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. I would like to take
him back to his era and remind him of the name D’Oliveira. It would be very, very
naïve to think that apart from the legendary Basil D’Oliveira, there would not have
been any (Hashim) Amlas, (Vernon) Philanders, (Herschelle) Gibbses, (Makhaya)
Ntinis or (Kagiso) Rabadas in those days. I mention these names because they all have
one thing in common; the fact that at some stage of their careers, they all occupied the
No 1 ranking in the world. Not in the country, in the world. Transformation has been a
topic from as long as I can remember. From the day I made my first-class debut in
1995, up to the day I retired in 2015, I had heard every kind of abuse you can think of
under the sun. The message is all very much the same, just varying in expletives, but
basically trying to tell me that I’m not good enough and that I will never be good enough, and that I’m only there because of the colour of my skin. The difficulty we
face in South Africa is that the influential people, ie captains, coaches and selectors,
until recently have predominantly been white. The fact that those people are/were
predominantly white shouldn’t necessarily be a negative for a non-white player,
providing those people have transformed hearts and minds. Unfortunately, in my
experience as a player, that did not seem to be the case. White coaches and captains
seemed to prefer to stick to “what they know”; in other words, their own kind, because
that is what they feel they can trust (Weekend Argus 22 July 2017).
Prince’s response is telling. He clearly chaffed under the suspicion that he was picked not because he was good enough but because of his colour. His own success as a national player seems not to have allayed these doubts. For Prince, one of the reasons for the persistent cloud hanging over him was the racial mind-set of captains and selectors that went under the guise of ‘their own kind’.
Given Pollock’s statement and Prince’s response, it would be instructive to look at how
Black and White cricketers are received in the public domain. The most “authoritative” voice is the South African Cricket Annual, edited by Colin Bryden.
A Tale of Two Players
One of the 2015 South African Cricket Annual cricketers of the year was Kagiso
Rabada, a young fast bowler who burst on to the senior cricketing scene after playing for the national under 19 side. One would think that the accolade of Cricketer of the
Year would be a time of celebration. Writing in the 2015 annual, sports journalist Heinz
Schenk, had this to report on the award:
…the buzzing, right-arm quick bowler has become a beacon of Cricket South Africa’s
renewed transformation drive. It is understandable that South African cricket needs to
produce another ethnic gem like Makhaya Ntini, while there’s also an undercurrent of pressure from government…Rabada has been central in that drive, being fast-tracked
into all of the Proteas’ three squads…It’s all very well marvelling at his meteoric rise,
but it would be foolhardy not to address what unavoidably is the elephant in the room.
Is Rabada a man earmarked for political expedience? (2015, 5).
All the code-words are there; ‘transformation drive… ethnic gem … undercurrent of
pressure from government… fast-tracked… meteoric rise… political expedience’. Schenk then
puts these questions to Rabada, a young man that has just come off a debut season that
catapulted him into player of the year! Rabada replies:
I’m a guy who likes looking at things from both sides…I think it would be rather naïve
not to realise that in our country’s context transformation is a given. Numbers
unfortunately are important too and that’s why the CSA perhaps have had to resort to
quotas. I see the benefit of it, yet it will always be a double-edged sword. Personally, I
still favour merit selection. In the end, it’s about your attitude. If you’re not going to
focus on trying to be the best, you’re going to fall by the wayside pretty quickly if
you’re relying on favours (2015, 15-17).
Was Rabada’s selection a result of the need to ‘produce another ethnic gem like
Makhaya Ntini’ or ‘political expedience’ or ‘quotas’, or was it that Rabada was simply good
enough to play for his country? And do any of the selection motives matter if the result is to
unearth such polished achievement? We never really get the answer, but it is startling that a
young player handed the accolade of one of the country’s players of the year is confronted with
these questions in an article that is supposed to celebrate his excellence.
As if to exemplify the difference in treatment, there are no such questions for the
“white” player Rilee Rossouw, another cricketer of the year, profiled by Neil Manthorp in the self-same annual. This, despite the fact that Rossouw started his international career with two ducks, ‘two more ducks in New Zealand gave Rossouw four in six innings, which became five in ten when he was dismissed against the West Indies…’ Instead, we are reminded that Sachin
Tendulkar started his international one day career with two ducks, a story that Manthorp
repeats, adding ‘both men scored exactly 36 in their third matches…’ (2015, 17). Rossouw is
linked with Tendulkar, one of the greatest exponents of the game, and Rabada with political
expediency. While Rabada was, and always will be under scrutiny, Manthorp tells us that
‘Rossouw had been identified as a player with the technique and temperament for the biggest
stage and only cursory thought was given to discarding him…’ (2015, 17). In reflecting on the
relative merits of Rabada and Rossouw, one gets a sense of the prescience of Temba Bavuma’s
comments on racial identity and cricket:
We honestly don’t see each other as Black, white or Indian, but rather as human beings
with the talent to play cricket for South Africa…However, in a more general sense, it’s
true that Black players face different challenges to their white counterparts within
South African cricket. I feel there is extra pressure for Black players to deliver big
performances each time they take to the field (GQ South Africa September 2016).
Staying with 2015, South Africa met New Zealand in the semi-final of the Cricket
World Cup. With rain delays, the Duckworth/Lewis system came into play, arguably favouring
New Zealand who were batting second and who went on to win the game. What followed was
a huge controversy over team selection. It involved the selection of Vernon Philander ahead of
Kyle Abbott. Philander had been injured and only three players of colour were in the team for
the quarter-final against Sri Lanka. Abbott had played and performed competently. He was
dropped and Philander, who was the first choice ahead of the tournament, was drafted back
into the team.
Allegations swirled. Colin Bryden, editor of the 2015 South African Cricket Annual, wrote: The controversy over the selection of the World Cup semi-final team once again thrust
the issue of representivity into the spotlight. Although the official policy is that national
teams are selected purely on merit, it is well understood there is a target of at least four
players of colour in each team…The statement issued by Cricket South Africa after the
controversy which followed South Africa’s elimination listed several factors, which
suggested transformation was a consideration, although not necessarily a prime factor,
in the selection. Should it have been, at such a crucial stage of such an important
tournament? Would the promotion of cricket and the happiness of all sport-loving
South Africans have been in any way diminished if a mainly white team had won the
World Cup? (2015, 7).
In the same Annual, Neil Manthorp’s analysis of the 2015 World Cup was dominated by the Philander selection issue:
…despite some outstanding and notable individual performances…the tournament is
likely to be remembered for a selection controversy….in particular the inclusion of a
partly-fit Vernon Philander in place of a bristling in-form Kyle Abbott….It was hard
not to reach the conclusion that direct instructions to change the originally selected X1
were not, in fact, required. All that was needed was a refusal to “sign off” on the team
until it reflected the requirements of those off the field rather than on it. Subsequent
claims that Philander had been made to sound like a “quota player” were spurious and
misleading. He had started the tournament as the first-choice all-rounder with proven
credentials. Subsequent injury and loss of form were normal hazards of the game. What
upset the players was that the desired XI had won the previous match in resounding
fashion but was then deemed unsuitable for the semi-final (2015, 101).
Manthorp goes on to add
The undeniable fact is that South Africa should have reached the final anyway but fell
short when it mattered most. Philander, despite being forced to leave the field for most of the second innings when his hamstring injury recurred, did not cost his team the
game (2015, 102).
For the record, how did the ‘bristling’ Abbott fair in the quarter finals against Sri Lanka
who were blown away for 133 in 37.2 overs. Dale Steyn took one for 18 in 7 overs; Morné
Morkel one for 27 in seven overs, and Abbott bowled six overs for 27 and took one wicket.
The spinners Duminy and Tahir accounted for seven wickets between them.
#Drinkscarriersmustfall2
Black players who play for South Africa not only have to weather close, often hostile or
suspicious media scrutiny, as well as the challenge of playing in a highly competitive
environment and the feeling that their “White brothers” have been sacrificed, but they must
also “fit in” to the terms set by the “majority”. As fast bowler Allan Donald put it: ‘The non-
whites who had played international cricket for us had all been easily assimilated into our
dressing room, enjoying the banter, respecting the team ethos. No problem’ (Donald 1999,
217).
In this context, Melissa Steyn’s definition of whiteness ‘as the shared social space in
which the psychological, cultural, political, and economic dimensions of this privileged positionality are normalised, and rendered unremarkable’ is apposite (Steyn 2005, 121). What
is the “correct demeanour” comes often to be defined by the prevailing White culture. One is
reminded of Badiou’s famous phrase: ‘Become like me and I will respect your difference’
(Badiou 2001, 25). “Whiteness” allows for a seeming commitment to non-racialism (or more
appropriately colour-blindness) that occludes the historical and contemporary privilege of being White.
2 The hashtag was included in a letter written by Black players in November 2015 to CSA dealing with grievances around their selection and playing time. This has been the experience for sportsmen in rugby as well as cricket. Witness the views of Thando Manana, the third Black African to wear a Springbok rugby jersey after unity in 1992:
The first time I’d come across something called a ‘Kontiki’ was when I was with the
Mighty Elephants (Eastern Province) senior team. Back then the procedure was that a
man would get the bejesus kicked out of him-properly moered-as part of the initiation
into the first team. You’d also have to drink ‘down-downs’… (Mjikeliso 2017, 166).
Manana refused. But the situation reached a head when he was elected for the Springboks.
In 2000, the Springbok Kontiki, for which I gained infamy, took place in Buenos
Aires…It was no secret that I never wanted to be initiated…Gideon Sam (the team
manager) came to speak to me and I told him…that I refused to go through the Kontiki
and wasn’t interested… I told Gideon, a Xhosa, that my reasoning was simple: I’d
already been initiated as a man in my culture and no one else had the authority to initiate
me as a man in my culture thereafter…Those who did not take the same stance as me
were properly bliksemed with the pool stick…I didn’t give a damn about a ritual
performed by players during a time when people who looked like me weren’t allowed
to play for the Springboks. I was further taken aback by the fact that the selection of
eight Black Springboks meant nothing to these so-called senior players-they weren’t
interested in doing anything that was inclusive; instead all they wanted was for us to
conform to their norms. We were a multicultural team and we wanted to promote
multicultural values. I wonder whether the players would be willing to go through
Xhosa initiation, if that was one of the Springbok Kontiki requirements for acceptance
into the Springbok team. The answer is a resounding No! (Mjikeliso 2017, 168-72).
Similar issues arose in the national cricket team. Often, team banter would draw on all the racial stereotypes of apartheid South Africa. The Coloured cricketer Paul Adams, of the unorthodox spin action, was on the receiving end of the following comment from fellow Western Province and Proteas cricketer Craig Matthews: ‘Paul’s head is positioned in such a
way at the point of delivery because he used to steal hubcaps off moving cars when he was a
kid’ (Woolmer 2000, 164). In the international arena and in one of the most ill-tempered games
between South Africa and England, Mark Boucher was ‘alleged to have racially abused
Butcher, leading to a rollicking from Donald – “You’re a South African, representing a new
country, the old ways have gone for good, go and find Butcher and apologise”’ (The Guardian
4 July 2017).
In November 2015, a letter was written to CSA by Black African players bemoaning the lack of playing time they get when selected for national teams. The letter read:
The purpose of this letter is to address a fundamental problem in the national team. The
quality of opportunity afforded to Black African players…Historically, and more
recently, the call-up has acted to erode the Black cricketers’ human dignity and self-
esteem. They have been pushed to the margins to become “hewers of wood and drawers
of water”. There is a mistrust of Black African players’ ability to perform and assume
responsibility and be charged with leadership roles…At the national level, Black
African players have become political pawns and official drinks carriers… (City Press
16 November 2015).
The CSA hierarchy seemed flummoxed, announcing that while they ‘regard the issues
as serious’, they were not happy that ‘a letter of this nature finds its way into the media because
we do not solve issues in the media’ (Sunday Times 15 November 2015).
Subsequent to this, and with the revelation that in the 24 years since unity, of the 87
Test players, only seven have been Black African, Haroon Lorgat, then CEO of CSA, conceded
that: ‘We waited for the system to produce players rather than actively producing them’
(Cricinfo 17 December 2015). Lorgat indicated that henceforth, franchises would have to field
a minimum of six Black players of colour at all times, of whom at least three must be Black
Africans. Out of this pool, he hoped future Proteas would emerge. CSA also planned to develop ‘focus schools’ in townships with excellent facilities. This is a tough call in a society with deepening inequality, mounting levels of unemployment and the persistence of stark apartheid geographies. In this context, as Lorgat acknowledged: ‘You might have a lot of talent in the community but they are also challenged by the need to do some basic things, like putting food on the table, walking miles to educate themselves, walking miles to go and practice and play the game of cricket (Cricinfo 17 December 2015).
In response to the players’ letter, a task team was eventually set up under the chairpersonship of Norman Arendse, an attorney with a long history of experience in cricket, including being a former president of CSA. The team dealt first with the lightning rod that sparked the letter; the non-selection of Khaya Zondo during the 2015 tour of India. They found that
…in relation to the Khaya Zondo matter, it is self-evident that having initially included
him in the Proteas Fifth ODI Eleven, he was subsequently excluded. Both his initial
inclusion, and subsequent exclusion, were motivated on what was described as
“cricketing grounds”. What is clearly apparent however, is that selection protocols and
policy were not adhered to, and we find that his exclusion from the Fifth ODI Protea
Team in Mumbai on 25 October 2015, was unfair, and was contrary to the CSA
Selection Policy (CSA 2015).
At a general level, the task team found
…evidences that generic Black players, and Black African players have consistently
undertaken National Tours without being given an opportunity to play. The most recent
example was that of Aaron Phangiso when he was not selected to play one match at the
ODI World Cup held in New Zealand and Australia in 2015. Although it appears from
the statistics that this is indeed the case, it is difficult to determine whether the exclusion
of Black African players in particular was on grounds other than cricket grounds. There
does, however, appear to be a mind-set which indicates a mistrust of Black African players particularly when it comes to the Proteas playing in high-profile matches or in
so-called “series’ deciders”, like the Fifth ODI match in Mumbai on 25 October
2015 (CSA 2015).
Cricket’s Change-room
The line of isolating Black players, whether they are the calibre of Ntini, Philander or the newest addition to the team, Temba Bavuma, is never away. Describing Bavuma’s century at
Newlands, Ali Martin wrote in The Guardian, that it saw Bavuma become the first Black South
African to reach the hallowed three-figure mark in Test cricket. For all the significance of this, coming 25 years after readmission and in an era of transformation policies, Bavuma’s emotions were understandably personal. Seven Tests into his career- the mark that certainly England batsmen of late have been deemed to have a fair crack- the right-hander felt under pressure for his spot (The Guardian 5 July 2017).
There is no context here. Bavuma is only the first Black African to make a century in
Test cricket because Black people were not allowed to play for their country. It is thus not so much a late achievement as the removal of a grotesque impediment that is the true context of
Bavuma’s achievement. Furthermore, one can only reach such a conclusion if one wrote out of history Black cricket in South Africa. Once again, the code-words that define the Black player;
‘transformation policies … England batsmen of late to have a fair crack’ linger. Is this empirically true? Martin might well have reflected on the England middle-order batsman Gary
Ballance who failed to reach 50 in eleven Test innings.
To be fair, Martin does seek to flesh out Bavuma’s biography: ‘The 27-year old grew up in a middle-class cricketing family, played street games with friends and watched his uncles playing cricket for the local club before eventually joining them.’ Middle class? What does the term mean in apartheid South Africa? Does middle class in Langa, an African township, have
the same connotation as middle class in the affluent suburb of Camps Bay? What were the conditions in which Bavuma’s uncles played cricket in Langa? In these pithy statements,
Martin occludes more than he reveals. Telford Vice writes that Bavuma is not the only cricketer to hail from Langa.
So do former test wicketkeeper-batsman Thami Tsolekile, Knights medium pacer
Malusi Siboto, Western Province left-arm spinner Siya Simetu, and pre-unity era
allrounder Ben Malamba. “I wouldn’t say it’s a co-incidence that so many good players
come from there,” Bavuma said. “Langa has a rich history in cricket in particular.
“People there show their support. The club has good facilities, and you have the
necessary people to guide young players” (The Herald 6 December 2014).
Martin however returns time and again to race, bringing Bavuma and Rabada together:
Rabada the gifted 22 year old fast bowler and Bavuma discuss their positions as role
models…Both players are in the side on merit-Bavuma, averaging 31 from 20 Tests,
still has a point to prove…but the topic of the racial quota that requires the national
cricket team to average at least six non-whites, including two Black players, across the
year remains a thorny issue.
The truth of the matter is that Bavuma, like Ntini before him, will always have a point
to prove in the eyes of some writers and selectors.
Reading through this, credence is lent to Gemmell’s point that underlying the cricketing
narrative post-apartheid is the way in which whiteness has been naturalised: ‘By describing a player as non-white we are assuming “white” as the pre-existing norm. We read and hear of the “Coloured” Herschelle Gibbs, the “Black” or “African” Makhaya Ntini, yet “the all- rounder” Shaun Pollock – never the “white”’ (Gemmell 2013, xvi). In this context, Gunaratnam’s assertion that ‘whiteness is naturalized and left to stand as a de-racialized (and also often a de-ethnicized) norm, with “race” being the defining property and experience of “Other” groups’ (2003, 29) is apposite. This allows ‘those categorized as white to ignore, deny, avoid or forget their racialized subjective and social positionings.’ This has led to a challenge in bringing to the fore ‘the ways in which whiteness is produced through its silences and invisibility’ (2003, 112).
In South African cricket, while whiteness is rendered invisible, Blackness becomes hyper-visible.
A remarkable feature of the Black player “quota” system is the amount of times supposed place-holders turn out to be world-class players, such as Coloured opener Herschelle
Gibbs or Ntini. This raises the possibility that, far from giving preferential treatment to Black players not quite up to standard yet, quotas were necessary to force selectors to divest themselves of prejudicial thinking and make the objectively correct cricketing decision. In this way, quotas functioned to enhance the performance of a team hamstrung by selectors not quite up to their job. If Bavuma’s inclusion in the team was indeed forced on selectors for political reasons, then the question arises why his natural talent was not spotted apolitically. It bears some thinking about. Kevin Pietersen famously left South Africa as he feared the quota system would rob him of a fair chance at making the team, despite his talent. Ironically, if Kevin
Pietersen were Black during the Woolmer era, without a quota, he may still have been robbed of a fair opportunity to show his abilities.
Beyond the Boundaries of Race
In 2001, Luke Alfred wrote:
We are now close to the time when angry debates about the racial composition of the
national team are thankfully a thing of the past; we are at a time when the UCB are able to give the impression that they truly are a united cricket board; we are at a time when
some of the agonies of readmission, the agonies of experiencing the whole wide world
and its temptations for the first time, are nearly at an end (2001, 9).
Alfred’s prognosis is sadly off the mark. Heightened debates about the racial composition of the team are still with us. Some might say more than ever. Some 16 years later,
Ali Martin asks Bavuma: ‘Can he picture the day when the subject is no longer relevant?
Bavuma replies: ‘That’s the ideal picture, where everyone is seen irrespective of colour. We’re moving towards it’ (The Guardian 5 July 2017). How do we move towards an environment where race is not the defining feature of South African cricket?
As Radhakrishnan points out in writing about race, we are also implicated in perpetuating it. Stuart Hall offers a way to think about identity while moving beyond it. Hall holds that we need to put key concepts
…under erasure. The line which cancels them, paradoxically, permits them to go on
being read. Derrida has described this approach as thinking at the limit, as thinking in
the interval, a sort of double writing. “By means of this double, and precisely stratified,
dislodged and dislodging writing, we must also mark the interval between inversion,
which brings low what was high, and the irruptive emergence of a new “concept”, a
concept that can no longer be and never could be included in the previous regime”.
Identity is such a concept-operating “under erasure” in the interval between reversal
and emergence; and idea which cannot be thought in the old way, but without which
certain key questions cannot be thought of at all (Hall 1996, 1-2).
It is this approach that I seek to bring to the fore when discussing race and cricket in contemporary South Africa. How to write race while simultaneously putting it under erasure?
There are two broad positions that animate the discourse on transformation in South African cricket presently. One is that race in a post-apartheid society should not be taken into account in the
selection of provincial and national cricket teams. Bob Woolmer, the South African coach
when West Indies toured the country in 1999, put it this way: ‘We picked the team for cricket
reasons and cricket reasons only. I’m not interested in politics. I’ve never been interested in
politics and nor shall I ever want to be’ (The Guardian 26 February 1999). And a decade and
a half later, when then Sports Minister Fikile Mbalula sanctioned CSA for ‘not meeting their
own set transformation targets’, Jacques Kallis responded: ‘So sad that I find myself
embarrassed to call myself a South African so often these days #no place for politics in sport’
(Mail & Guardian 13 January 2017). Did Kallis not take time to question why, in his long time
as a Proteas player, the Black players that made the team like Herschelle Gibbs and Makhaya
Ntini came through political interventions?
This position does not take into account discrimination in selection decisions, sometimes subtly expressed and at other times plain to see. In other words, it refuses to see that
“whiteness” can play a role in selection and thus focusing on race will help eliminate these barriers to Black achievement. The “anti-politics” position also sees no role in cricket selection decisions redressing the profoundly political selection decisions of the past, where Black people were denied opportunities to play at the highest level because of their race.
The other position on transformation emphasises the meeting of targets and quotas so that an ever more demographically representative team takes the field. At first, quotas and targets were aimed at achieving the inclusion of greater numbers of Black players, which, in the parlance of the time, meant African, Coloured and/or Indian population groups. Coloured and Indian players though comprised the bulk of Black players, sometimes exceeding their proportion of South Africa’s population. Coloureds make up approximately 8% and Indians
3% of the population, so with just a single member of this racial group in the team, substantive
equality could be said to have been achieved. Conversely, according to the racial bean- counters, when Coloureds and Indians make up, say, four players in a match day squad, this
must flow from a form of privilege, the same privilege, even if relative, that underscores White
dominance of the game. Therefore, the broader transformation remit has mutated into an almost
exclusive focus on upping the numbers of Black Africans, as defined in the census, in the team.
This was the position during the presidency of Mtutuzeli Nyoka of CSA, a transformation
strategy in which broader questions of class privilege became overwhelmed by “representivity”
as the key term (Bundy 2014, 140).
The “quota-ists” are content that, to some extent, this should come down to giving
Black African players preference in selection based on their race. In other words, if four
positions (as the position currently stands at provincial level) are reserved for Black African
players, even if a White, Coloured or Indian player exists who is objectively a better bowler or
batsman, the quota must be strictly filled with people of the designated race.
Interestingly, it could be argued that the position of the anti-politics, strictly merit based
group and the position of those seeking to impose quotas in favour of Black Africans, share a
striking common feature. Both neglect to address the workings of class and privilege in cricket achievement.
The link between race and disadvantage in the lives of the players available for national selection will disintegrate even further into the future. Where have Black African players come from and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future? South Africa has nurtured a Black middle and upper class who send their children to Model “C” (formerly White public schools) and private schools. While the numbers of such school-going children are small relative to the
African population, it is large enough to start to filter players into provincial and national squads. Most of the Black African players come straight through schools cricket and into provincial academies. Cricket in apartheid-era Black African township schools is non-existent. It is virtually non-existent in poor Coloured and Indian schools too, although very present in
the streets, extramurally.
Rather than activism to broaden the scope of the game into township schools, an
aggressive African nationalism has arisen to ensure that the small band of Black African, but
not necessarily disadvantaged players that come through the ranks of private schools get
selected into provincial and national teams. In more recent times, there has been a push to argue
for Black Africans to bat and bowl in particular positions and at specific times in the game, so
as to ensure that they are full participants and not just token selections. An almost messianic
drive is enveloping some cricket administrators to Africanise the game, which in their terms,
means that teams must reflect the demographics of the country. But given that, in the absence
of massive spending in school sports, the pool of elite Black players will in all likelihood come
from an elite strata of society, the noble ideal of redressing past disadvantage risks reproducing
a form of privilege. Those included on the basis of their race into cricket’s highest echelons
might well be just another faction of the moneyed elite. Many of the “Africanists” in cricket
positions, indeed simply assumed all the privileges of office in what the ANC, reflecting on its
own trajectory, called ‘the silent shift from transformative politics to palace politics’ (ANC
2012). It is a tale painstakingly and hauntingly related by Nyoka in his book on the reign of
Gerald Majola, who was CEO of CSA from 2000 to 2012 before resigning when he was found
guilty of corrupt practices around South Africa’s hosting of the lucrative Indian Premier League
(IPL).
Corporatisation of the game also fits into notions of class privilege. The corporatisation
of the game has seen resources shift upwards to an elite group of players, reinforcing and
exacerbating the division between professional and amateur levels of the game. As already
mentioned, given the erosion of township cricket, the overwhelming number of Black African cricketers are coming out of private schools and into professionalised clubs. The amateur game – a useful feeder of talent, especially from the rural areas - is under severe threat. It is instructive that our latest fast bowling sensation, Kagiso Rabada, a Black African, schooled at the prestigious St Stithians Boys College. On the other hand, Dale Steyn, a White player nearing the end of his career and considered by many as one of the country’s greatest fast bowlers, schooled at Merensky High School in the distant town of Tzaneen, a school with no equivalent culture of cricket. Had Steyn matured late as a player, there would have been no local league in which he could have continued to hone his skills in faraway Limpopo province.
In this regard, what is hardly ever confronted is how the persistent digging in of racial targets fails to problematise class and privilege and reinforces race thinking rather than challenging it. In response to the persistent pitch of race thinking, the idea of non-racialism of the anti-apartheid South African Council of Sport (SACOS) affiliated South African Cricket
Board (SACB) that envisioned the ‘free interaction of all human beings in all activities of society on the basis of total equality and opportunity without regard to race’ and not the ‘mere physical presence of cricketers of different races and colours on the cricket field’, seems today almost a quaint idea, more for speechifying than having any real purchase (Desai et al. 2002,
351). But can the idea of a militant non-racialism be resurrected; an idea that places both the idea of racial transformation and class privilege centre stage?
In practical terms, this would mean a massive investment in the grassroots of the game, in keeping with CSA’s Transformation Charter, which holds that it is the organisation’s ‘moral and historic duty to ensure that South African cricket grows and flourishes among the truly disadvantaged of our society’ (CSA 2015). If it comes to a selection decision in a top drawer team, the Black African, Coloured and Indian players who come from a poor background, marked by an absence of cricketing opportunities, should safely and fairly be given the nod.
This is the kind of transformation that has ethical meaning. Meanwhile, outside of the national team, CSA opted for a policy from 2016 that franchise and semi-professional teams would have to include a minimum of six players of colour, of whom three must be Black Africans. Alongside this, there has been an outcry of what happens to Black players on the field. As Colin Bryden put it:
there have been accusations that Black players in some teams are not given what the
transformation advocates have labelled “quality of opportunity”-bowlers not being
trusted to bowl an equitable number of deliveries or batsmen not given enough
responsibility (2015, 7).
CSA has produced copious figures to try and discern whether this is in fact true or not.
On the face of it, CSA’s Transformation and relationship manager, Max Jordaan has argued that Black Africans are not given a fair shake. It is hard to come down on this issue. Cricket is a game of tactics often made “instinctively”; when to bowl a spinner, when to send in a pinch- hitter. To simply read off racial profiling from statistics is incredibly difficult but in a game so trespassed with race, it is a divisive issue.
From some quarters, however, it has led to a call that, of the Black Africans selected, at least two must bat in the top four or five and that Black Africans must be bowled in the death overs. It is this kind of social engineering that could effectively take the heart out of cricket; its ebbs and flows and the decisions made on the hoof to turn the tide in one’s favour. In cricket, captains continue to be seen as imaginative thinkers. But having to read from a racial script will hem in this ability. And, what of ability? If a franchise has developed two spinners of
Indian origin that have the potential to be world class, a leg and an off spinner bowling in tandem, learning from each other, must one be farmed out to another franchise?
Ashwell Prince pointed to the racism of captains as one of the reasons why Black players are overlooked. While the present Test captain Faf Du Plessis is White, he certainly does not appear to be a captive of racism. Furthermore, in the present conjuncture, given that a
Black person is the national coach, the chairperson of selectors is Black, the Board is predominantly Black and this demographic shift goes all the way down to provinces and franchises, is it not time to do away with quotas and targets? It is the contention of this article that the positives are now outweighed by the unintended negative consequences. At the time of Ntini and Gibbs, Whites with an apartheid mind-set were dominant. That time has passed and Black administrators as much as anyone need to ensure fairness and equality rather than relying on set racial measuring standards. These have the consequence of digging in apartheid racial categories all the way into primary schools and simply do not achieve the objectives set by the social engineers who espouse them. That which was high has not really been brought low.
Cricketing performance is still predominantly predicated on the attendance of particular schools. In this sense, the continued focus on Black-African, Coloured, Indian and White has functioned to amplify rather than erase what was intended: privilege unearned by anything other than potential to perform on the field. What cricket transformation has taught is that if we do not identify our dichotomies correctly at the beginning, we may become involved in a whole lot of dislodging and irruption, inversion and emergence of race and ethnicity, when all of this prevents key questions from being thought at all. In this context, Maré’s (2001,78) contention that an exclusive focus on biological notions of race muzzles ‘alternatives, other questions that could be raised of the existing order, other visions of the society and its future, other ways of understanding or structuring social relations, other policy proposals’ is apposite.
While sport, as this article has shown, brings into sharp focus how whiteness becomes naturalised and race thinking “instinctive” rather than simply taking racial categories as given and forever, we desperately need to start ‘unlocking cages of ascribed identities and freeing people to define themselves’ (MacDonald 2006, 186). Whatever one thinks of the idealism of “same opportunity”, one can see how at the height of apartheid, these words possessed such an evocative ring. Twenty five years after unification, can these words bring into sharper focus both race and class privilege? Can we move from the hollowness of transformation speak, which ‘has been divested of radicalism and reduced to head counts’ (ANC 2012) to the idea of structural change that places redistribution and inequality at the centre of macro-economic policy?
And would not this approach hasten Bavuma’s desire for a time when race is not an issue, especially when compared to CSA, which as every challenge of racism and racial representivity emerges, responds by digging in apartheid racial categories more deeply?
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