This book examines aspects of South African cricket from the formation of Union in 1910 to the country’s eventual isolation as a cricketing nation in 1971. It is a history of cricket and a history of how cricket was shaped by society and society by cricket. It explores the tangled and complex relationship between cricketers, politicians, and the economy during the period which started with South Africa at the beating heart of the imperial project and ended with the country as an international pariah.
Cricket, with a weight of ideological baggage unmatched by other sports, was influenced in many ways by the relations between land, labour and capital, town and country. South Africa’s human landscape was divided by the state into English or Afrikaans-speaking whites, and blacks whether African, coloured or Indian, and by economics and culture on the basis of race, ethnicity, language, class, religion, and gender. These tensions, divisions and conflicts also influenced South Africa’s relations within the Empire and the operation of the South African economy through an exploitative cheap labour policy sustained by a segregated regime which in its state-structured shape proved unsustainable by the end of the twentieth century. And all this occurred in a world at a time of unprecedented upheaval; the end of the construction of colonialism; the advent of economic imperialism after the South African War and the formation of Union; the struggle over labour; the involvement of the Empire in two world wars; decolonisation and finally the expulsion of South Africa from the imperial fraternity.
The various chapters explain and tease out some of the key strands in the evolving nature of South African cricket within the international landscape. The view through the cracks of history is often constrained by difficulties of evidence and establishing the decision-making processes which took place behind closed doors. Cricket not only reflected the evolution of the social order but was part of a strategy used to control that structure and maintain the global imperial network. All South African cricketers represented their own specific interest groups based on race, ethnicity, gender and class—whether Africans on the gold mines trying to forge a community; Indians trying to establish their identity as South Africans; Afrikaners rejecting one imperial game, cricket, for another, rugby; women fighting their ongoing battle for resources and recognition, or the final generation of white cricketing Springboks walking off the field in a futile protest aimed at saving their country’s Test status, the last act before the shutters came down on South African participation in official international cricket.
Not surprisingly therefore, the historical experience of South Africa over the last hundred years has witnessed the tension between fragmentation and unity, as part of the struggle to weld a country from its disparate elements. This reflects on a smaller screen the global struggle over Empire as political ‘colonial’ control gave way to an economic and ideological framework.
South Africa was not unique among imperial cricket-playing countries in the extent to which cricket influenced the political and social order. But the South African dynamic was qualitatively different from the other parts of Empire where the racial questions of who could play for the country and who the country would play against did not arise. These questions lay at the heart of the South African social and political order. They still reverberate through the debate over the role of cricket in the collapse of apartheid, and the subsequent transformation process as well as the tensions in South Africa’s current search to ensure that it fields a competitive international team which is representative of the whole country.
Cricket is and was a barometer of South African society as well as part of the complex and changing relationship between South Africa and Empire. This was shifting and ambivalent in nature, riven by economic and political tensions. From the late nineteenth century, white and black cricketers played their own segregated games, with the pervasive racism of the state and the white community always shaping the action. By the mid-twentieth century, the segregationist strategy had solidified, through the ostensible development of an ideology to justify its repression, into the apartheid regime. Who could play with or against whom, and where, were enshrined in law as well as practice.
This essential landscape had its key elements in place before the formation of Union in 1910 unified the previously separate British colonies—Cape, Natal, Transvaal and Orange Free State—into a self-governing dominion within the Empire. Cricket in earlier years had been a critical factor in the Cecil Rhodes imposed policy of segregation which concentrated economic and political power in white hands, and restricted representation at cricket to whites, whatever the nature of their ties to the country itself. Race was the key to qualification: white South Africans were ‘citizens’ of Empire, blacks were subjects, less to Empire than their white masters.
The opening section of this work explores the landscape in two main areas: first the evolution of South African sport and identity in its imperial context and second, the nature of the internal landscape and how it defined South African cricket.
Origins
During the latter part of the nineteenth century Cecil John Rhodes , by then Prime Minister of the Cape Colony and before that one of the first mining magnates who exploited the discoveries of diamonds in 1867 and gold in 1886, often expressed his desire that South Africa should be united under British leadership as part of the Empire. He did not wish to be left ‘settled just on this small peninsula’ but wanted the Cape Colony ‘to be able to deal with the question of confederation as the dominant state of South Africa’. 1
In order to achieve union, he sought to bring together the two dominant white ‘races’ (English and Dutch/Afrikaans speakers) at the expense of the Cape’s grand ‘liberal’ tradition and the rights of the black population. 2 His aspirations to an Anglo-Afrikaner alliance were shared by the leader of the Cape Afrikaner Bond, J. H. ‘Onze Jan’ Hofmeyr . But while they agreed on an alliance for unity, Hofmeyr wanted a unified South Africa under its own flag and an independent republic beyond the ties of Empire. Whichever side won, black South Africans were to be the losers.
Rhodes and Hofmeyr both recognised the potential for sport to unify the region fully twenty years before this became a political reality. A ‘South African’ cricket team was selected for the first time in 1889 to play against Major Warton’s English tourists. This team met Warton’s on level terms and included representatives from the various self-governing colonies and independent republics in the subcontinent. Several months later the South African Rugby Football Board was formed, and in 1890 a meeting was held to establish the South African Cricket Association (SACA) .
Cricket did not play the role in bringing together the two white ‘races’ which rugby, another imperial game, managed to do in the late nineteenth century. The problem was not the Afrikaner’s lack of interest or ability in cricket. Stellenbosch , a side comprised almost entirely of players from the Dutch-speaking sector of the white population, was for a time the most feared team at the Cape. They produced several outstanding fast bowlers—notably Louis Neethling , E. L. Schröder , Pieter de Villiers , Johan du Plessis and Nicol Theunissen . The last named, renowned for his ‘great knee-shaking, rib-roasting, finger-mangling bump’, opened the South African bowling against Major Warton’s side in 1888/89. 3
The problem was what in the nineteenth century the Cape used to call ‘race’, that is the relationship between the Dutch/ Afrikaner and English, rather than class as they referred to white-black relations. William Milton, South Africa’s leading cricket administrator and the Western Province Cricket Club—the self-styled MCC of South Africa which Milton controlled for many years—were reluctant to provide opportunities for the Dutch country district teams. Milton also became Rhodes’s Private Secretary but his innate snobbishness and distaste for the Dutch meant that he did not share Rhodes’s vision in this key area. The failure at this early stage to recognise the potential of the Afrikaner would prove detrimental to South African cricket for much of the twentieth century, The indifference shown by cricket’s administrators towards teams outside the elite group of Cape Town’s southern suburb clubs contrasted with the attitude of the progressive and democratic Western Province Rugby Football Union . Led by their young secretary, Carlo Douglas-de Fenzi , the Union actively encouraged the participation of the Afrikaans-dominated districts and introduced the successful Country Challenge Cup. Stellenbosch enjoyed marked rugby success and in the 1896 season not only won Western Province’s premier competition—the Grand Challenge—but also secured the Junior Challenge for the third successive year. 4
By the mid-1890s Afrikaner participation in cricket had declined at the Cape and elsewhere with the representative games essentially taking on an exclusively English-speaking white status. Interest flickered among Afrikaner communities in the different regions and in March 1892, for example, Charlie Fichardt and Vlooi du Toit attended a SACA meeting to set up the affiliation of the Orange Free State.
Yet during all of this, cricket was not just a white game. Black pupils were encouraged to play by the mission schools as proud harbingers of Empire, while the coloured and ‘Malay’ communities, who had not received a mission education, nonetheless had built a strong cricketing network in Cape Town and Kimberley by the 1880s. The quality of play was equally strong and their best players participated at a level directly comparable with white cricketers despite their limited resources. Cricket’s popularity was in part due to the fact that it was emblematic of Empire and as such allowe...