Bobotie Dawn (Used)

Former England international player and South Africa World Cup and Olympic coach Gavin Featherstone has just completed a tour of South Africa promoting his latest book Bobotie Dawn.

It is an enthralling read – a memoir which offers fascinating insight into Gavin’s risky decision to coach club hockey in apartheid South Africa in the early 1980s, before chronicling his return as national team coach in the ‘90s. In this role Gavin challenged the systems and structures of post-apartheid South Africa attacking entrenched provincialism and selecting the first non-white South African player, Allistar Fredericks, for the men’s World Cup in Sydney in 1994. The book finishes with Gavin leading South Africa’s men to the Olympic Games in Atlanta in 1996 and the triumph of a top-ten global ranking with the youngest hockey squad in South African history.

Bobotie Dawn offers an extraordinary vision of South African society (told through the unique prism of hockey) during, and coming out of, the country’s years of international sporting isolation. It draws on the language of apartheid to anchor itself in a distinct place and time, recounting hockey and societal issues matter-of-factly interwoven with tales of Gavin exploits. Yet underlying it all is a very human struggle to balance first-hand experience of an unjust society with a gradual ‘romantic’ attachment to a fanatical hockey nation and its people.

Editor: the opinions presented in this article are those of the individual assigned to review this particular book. They do not represent the views of The Hockey Museum.