Wisden editor Matthew Engel reports on South Africa’s return to the home of cricket
LAST WEEK, when the touring South African cricketers were playing Durham on the little ground at Chester-le-Street, Wayne Larkins, a man who hits a cricket ball very hard, pulled a delivery from Allan Donald, a man who bowls a cricket ball very fast, into what should have been the middle distance on the leg side.
The ball was retrieved a few feet from the batsman, on the off side of the wicket. The only rational explanation for this is that the ball must have hit — at great velocity — the only object between Larkins and the square-leg boundary, namely Gary Kirsten, the fielder under the helmet at forward short-leg.
But there was no sound or movement from Kirsten, not a yelp, not a flinch. His only response was to shuffle a couple of inches closer to the batsman before the next ball…
Here was the first great indication that the South Africans were back, not as symbols of their old, hated country, nor even, particularly, of their morning-fresh too-good-to-be-true-shining-new country — the team playing at Lord’s is, after all, entirely white — but as cricketers in the way they used to be: not always overwhelmingly gifted, but always hard, determined, unflinching.
In Westminster Abbey this week there was a ceremony to mark the return of South Africa to the Commonwealth. But the most public ceremony is taking place at a London shrine far holier to the old Empire — Lord’s, where South Africa are playing their first Test match against England in 29 years. Arguably, it is the first game ever between the two countries, since the team that formerly masqueraded as South Africa in fact represented only the tiniest slice of the nation.
The intervening years have contained much sadness. Yet from it all a new South Africa has emerged blinking into the sunlight and cricket has played a big part in the midwifery, far greater perhaps than political analysts who regard sport simply as a triviality can comprehend. Nothing brought home South Africa’s political and moral isolation so much as the sporting boycott.
But cricket has also behaved shamefully: there was ineptitude and complaisance by administrators, avarice and amorality by players. English cricket did everything possible not to sever its links with the old South Africa. There was no sign when rain ended the Oval Test in 1965 that an era was ending; if memory serves, there was far less opposition to that South African tour than there had been in 1960, just after the Sharpeville massacre.
South Africa had never played cricket against the black countries or shown any interest in doing so, still less shown any concern about non- white players at home. Yet cricket was never the game of the Afrikaners, old South Africa’s rulers; it was the game of the English-speaking whites, who had forfeited political power at the 1948 election and settled back to enjoy the benefits of the imperial racism double-plus that was codified into the laws of apartheid. Donald Woods tells the story of the late prime minister John Vorster being told the Test score, that the English were 42 for three or whatever, and asking sourly: “Their English or our English?”
Vorster’s English were the sort who, if challenged by meddling outsiders, would say that they voted against the government and were jolly nice to their maids and what was it to do with you and didn’t you understand that blacks in South Africa were not like blacks in America and that the communists were desperate to take over the Cape sea routes and, anyway, have you seen what it’s like in Nigeria? As a breed, their physical courage was rarely matched by moral courage, or vision.
The South African cricketers often had names like Van Ryneveld or Van der Merwe, but any Afrikaans in them had long since been diluted. Most of them went to a handful of schools — not all of them private — modelled on English public schools, but with an emphasis on team games and discipline not seen in Britain since Dr Arnold died. To this day, the good manners of so many South African children is one of the glories of the nation.
The cricket teams that emerged from this were thus uniquely cohesive, and responsive in a way that other cricket teams were not. In 1952-53 a South African team under Jack Cheetham went to Australia expecting to be slaughtered; they drew the series 2-2, on a regime of early nights and up to four hours a day fielding practice.
Gary Kirsten’s Gibraltar-imitation at Chester-le-Street was in direct line of descent from this. Cricketers from other nations were often surprised by the extent to which South African teams resembled school sides, with their nicknames and their prefectorial bossing about.
Trevor Bailey has never quite recovered from hearing a Test captain barking at one of his players: “On your toes, Tony Pithey.”
But these were people English cricketers could understand and admire. They were stout opponents on the field and hospitable off it. They often had very pretty sisters. Anyone on a cricket tour of South Africa would see a lot of barbecues in beautiful back gardens and damn-all of Soweto. They were told non-whites did not play or care about cricket, which was a lie. The climate was perfect. The contrast with a hard tour of India was overwhelming. Many English cricketers settled out there and very few regretted it.
There never was and never has been a disposition among the cricketers of England to boycott South Africa. It happened by fluke. England would have gone on tour there in the autumn of 1968 but for the complicating position of Basil D’Oliveira, the exiled Cape coloured player who scored a century for England in the final Test that summer, was sensationally omitted from the touring party and then, after a huge outcry, restored when Tom Cartwright was fortuitously injured.
Knowing that D’Oliveira might be included, MCC — in their last year as controllers of English cricket — had written to the South Africans in the spring asking for an assurance that any team they selected would be accepted. They received no reply, but pressed on anyway. The rationale for both D’Oliveira’s exclusion and his reinstatement was tortuous yet those involved insist — and I think I believe them — it was done without consideration of the racial issue. “If they were arses,” said one close observer, “they were cricketing arses.”
However, the sequence of events gave Vorster the opportunity to stand before the Orange Free State congress of the National Party — pissed, so it was said — and announce to his delighted supporters that he would bar D’Oliveira. “This is no longer the team of the MCC, it is the team of the Anti-Apartheid Movement.”
It was an act of folly even the England selectors could not match. Vorster brought the boycott on his own head. Yet still English cricket wanted to play on. South Africa were due to tour here in 1970, despite the prospect of massive demonstrations. It was only when the Home Secretary, Jim Callaghan, who had an election to worry about, leaned hard on Lord’s that the tour was abandoned and the links cut.
By a poisoned twist of fate, this was the one time in history that South Africa had a cricket team that was much more than just hard and determined. Several brilliant cricketers — led by Barry Richards, Graeme Pollock and Mike Procter — all came to maturity together in the same country. Early in 1970, they had beaten Australia 4-0.
A Test series in the late-1970s between this team and the West Indians with Michael Holding and Viv Richards in their pomp would have been sensational. But it is now as fruitless to argue about their merits as to compare these teams to the England of 1902. We shall not find out the truth in this lifetime.
Richards, one of the greatest batsmen who ever drew breath, played four Test matches instead of the hundred-odd that should have been his due. In his way, he was as much a victim of the old South Africa as anyone; apartheid was a denial, above all, of opportunity.
Through the 1970s, South Africa — though political change was a million miles away — moved tortuously to liberalise sport, with the tenuous support of the government, in the hope that this would persuade the world to release the increasingly choking boycott.
This gave rise to some spectacular bits of dissonance. In 1975 a black team was allowed to take part in South Africa’s one-day competition, the Gillette Cup. However, it was admitted on condition it played against the strongest team, Natal, and informed that even if it won (which was highly improbable) it would not be allowed to progress to the second round.
Tsarist Russia was always said to be run on absolutism mitigated by assassination; apartheid South Africa was a tyranny mitigated by the boundless patience of the blacks and the sheer blithering idiocy of the white rulers. I recall an incident a few years ago when there was an anti-apartheid fun run and the police arrived at the start to inform everyone that they were taking part in an illegal gathering and must disperse at once; so they did — they began running.
But white South Africa had money and cunning. In 1982 it stage-managed the first of the seven rebel cricket tours that bust the sporting boycott — by then formalised in the 1977 Gleneagles Agreement. Graham Gooch, who is in the current England team, was the captain of that side. He is thought to have received 40 000 for a month-long tour that earned him a three-year ban from Test cricket and the opprobrium of the Third World and the Guardian reading classes at home.
But all this hate was so hopelessly unsuccessful that by 1989, when Ali Bacher, executive director of South African cricket, was rounding up England players for the last of these tours, he could virtually pick his side with a free hand. There were a very few English players, like Botham and Gower, beyond the financial reach even of Bacher (he always insisted he got no government backing — the truth was that it came indirectly, through amazing tax concessions to the sponsors). But there were probably not half a dozen who would have declined to sign on moral grounds, even though Nelson Mandela was still in jail and the regime remained unreconstructed.
The culture of cricket ensured that no bitterness attached to these foot- soldiers in apartheid’s foreign legion. In the dressing rooms, they had the argument all won. Cricketers are not well-enough paid to spend time inspecting the mouths of gift-horses. Look at South Africa’s opponents, they would say: corrupt black dictators. True. We’re just businessmen and the Government didn’t try to stop anyone else doing business with South Africa, did they? And we’re playing against blacks, aren’t we? Well, a few, anyway.
But this final rebel tour, staged early in 1990, had a cathartic effect. To Bacher’s astonishment, the threats from black activists that they would disrupt the matches were no longer empty ones. Mike Gatting and his players, shaken, were paid off and sent home early. The programme of township coaching that Bacher had lately been trumpeting lay in ruins.
However it arose again triumphantly. Within two years black and white officials had joined together in the United Cricket Board of South Africa; a team was heading — incredibly — to play cricket in Calcutta, with the support of the Marxist government of West Bengal, and Mandela was heading for the presidency. South African cricket is now doing more than anyone in the world to spread the game among its people. Bless it for that.
This is a week for celebration. The touring party assembled at Lord’s has an Indian assistant manager but no black players — it does, however, have five whose first language is Afrikaans, which would also have been unthinkable in the old days. This can pose a terrible problem for English batsmen, inclined to be paranoid if they don’t know what the hell first slip is telling his neighbour.
The black stars will come soon enough. It would have been as wrong to include a black player for the sake of it in 1994 as it was to exclude Krom Hendricks from the tour of England in 1894. Hendricks was a Malay and the fastest bowler in Cape Colony. He was chosen in the original touring party but left out after pressure from the Cape’s British political masters.
It has been a long, tortuous process, much of it to cricket’s lasting discredit. It is time to move on and enjoy the next few days. But we should never forget. The line that people parroted for so many years “Politics should be kept out of sport” is rubbish. Cricket, above all others, is the game that reflects character beyond the sports field. It can never divorce itself from real life.