The Race Chase: the Colour of Cricket Transformation in South Africa
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The Race Chase: The Colour of Cricket Transformation in South Africa Ashwin Desai Department of Sociology, University of Johannesburg [email protected] Biographical Details Ashwin Desai is Professor of Sociology at the University of Johannesburg. His latest book is entitled ‘Reverse Sweep: A Story of South African Cricket since Apartheid’. The Race Chase: The Colour of Cricket Transformation in South Africa Abstract South African cricket (re)entered international cricket in 1991, a few years before the country’s first democratic elections. A tour of India was a prelude to playing in the 1992 World Cup in Australia and New Zealand. From the outset of “unity”, cricket was lauded for its transformation programme and for making a decisive break with the past. This break was epitomised by the team being called the Proteas rather than the Springboks. Despite this and on-going efforts to transform the team into a more representative one, issues of racism and racial representation have continued to haunt the game. Questions are persistently raised about racial targets and interference in selection from on high. At local level, Cricket South Africa (CSA) has now made it mandatory that franchises and semi-professional teams be obliged to include six players of colour, of whom three must be Black Africans, raising concerns about deliberate racial engineering. These apprehensions have been exacerbated by increasing calls for national teams to reflect the racial demographics of the country. This article looks at issues of race and representivity in South African cricket post- unity, seeking to probe allegations of racism, as well as how CSA has approached issues of racial representation in the form of quotas and the possible effects of this on the game. Keywords: Proteas; cricket; quotas; non-racialism. Whites on Blacks No sooner do we mention “race” than we are caught in a treacherous bind. To say “race” seems to imply that “race” is real; but it also means that differentiation by race is racist and unjustifiable on scientific, theoretical, moral, and political grounds. We find ourselves in a classic Nietzschean double bind: “race” has been the history of an untruth, of an untruth that unfortunately is our history . The challenge here is to generate, from such a past and a present, a future where race will have been put to rest forever (Radhakrishnan 1996, 81). Sport and race like all aspects of South African life were inextricably linked during the years of apartheid rule. During transition to democracy the dominant liberation movement, the African National Congress (ANC), was at pains to point out that the racial divisions of apartheid would be consigned to history. In its stead would be a commitment to non-racialism. Not much was offered about how race-based notions of redress would sit with this commitment to moving beyond apartheid’s racial categories. Some two decades after the inauguration of the first democratically elected government, race continues to be the central way in which the ANC government seeks to redress past inequalities. This article focuses on how race plays out in cricket and argues that a broader racial nationalism which has emerged in the public domain has insinuated itself into cricket. In terms of the theoretical framework, race is central to this article. The author takes the view that race is not biological but a social construct. Despite being a social construct for most people, it is not fluid but fixed. Race cannot be wished away, since it remains both a legal fact and a social reality quarter of a decade into the post-apartheid period in South Africa. Deborah Posel argued in 2001 that, ‘after decades of apartheid racial reasoning, the idea that South African society comprises four distinct races – “whites”, “Coloureds”, “Indians”, and “Africans” - has been a habit of thought and experience, a facet of popular “common sense” still widely in evidence’ (Posel 2001, 51). Posel was writing seven years after the end of apartheid, and if anything, racial identities have hardened in the intervening years. South Africans simply cannot avoid or evade race. Whether one wants to apply for a job, a place at university, a passport, identity document, or even a sports team, one has to belong to a racial group. From the government’s perspective, racial categorisation is essential to achieve redress, since historically South African society was based on a racial hierarchy. The point then is that race and racial identities have social, economic, and political meaning in South Africa. As Knowles puts it, while …racial categories are social and political constructs, they are also effective in the making of who we are in the world and what we do in it. They operate in the manufacture of identities and in activities composing human agency….They don’t have a force in human biology, but that is a different point. They have a meaning in social and political organisation and human action (2003, 29-30; emphasis in the original). Race is a persistent theme in relation to South African cricket. In July 2017, the celebrated former Springbok batsman Graeme Pollock for example, bemoaned the state of South African cricket after the Proteas suffered a heavy defeat against England in a Test match at Lords, regarded by many as the “home” of cricket. This was the first of a four match series which the Proteas eventually lost by three matches to one. Pollock argued that the team was, and will continue to be mediocre because of the commitment to racial quotas (Sport24 14 July 2017). Indeed, the issue of race and selection has been festering for some time. Garnett Kruger, the “Coloured” pace bowler1, who was selected to tour Australia for the national team in 2006, publicly broke ranks in 2007: They (CSA) are not looking after players properly. We have not been given opportunities. We are included in squads, but then not used. And when we do get opportunities, we are thrown in at the deep end. White players are handed opportunities all the time. It is told to us they are young and need exposure. Why is the same philosophy not used with us… I was in prime form prior to being selected for the 1 For the purposes of this article, Black denotes Black African, Indian and Coloured players. Australian tour and did not play in a single test even when there were so many injured bowlers. Everybody looks out for his group of friends. There is a major problem with cliques in the Proteas team. Why do you think Mark Boucher is opening his mouth over Jacques Kallis’ omission from the Twenty/20 squad? (Cricinfo 31 August 2007). One of South Africa’s most hopeful fast bowling prospects was left disillusioned, his confidence shattered by his experiences in the national squad. The other perspective is shown by former wicket-keeper Mark Boucher, who in his autobiography defends the rationale for a small tight group, which make decisions one step removed from the rest of the team: I equate the situation in the national team to a large business or corporation. Does everyone in the workforce have their say on major decisions? No, the directors run the company and make the important, strategic decisions. A cricket team is the same, with its senior players and high performers who have served the team for many years and have learnt from their experiences. They are the directors…Some people might call it a clique but that’s not the way I saw it. It’s no different in 2013 to what was in 2007 when the team was run by the so-called clique. There are some excellent, well- respected players in the team under Graeme’s captaincy and they form what is effectively the board of directors. It allows new players to come into the team and to know exactly what is expected of them and how the hierarchy works…When I first came into the team, I never questioned Hansie, Symmo [Symcox], Brian McMillan, Dave Richardson or Gary [Kirsten] (Boucher 2013, 102). Boucher could not contemplate how “whiteness” and networks have worked to privilege some players and not others. Some, like Kruger, could be discarded after a couple of games, while people like Pieter Strydom, an old mate of Cronje, would be given chance after chance. A point made with some humour when it was revealed that Cronje had approached Strydom during his corruption innings: Pieter Strydom? Surely not. Why would anyone in their right mind pay him to play badly? He had, after all, been that for free ever since he started playing for the Proteas! In an international career that spanned all of two tests and ten one day internationals, Strydom had amassed a grand total of 83 runs and taken all of one wicket (Gouws 2000, 12). As will be shown in this article, running through the writing of cricket correspondents and “mutterings” of the players, one gets a deep sense of what Adrienne Rich called ‘white solipsism’, meaning the trend to ‘think, imagine and speak as if whiteness described the world’. Rich is at pains to point out that, while this way of seeing does not reflect ‘the consciously held belief that one race is inherently superior to all others’, White solipsism reinforces racism by its occlusions and indicates ‘a tunnel vision which simply does not see non-white experience or existence as precious or significant, unless in spasmodic, impotent guilt-reflexes, which have little or no long term, continuing momentum or political usefulness’ (quoted in Gqola 2001, 101). The comments made by Graeme Pollock around team selection drew an immediate response from former Proteas batsman Ashwell Prince: Mr Pollock talks about merit selection or non-political selection.