Out of Apartheid’s (Racial) Corner: One Man’s Journey from Bare-Fists to Bible-Puncher

Raymond Mentor tells the story of personal transformation, from being a feared gangster to a preacher, through the sport of boxing. Placing boxing in the context of South Africa’s history of forced displacements, Mentor’s relationship with the sport gives us rare insights into how uprooted communities (re)built their lives while negotiating questions of racial and more localised identities. The reading of Mentor’s life through boxing, against the background of the internal configurations of daily life under apartheid, provides a counter to the broad brush of liberation history that privileges the struggle against apartheid while also highlighting ways of living that allowed imaginative negotiation of the violent street culture of apartheid’s newly constructed racial communities.