Zimbabwean cricket, so long on life-support, is brain-dead. President Robert Mugabe ordered a pillow to be held over its face and that was that.
For a decade of service Heath Streak was branded a racist reactionary. No one has worked harder for Zimbabwean sport, and no international cricket captain has had so little incentive to stay at the coalface year after year.
Naturally this week’s evaporation of meaningful cricket in Zimbabwe has prompted renewed bleats for the International Cricket Council (ICC) to do something. Send a gunboat, that sort of thing. But the ICC is not the United Nations, and the international community is not showing undue haste in excommunicating Zimbabwe.
Foreign investment has slowed but not stopped, and Anglo-American, angling for a controlling interest in the country’s platinum supply, continues its implicit endorsement of Mugabe’s dungheap. Next week’s International Trade Fair in Harare has attracted 11 countries, including Italy, Austria and China.
The issue of sport’s reaction to tyranny has long been clouded by South Africa’s ejection in the 1970s over apartheid. That chain of events fired the self-righteous imaginations of Guardian readers, because it made neat moral sense.
And protests at South Africa House or flour bombs in New Zealand were far less taxing than asking why the Soviet Union and the United States could compete at the Olympics while the one was killing and torturing hundreds of thousands of its citizens and the other was dropping bombs on Cambodian civilians.
The sports ban on South Africa was an accessible gesture, but also one with a unique and unrepeatable impact. With a soul shared equally between God and sport, white nationalist South Africa felt the expulsion keenly, while for the black majority it was business as usual.
But if the ICC expels Zimbabwe from its ranks who in the country will pay any attention other than a handful of players and fans?
Certainly Mugabe will see it as a further justification for his laager mentality, and attribute some new decadent perversion to the West. Already Information Minister Jonathan Moyo’s devious little mind must be trying to find some racist connection between the appointment of a black captain and Australian and English reluctance to tour.Â
And if we’re going to boycott Zimbabwe, then we must immediately boycott Pakistan (an illegitimate government ruled by a military dictator) and India, regularly cautioned by Human Rights Watch for its tolerance of atrocities against lower castes and its interfaith massacres.
Some might even argue for boycotting England, currently involved in an illegal bilateral occupation of a foreign country and responsible for considerable destruction of property and loss of life. While this seems tenuous, the point is that by global standards Mugabe’s despotism is quite average.
Beijing’s minions have brutalised 10 Zimbabwes, and yet China is being actively wooed by sporting bodies. Malaysia, busily torturing migrant labourers in detention camps, got to host the Commonwealth Games.
Realistically, the ICC is way out of its depth on this one. Its failure to deal with match-fixing, evidenced by the fact that India’s economy has not ground to a sudden halt, is enough indication that it is a popgun in realpolitik terms.
Its reaction will be standard Colonel Blimp: let’s see how things pan out, it’s all very complicated, obviously we must act but let’s first wait and see — But the ICC and the national unions that behave similarly should not be condemned for their indecision, since they are just businessmen trying to make a living, and it’s tough when your customers are insane Zimbabwean geriatric homophobes with Hitler moustaches.
In the end it must be a personal choice whether or not to play in Zimbabwe. Australian spinner Stuart MacGill has already boycotted the upcoming tour on moral grounds, an act of considerable conscience given how hard he has had to fight for his place in the team next to Shane Warne.
MacGill should be praised for his decision, but then so should any player who has thought deeply about his motivation for going or not going, and found it to be the best interests of the people of Zimbabwe.
Those who do play will not be endorsing Mugabe’s regime. They will instead be smuggling in a glimpse of broader horizons to a population suffocating as the walls close in.