First Olympic athlete of African descent for Zimbabwe dies at 86

Image: Newshawks

The first Olympic athlete of African descent for Zimbabwe, Cyprian Tseriwa, who competed in the 1960 Olympics in Rome, Italy, in both the 5000m and the 10 000m races has died.

Tseriwa died on Monday at Avenues Clinic in Harare.

He was 86.

Tseriwa represented Southern Rhodesia at the time. The sporting sphere in Rhodesia was a patchwork quilt.

Some sports had always been and largely remained sites of black African autonomy; other sports were almost completely reserved for whites; and still other sports had parallel, segregated regimes, both in law and in practice.

The first recorded integrated athletics competition was in 1958 in Salisbury, where Yotham Muleya set a national record in a three-mile race, coming second to a Kenyan, while defeating a white runner. Muleya was a long-distance runner who represented Rhodesia and Nyasaland.

Racial discrimination existed in Rhodesian sport, just as it existed in Rhodesian society, but it was not sweeping blanket; sport remained a site of contested control until Zimbabwe’s independence.
Some observers have claimed racial discrimination did not exist at all in sport.

Newshawks