Of Caster Sesmenya, Saartjie and the IAAF

In about a month’s time Caster Semenya’s athletic career will either be all but over or it will endure – she having entered into a Faustian pact with her tormentor, the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF).

This week Semenya took the IAAF to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), seeking to overturn its new rules aimed at forcing female athletes to artificially lower their testosterone levels as a condition for participation in international contests.

On the eve of the hearings this week, the IAAF fired a propaganda salvo, issuing a press statement boasting about the support it had from “world experts” and proceeding to trot out said experts’ credentials.

It was an intervention that could only have been aimed at turning public opinion against Semenya and breaking her resolve to go through with her challenge.

The IAAF claimed that its stance was necessary “to ensure fair competition for all women”. But the organisation, having previously failed to stop Semenya from running competitively, and now cynically engaging in spin games, can hardly be an honest broker or arbiter of what’s fair or not. What’s fair, to start with, is to ask why the new rules apply only to sportswomen and not their male counterparts?

And the irony, lost on the IAAF, is how, having spent its time punishing the artificial boosting of performance, it now conveniently encourages – no, demands – the use in Semenya’s case of chemicals to effectively slow her down.

Additionally, if the new rules are to protect all female athletes as the IAAF alleges, the question is why they are applicable only to the distances in which Semenya dominates?

If the CAS endorses the IAAF’s position, then the anatomical scrutiny of athletes would surely have to extend, in particular, to all top sportspeople. After all, they are by definition genetically more advantaged, that is more naturally gifted, than others. Whether it is Rafael Nadal, Lionel Messi or the Kenyan long-distance champions. Ditto Serena Williams (who, by the way, has complained of being dope tested more frequently than other top players).

And so, if it has its way, the IAAF will have embarked on the business of re-engineering humans, and publicly dissecting athletes like laboratory specimens, as it did with Semenya when it released her intimate anatomical details.

What then of the time-honoured doctor/patient confidentiality principle? An IAAF victory at the CAS will mean that henceforth, to participate in athletics, female athletes will first have to waive their right to keep their medical records private. The IAAF would have the licence to not only subject them to medical tests, but to leak the results at will.

We can only speculate about the IAAF’s underlining motive.

It may be because of a discomfort with the idea of an African woman super athlete – implying that she does so exceptionally well because she is not a proper woman after all.

It could also be a reflection of persistent homophobia in the ranks of the global athletic community, which has forced many athletes to stay in the closet. (This anti-lesbianism, by the way, may also account for the reluctance of many in our society to support Semenya.)

There are, certainly, African people who may think this is simply a sports-related dispute affecting Semenya alone. That it has nothing to do with the rest of us. But they would be mistaken.

Given the history of how racist power has historically, through colonialism and slavery, sought to demean and dehumanise black people, the re-use of science now to justify racial prejudice should be of concern to all black people, and indeed all of humanity.

For some of us, the actions of the IAAF bring back memories of how science has historically colluded with colonialists and racists in trying to prove the sub-humanity of black people.

Some among us may in all honesty not know, and others may well feign ignorance, of the Saartjie Baartman story.

It has been told before, but it bears repeating here. She was the Khoi woman who was sold into slavery and taken to Europe by colonialists, where she was put on exhibition in the same way we put animals in zoos for public viewing today.

Her physical attributes, which did not fit the “European standard”, made her a freak-show attraction and the subject of “scientific research” seeking to prove the inferiority of black people to Europeans.

In her time Baartman’s struggle would have been for recognition as a full human being.

Semenya’s quest today is to assert her status both as a woman and a human being.

That’s why she is correct to refuse to be a guinea pig in a discriminatory IAAF experiment where she is treated like a defective human being needing medical modification.

And that is why all black people – indeed all human beings – must support Mokgadi Caster Semenya in her showdown with the IAAF.

• Siluma is a veteran journalist and host of Karibu on Kaya FM 95.9