at the 1904 Olympics, we are a long way from Paris 2024. Not only do strange tournaments include swimming obstacle courses, bicycle polo, hot air balloon competitions and even tug-of-war (as at the Paris Games in 1900). But above all, the world of sport reflects the racism and eugenics of the time. Thus, the event on the fringes of the Games is called “the athletic competition of the savages”. This is how marathoners Jan Mashiani and Len Taunyane (or Tau), the first two African athletes to participate in the Olympics, are welcomed.
That these two South Africans arrived in the United States is already exceptional. These were only the third Olympic Games in the modern era since Athens in 1896, and they came at the height of European colonialism. The archives do not find any African Olympic athletes until the late 1940s, when the postwar independence movements began.
Jan Mashiani and Len Taunyane do not represent South Africa, for the simple reason that it is still a British colony. Their story therefore struggles to transcend the ages, but The online media The Conversation has put the spotlight on it again.
In 1904, the boer warwhich pitted the British crown against the independent Boer republics (populated by Dutch Afrikaners), ended two years ago in South Africa. Both sides used black South Africans in various roles, including as messenger runners. According to sports historian Floris van der Merwethis is probably the case of Jan Mashiani and Len Taunyane – hence their disposition for the marathon.
Half-freaks, half-athletes
Jan Mashiani (called «Yamasani» by officials who cannot pronounce his name) and Len Tau (called «Lentauw») were probably members of the Tswana ethnic group (now mainly found in northern South Africa). On the official marathon record they are listed as “kaffir”, a racial slur today punished by law and liable to imprisonment in South Africa. A precision which does not appear, however, next to the name of their white compatriot BW Harris.
But before taking part in the Olympic marathon on 30 August 1904, the two runners must first put on a show at the South African warrior stand of the “Anthropological Days”organized on the sidelines of the Universal Exhibition, which was then concomitant with the Olympic Games. With great pomp, the event presented “savage tribes” who confronted each other in physical competitions, supposedly for scientific and cultural purposes. On the program: javelin throwing, baseball and athletics, but also tree climbing and stone fighting.
Now it was time for the marathon. In this case, a race with trying conditions, since in addition to the 40 kilometres of the event (at the time, the distance was not yet standardised), there was a temperature of 32°C and the dust raised by the cars using the same road. Len Taunyane and Jan Mashiani started from the second row, their compatriot BW Harris from the first. The latter did not see the finish line, while the two messengers finish 9 respectivelye et 12eIt is even said that one of the two could have finished higher if a dog had not chased him on an isolated portion of the course.
The two pioneering runners started from the back of the pack in the St. Louis Olympic Marathon on August 30, 1904. | Missouri History Museum via Wikimedia Commons
Jan Mashiani and Len Taunyane nevertheless came first in another Olympic record: that of African athletes to have participated in the Olympic Games. It would be forty-four years before another indigenous South African took part in the Olympic Games: Ron Eland with the British weightlifting team in 1948, in London. The same yearapartheid policy was implemented in South Africa. The country would participate in the next three editions, but would then be excluded from the Games between 1964 and 1992 and would return in Barcelona that year.
Source: www.slate.fr
