In the build-up to the 1976 Test cricket series between England and the West Indies, the England captain, South African-born Tony Greig, uttered words he would come to regret. Sizing up his opponents, Greig said: “You must remember that the West Indians, these guys, if they get on top, are magnificent cricketers. But if they’re down, they grovel, and I intend, with the help of Closey [teammate Brian Close] and a few others, to make them grovel.”
Ill-advised words from a South Africa-born cricketer, especially when the apartheid regime had, a few months earlier, massacred schoolchildren in Soweto on June 16. Black consciousness was on the rise at that time, as was anti-immigrant sentiment and racism in England.
There was a public outcry, but the most apt riposte came on the cricket pitch. The fearsome fast-bowling trio of Michael Holding, Wayne Daniel and Andy Roberts battered the English batsmen into submission. The Windies went on to win the series 0-3 and the team would go on to dominate world cricket for the next 20 years.
Bringing it together
It also articulated a coalescence of various political strains and sport — the embodiment of black power and consciousness, emerging in Africa and the diaspora, on the cricket field.
In the documentary Fire in Babylon, which has its South African premiere at the Durban International Film Festival, legendary Windies batsman Vivian Richards says cricket had become “about showing how equal you are [as black people] and proving that you are useful”.
The team had gone to England after being demolished 5-1 in a Test series in Australia, where the atmosphere was racially charged: players interviewed in the film remembered being called “black bastards” by the crowd and being told to “go back to the trees where you belong”.
Director Stevan Riley says he was “surprised by how influential Rastafarianism was in the politics of the team. Richards’s history teacher [who appears in the film] was teaching an Afrocentric version of history that influenced Richards. Both Richards and Clive Lloyd [the influential captain] had many Rastafarian friends and there was, obviously, the influence of the civil rights movement in the United States and notions of pan-Africanism.”
A swaggering film
Fire in Babylon traces the emergence of this West Indian team from that loss in Australia through the England victory, a home-series demolition of India, the Packer World Series and all the way through to the 0-5 “blackwash” of England in 1984. Set to a stepping razor-reggae and dub soundtrack, and with interviewees including Lloyd, Richards, Michael “Whispering Death” Holding, Bunny Wailer and “Charlie”, the West Indian groundsman, it is a swaggering film — much like the cricket played by the team.
It also covers the contentious decision of some members of that team to break the international sports boycott and play in South Africa in 1983. Several first-team players, including Richards, who was offered a blank cheque, refused to go. Others accepted “honorary white status” and did.
Says Holding in the film: “If they were offered enough money they would have accepted chains on their ankles. It was disgusting.”
But it is Fire in Babylon‘s one flaw that it is unable to tell comprehensively how members (or those on the fringes) of a team imbued with a sense of black pride would decide to play in the most racially oppressive — and violent — country in the world at that time.
The Durban International Film Festival runs until July 31 at various venues in Durban. Go to www.cca.ukzn.ac.za for more details