John Young
The South African cricket team don’t spend a lot of their time reading the local newspapers so they won’t know that their first visit to Port-of-Spain caused quite a stir. On the day the cricketers’ plane landed, two days before the second Test, the Trinidad Guardian published as its Thought for Today a line from Steve Biko about black consciousness.
The racier Newsday ran a colour piece on what fun it was to be in the happy Test match crowd. The article included a startling line about boundaries being hit by “South Africans for whom we still hold plenty bitterness in our hearts”.
Trinidad is proud that its dock workers were the first to refuse to unload ships carrying South African cargo and with an island population that suffered slavery and colonial oppression, the affinity with South Africa is clear. However, Human Rights Day and the second Test also provoked a lengthy revisionist article in Newsday.
Marion O’Callaghan questioned just how committed Trinidad and Tobago had been to the cause. She asked readers to “forgive my cynicism as I watch the to-ing and fro-ing to South Africa … from the same people and the same groups, who were at best silent as South Africans suffered”.
It was a Trinidad-born academic and activist who most clearly linked the Caribbean and Africa. In The Black Jacobins, a study of a successful slave revolt in San Domingo in the late 18th century, CLR James wrote: “The road to West Indian national identity lay through Africa.”
James organised trade unions in Trinidad, was thrown out of the United States during the McCarthy era and earned fame as a Marxist historian but he also wrote a cricket book that changed the way the game is seen.
In Beyond a Boundary James connected cricket to society in a way no writer had done before. Here’s his description of a West Indian cricket crowd: “West Indians crowding to Tests bring with them the whole history and future hopes of the islands. English people have a conception of themselves breathed from birth. Drake and mighty Nelson, Shakespeare, Waterloo … those and such as those constitute a national tradition. We of the West Indies have none at all, none that we know of. To such people the three W’s, Ram and Val wrecking English batting, help to fill a huge gap in their consciousness and their needs.”
The Carib people from the Amazon region who lived on Trinidad at the start of the colonial era were wiped out. They were replaced by Spanish, French and English overlords, slaves from Africa and indentured labourers from India and China.
The latter group at least retained their names and religions. The grandsons of African slaves in Trinidad and the West Indies are a people disconnected from their past and their culture. Cricket represents a past of which they can be proud.
James wrote his book about the slave uprising because he was “tired of reading and hearing about Africans being persecuted and oppressed”. He wrote of people of African descent who “would themselves be taking action on a grand scale and shaping other people to their own needs”.
James wrote “with Africa in mind” and believed that West Indians had to “clear from their minds the stigma that anything African was inherently inferior and degraded”. Only then could they “begin to see themselves as a free and independent people”. The unbeatable West Indies cricket teams of the 1980s expressed that spirit.
In the same way that the cricketers formed a united force, so James hoped there could be political union. The West Indies Federation was formed in 1958 but Jamaica and Trinidad broke away and gained their own independence. The other islands followed suit through the 1960s and today all that survives of the federal ideal is a free trade and travel arrangement, the University of the West Indies and the cricket team.
Looking at the media from around the Caribbean, it is easy to see what the West Indian selector meant when he said “spiteful insularity” is a curse. The vice-president of the West Indies Cricket Board told me to pay it no mind. Clarvis Joseph says: “We cuss and fight but the fighting ends when an international begins.”
That may be so but Guyana had full stands for the domestic competition. For the Test match, there were many empty seats although high ticket prices may be part of the explanation in a poor country.
What is obvious is that players are now more closely identified with their individual countries than 10 years ago. The flags on display at Caribbean grounds are not the maroon of the team but Jamaica’s green and black, the bright stripes of Trinidad and the red, yellow and green of Guyana.
One of the smallest islands has produced one of the most passionate West Indians. Sir Vivian Richards of Antigua and Barbuda became a national, regional and international symbol. He played through the Black Power era and he represented it. His most devastating batting displays were reserved for England, the old colonial master.
Lester Bird, now Prime Minister of Antigua, remembers the effect of one Richards masterpiece: “The whole nation stayed up all night to listen by radio to that epic innings. We collectively felt a sense of pride, of achievement and of togetherness. Richards personified what we perceived ourselves to be: young, talented but yet unrecognised in the world.”
Test series between West Indies and South Africa are played for the Viv Richards Trophy.
As the South African cricket party’s plane touched down on West Indian soil I spotted two things: a new Caribbean Court of Justice would be replacing the British Privy Council, and in talks between the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean states with a monopolistic telecommunications provider, the government minister of St Lucia was negotiating “like Viv Richards”. Caribbean states are trying to work together again, and the link between political action and cricket is still strong.
The man who detailed and explained that link so clearly in Beyond a Boundary died on May 31 1989. He just missed Nelson Mandela’s release but his other great book had an influence on South African thinking.
James met a group of South African students in Ghana in 1957, who told him that The Black Jacobins had been of great value to them. A white professor had told them where to find it and they had learned about revolutionary inter-race relationships.
James recalled: “They found that very important for understanding the relation between the black South Africans and the coloureds. They typed out copies, mimeographed them and circulated the passages from The Black Jacobins dealing with the relations between the blacks and the mixed in Haiti. I could not help thinking that revolution moves in a mysterious way its wonders to perform.”
James didn’t live to see a team representing a democratic South Africa visit Trinidad, but you know he would have been pleased.