Rajendra Chetty and the marathon that out-ran apartheid

‘Running is rebellion against the limitations imposed by society.’ Allan Sillitoe

As South Africans prepare for the spectacular Comrades Marathon, often forgotten is that until 1975 Black people were not allowed to participate. But a powerful and prefigurative alternative was pioneered by journalist Rajendra Chetty and involved a “ghost runner” aka John Tarrant. It was one of the most remarkable moments in South African sporting history and “Comrade fever” is an apposite moment to remember what came to be known as the Goldtop Marathon.

The story of Rajendra Chetty, the Drum correspondent and John Tarrant is eerily reminiscent of Allan Sillitoe’s 1959 The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, which revolves around a working-class boy in England, Colin Smith.

Smith was incarcerated in an institution for juvenile offenders. He was a brilliant runner, and the institution’s governor thought he could use him to highlight the success of his rehabilitation programme. This moment came when there was a race against a nearby elite private school whose students were mainly from the upper classes.

Though Smith was ahead in the race, he refused to cross the victory line, for that would have given the Governor legitimacy and act as a cover for the institution’s brutal practices of discipline and class prejudice.

How did a working-class white boy from England and a local sportswriter’s lives intersect? Part of the reason lay in Rajendra Chetty’s indomitable spirit once he set his mind on something. Nothing exemplified this more than the Goldtop Marathon, named after a famous cool drink of the time.

Let's jog backwards a bit.

The pre-eminent long-distance road race was the Comrades Marathon, which had been run between the cities of Pietermaritzburg and Durban since 1921. But as was apartheid’s madness, non-white (black) runners were barred. And as was Chetty’s way, he organised a counter. It was in the late 1960s that Chetty formed the non-racial Natal Roadrunners Association (NRA) in direct response to the decision of the Comrades’ organisers to prohibit black runners.

Chetty’s masterstroke was to organise an alternative race from his hometown of Stanger to Durban. The inaugural race was held in September 1970. This was possibly the country’s first non-racial long-distance road race and marked one of Chetty’s proudest achievements.

As he recounted, he wanted to prove “to the apartheid government that we could organise the race. We were non-racial. We had an overseas runner, the famous John Tarrant, who won in 1970. We were in direct opposition to the Comrades Marathon where Blacks could not compete. I went to Ismail Karodia of Gold Top and told him to sponsor the race. We raised many eyebrows but it was a success.”

Securing the participation of a high-profile English athlete in John Tarrant, gave the race a massive boost. John Tarrant’s story is recorded in Bill Jones’ The Ghost Runner.

Tarrant was known as "The Ghost Runner" because he "gatecrashed" races, from which he was barred for being a "professional".

In 1950, when Tarrant was still a teen, he fought a few boxing fights for which he earned a small sum of money. During training, he enjoyed running, so he gave up boxing and applied to join an athletic club in 1952. However, athletics had a strict amateur code, and he was banned from athletics for life because of the income he had earned from boxing.

Tarrant, unfazed, entered races unofficially, sometimes winning them. As notoriety turned into the popularity of the "lonely" runner, English officials relented and allowed him to run but banned him from representing the country. These persistent barriers seemed to have no impact on Tarrant’s performance, taking him to world records for the forty- and hundred-mile races.

Tarrant finished fourth in the (white) Comrades in South Africa in 1968 and returned for several years to run the race. According to his biographer Bill Jones, “In the minutes before the (May 31, 1970) Comrades had started, leaflets had been clandestinely circulated inviting white runners to run with black, Indian, and coloured athletes in a multiracial fifty-mile road race scheduled for three month’s time. Tarrant was intrigued and wrote immediately to the Indian organisers accepting their invitation. Of the 835 (white) runners who took part in the 1970 Comrades, he was the only one who did.”

It did not have to take a Sherlock Holmes to work out who was behind the invitation.

Chetty sensed an opportunity. As Jones put it: “For years Rajendra Chetty had been chipping away at apartheid. As a young Durban-based journalist with a passion for sport, he’d evolved from critic to activist, becoming ever more radicalised by each government-sponsored indignity… Everywhere he looked, discrimination was denying thousands of blacks the same ‘freedom of action, mind and soul’ that John Tarrant craved.”

“Chetty’s resistance”, writes Jones, “was proving an uphill struggle, made harder by what Chetty identified as white liberal hypocrisy. Even those who professes opposition seemed horribly comfortable with the status quo: ‘No matter how vociferously they disagreed with the Afrikaner nationalists, they were quite happy to vote them into power to protect their own vested interests'."

“Every time Tarrant ran along the ocean shoreline”, Jones continues, “he passed a chilling sign on the beach: ‘Uitgehou vir die uitsluitslike gebruik van lede van die blanke rassegroep’ (Reserved for the sole use of members of the white race group) – the same ‘blanke rassegroup’ which wouldn’t allow a ‘dirty pro’ like him to take part in the Comrades, notwithstanding the acceptable pallid hue of his skin'."

Jones recounts that “It was time for Chetty to take a trip across town to the railway workers’ hostel to find out what this John Tarrant fellow was all about. From the beginning there was a spark. Tarrant’s unpretentious dignity touched Chetty deeply, and Tarrant was lifted by the younger man’s conviction. It was a relief for the Englishman – and immensely flattering – to be in the presence of someone who embraced him without conditions. There was something disarming in the cherubic, smiling face of this articulate Indian, and something about his evocation of a dispossessed people fighting back against discrimination which resonated with Tarrant'."

Rajendra Chetty was thrilled, continues Jones.

“As Chetty carefully spelled out the legal position, Tarrant listened attentively. Provided he got changed before the race in his own dressing-room, there would be no infringement of the Separate Amenities legislation. There were no laws which could prevent him from running down a public highway, and the government ban on mixed sport applied only to contact activities like wrestling."

According to Chetty: “I explained this was tantamount to one of the most historic events in South African sport, a test of the government’s apartheid policy… intended to expose the fallacy of the state’s policy and send a strong statement that certain codes of sport were exempt from the laws of the country. John sat listening all the while. He smiled pleasantly, got up and shook my hand. That told me he was ready for action.”

In the weeks before the race, sponsors, under pressure from the authorities, pulled out. Companies that had agreed to provide communications links and first aid also pulled the plug. But the race would not be scuppered. Tarrant and 94 black runners ran the first race. Chetty had warned Tarrant that he could not guarantee that he would not be arrested or even imprisoned. But Tarrant had set his mind on running.

According to Jones: “As news of Tarrant’s alliance with Chetty spread, South Africa’s marathon running community peered into its collective conscience... Seeing an outsider like Tarrant make such a valiant – albeit foolhardy – stand was humiliating… For Chetty and his fellow Durban journalists like Farook Khan the disappointing reticence of white athletes… drew contempt. ‘People like that sat in their pearly protected kingdoms,’ says Chetty. ‘If they really cared they would have acted on their conscience, not waited for someone to beg and plead'."

The Goldtop Marathon was run on September 6, 1970, starting from the Stanger Town Hall to the Curries Fountain Stadium in Durban. The race, Jones writes, was “quite unlike the Comrades. A dishevelled festival air hung over the proceedings. If any traffic lights were red, all the runners had to stop, and all along the route down the coast, hundreds of blacks and Indians rushed from their homes with cooling ice and drinks”.

Tarrant came first, running the fifty miles in 6 hours and 43 minutes, 40 minutes ahead of the next runner. But like Colin in The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, the symbolism was more vital. Tarrant’s presence turned the race into “PR heaven. The man was a gift – and godsend”, Chetty would reflect. There were benefits both ways.

For Tarrant, Jones points out, “class had always been the issue– not colour – and he was comfortable in the company of these beaming underdogs. If Chetty and company could provide him with the opportunity to run and race, then for both parties it would be the perfect marriage. They’d get their hero and he’d get what mattered.”

In typical Chetty fashion, he refused to bask in the “success” of the Goldtop Marathon. Unlike the Governor in Sillitoe’s novel, he sought to use Tarrant’s presence to puncture the class and race privilege that ran through apartheid athletics in South Africa. Chetty organised an eight-hour-long endurance track race under the auspices of the Callies Road Runners Club at Curries Fountain on 5 December 1972 where Tarrant attempted to break the world fifty-mile record.

Tarrant’s visits to the country were made possible by local Indian businessmen. He competed with seven Indian runners, including VS Naidoo, all of whom dropped out by the thirty-mile mark. Tarrant, running bare-chested on a hot, humid evening, and on the poor-quality Curries Fountain track made heavier by rain, ran for 6 hours 18 minutes. He completed the race as a thank you to Chetty even though there was no chance of breaking the record.

It was only in 1975 that black runners were officially allowed to run in the Comrades. It is undoubted that Chetty’s exploits and Tarrant’s bravery played a role in bringing this about. Together, they ran a race that was designed to confront racism. Both are dead but their spirit lives on in today’s Comrades in which one’s qualification does not rest on the colour of one’s skin, but on one’s ability.

It was moments like this in a tiny corner of South Africa that would inspire a global anti-apartheid sports movement. As you watch the Comrades this weekend, think of Rajendra Chetty. A man forgotten in the pantheon of anti-apartheid fighters. Notice how those who receive accolades and awards for their work in sport never mention Chetty.

Reading the newspapers of the time, we were humbled by this man’s energy, commitment and ability to think out of the box.

For a fuller version of Chetty’s life see the authors book Durban Casbah: Bunny Chows, Bioscopes and Bolsheviks.

Goolam Vahed is at the University of KwaZulu-Natal and Ashwin Desai is at the University of Johannesburg.

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