Canadian International Council Caribbean Cricket: The Role of Sport in Emerging Small-Nation Politics Author(s): Brian Stoddart Source: International Journal, Vol. 43, No. 4, Sport in World Politics (Autumn, 1988), pp. 618- 642 Published by: Canadian International Council Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40202566 . Accessed: 19/09/2011 13:24 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Canadian International Council is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to International Journal. http://www.jstor.org BRIAN STODDART Caribbean cricket: the role of sport in emerging small-nation politics On 29 June 1950 a team of cricketersplaying as the 'WestIndies' beat England in a test match for the first time since their acces- sion to internationalstatus in 1928. The victorywas all the more historicfor being recordedat Lord's,the London ground dubbed the Cathedral of Cricket.1As the last English wicket fell to produce the win, those at the ground witnessed a 'rush of West Indian supporters, one armed with an instrument of the guitar family.'2That was Lord Kitchener,the famous calypsonianfrom Trinidad whose words and music led the celebrationsin honour of a new cricket power, for West Indies went on to win two more tests and so the series that summer. For the cricket world, it was the moment when the name West Indies began to evoke images of rum, calypso,and exciting play. But there was another dimension, too, missed by many outsiders:the rich politicalvein within Caribbeancricket which was both an inheritance of em- pire and a prophecy for independence. This article sketches some of the political richness inherent in Caribbeancricket, and it is important to note that it is really a discussionof the game's politicalculture. While in recent years there has been an increase in the number of works devoted to Senior Lecturer in Sports Studies, Canberra College of Advanced Education, Australia, and Visiting Professor, School of Physical Education and Recreation, University of British Columbia 1988-9; a historian by training, the author has pursued the study of sport in society since the mid-1970s; his most recent book is SaturdayAfternoon Fever: Sport in the Australian Culture (1086). 1 See National Library of Australia, Menzies Papers, 1950s correspondence be- tween Sir Robert Menzies, prime minister of Australia, and Sir Pelham Warner, English cricket administrator. 2 Times, 30 June 1950, 4. InternationalJournal xliii autumn 1988 CARIBBEAN CRICKET 619 what is loosely described as 'sport and politics,' little of that material has proceeded from a base in political theory.^It has been overwhelmingly descriptive, seizing upon sport as an in- teresting politicalsidelight or politicalissue. That has been most noticeable in political coverage of the Olympic Games, for ex- ample - it is as if the 'politics'come around only every fourth year.4Much of the writing on sports politics, then, might fairly be described as incident-based, providing little in the way of continuing momentum or accumulatingknowledge. There are exceptions, of course, but they generally serve to demonstrate the rule. This Caribbeancase study suggests, however, that it is more fruitful to approach sport as a constant and complex politicalfactor inextricablybound up with the culturalevolution of the society within which it is located. That is, it is not so much the facts of politicalhistory which determine the politicalnature of sport (development of constitutions, suffrage, parties, and so on) as the cultural history of which it is part. The composition of that victorious West Indies team, to begin with, symbolizedthe Caribbeancolonial inheritance. There were three players from Jamaica, now just over an hour's flying time from Miami and less from Havana (to highlight the re- gional politicalvariety). One came from BritishGuiana, the only British possession on the South American continent and sur- rounded by Venezuela, Dutch Guiana (now Suriname), and Brazil. Jamaicaand bg, as it was known, were well over 1000 3 See: Benjamin Lowe, D.B. Kanin, and A. Strenk, eds, Sport and International Re- and Interna- lations (Champaign il: Stipes 1978); Maaret Ilmarinen, ed, Sport % tional Understanding(Berlin: Springer Verlag 1984); Lincoln Allison, ed, The Politics of Sport (Manchester: Manchester University Press 1986). All these works are of interest, but produce little in the way of an integrated view on the sports- politics phenomenon. John M. Hobermann, Sport and Political Ideology (Austin: University of Texas Press 1984) attempts a pioneering view. 4 Richard T. Espy, The Politics of the OlympicGames (Berkeley: University of Cali- fornia Press 1979); David B. Kanin, A Political History of tfie OlympicGames (Boul- der co: Westview 1981); Alan Tomlinson and Garry Whannel, eds, Five Ring Circus: Money, Power and Politics at the OlympicGames (London: Pluto 1984). Again Hobermann attempts a different analysis - The OlympicCrisis: Sport, Poli- tics and the Moral Order (New York: Caratzas 1986). D2O INTERNATIONALJOURNAL miles apart so that these 'West Indian' players very rarely saw each other except for a limited number of intercolonial en- counters and the even more limited number of overseas tours. Another six players came from Barbados,a tiny 21- by 14-mile island out on the Atlantic side of the Caribbean island chain and the second oldest British possession in the world. The re- maining six cricketers came from Trinidad, one of the truly multiculturalcountries in the world, which lies to the southwest of Barbados. That distribution points immediately to the need to qualify the use of the term 'Caribbeancricket.' The game was clearly restrictedto the English-speakingsections of the Caribbeanand was dominated for a long time by its major population centres. And while the passion for cricket was prominent in all centres, it was more highly developed in some than in others. As a long- time British dependency it was (and remains) appropriate that Barbados constituted the great cricket centre with the game spread all over the island. In Jamaica, however, partly because of a more difficult geography and partly because of a more mixed historical evolution, the game was more centralized in Kingston.5 'Caribbeancricket' is a useful generic term, then, but should be used in the knowledge of the quite distinct pat- terns within the region. Team photographs of 1950 reveal men of very different skin colours whose names reflected the diverse cultural back- grounds from whence they came and which were the products of colonialism: Gomez, Pierre, Christiani,and Ramadhin (the first man of East Indian descent to play for West Indies), to name a few. The captain wasJohn Goddard, a white Barbadian whose family rose from obscure origins to become one of the 5 For Barbadian cricket, Brian Stoddart, 'Cricket, social formation and cultural continuity in Barbados: a preliminary ethnohistory ,' /ourrkz/ of Sport History i4(winter 1987). A quite different cricket is described in Frank Manning, 'Cele- brating cricket: the symbolic construction of Caribbean politics/ AmericanEthnol- ogist 8( August 1981) - it is about Bermuda, an island not generally considered part of the Caribbean cricket culture. CARIBBEAN CRICKET O2 1 island's major trading houses. His vice-captain was Jeff Stoll- meyer, anotherwhite man of Germanand Englishdescent whose family became business and political leaders in Trinidad.6The great stars of the team were the 'three Ws': Worrell, Weekes, and Walcott,darker coloured men from Barbadoswith the first two of humble origins and the last from a lower middle class family.7These backgroundsare importantbecause they indicate the only real common reference shared by all these men in cricket: the politicaleconomy of slaveryand sugar and its post- colonial consequences. From the middle of the seventeenth cen- tury these British Caribbeanterritories produced sugar for the world'smetropolitan markets aided by the labour of blackslaves taken from Africa. By the early nineteenth century a minority of whites controlled commercialand political life while the ma- jority black populations maintained the production.8 Relatively few alterations occurred in that economic rela- tionship after the abolition of the slave trade in the British territories in 1807 and the final freeing of all slaves in 1838. There were some significantcultural shifts, however, in a region where British, French, Dutch, Spanish, and Portuguese influ- ences had all been felt at some stage. During the middle of the nineteenth century, for example, indentured labourers from India and China were engaged to replace the lost black slaves, especiallyin British Guiana and Trinidad, and this would serve in time to render even more complex the search for a Caribbean identity.9(One of Trinidad's best-loved cricketers of the 1040s 6 Jeff Stollmeyer, Everythingunder the Sun: My Life in West Indies Cricket(London: Stanley Paul 1983). 7 These three players figure prominently in any history of the game, be it about the West Indies or the world. 8 There is a vast literature