Dehring wrong on Rowe

MORE THAN six decades ago, in 1960, when Lawrence Rowe was a prodigiously talented, 11-year-old batsman, the great West Indian thinker C.L.R. James, in the preface to Beyond a Boundary, his book on cricket and life, posed this question: “What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?”

As he was preparing to publish that book, James, a Trinidadian, through newspaper articles, was also campaigning for Frank Worrell’s appointment as the first permanent black captain of the West Indies cricket team. The great George Headley of Jamaica should have been the first.

Happily, Worrell captained the team on the famous 1960 tour of Australia. Franz Alex Alexander, a white Jamaican, the captain of the previous two Test series, decently stood aside and served honourably under Worrell.

This newspaper commends these two bits of West Indian cricket and social history to Christopher Dehring, the Jamaican businessman and the CEO of the 2007 ICC Cricket World Cup in the Caribbean. For facts and context matter.

Lawrence Rowe turned 75 on January 8. Last weekend, a gaggle of former West Indian cricketers and cricket officials used that milestone, at a function in Miami to mark, two months early, the 50th anniversary of Rowe’s sublime triple century against England at Kensington Oval in Barbados.

CALLED FOR AN END

Mr Dehring was the featured speaker. He called for an end to what he claimed was the “persecution” of Rowe in Jamaica for leading teams of West Indian cricketers on rebel tours to apartheid South Africa in 1982 and 1983. He implied that there was an exclusion of Rowe from the island’s cricket sphere.

“This banquet … should have been staged in Jamaica with the full and unequivocal support of the Jamaican Government, cricket association, and the people of Jamaica,” Mr Dehring said. “That it is not being held in Jamaica, ironically, mirrors the embarrassing fact that the T20 Cricket World Cup is being staged this year in Florida and not in Jamaica.”

Black South Africans, he added, had forgiven “their oppressors years ago through their truth and reconciliation process”, while in Jamaica, Rowe was not even celebrated in the mural of cricketers at the Sabina Park cricket ground. Yet the society freely embraced the music of the jailed dancehall artiste Vybz Kartel.

Mr Dehring’s reference to South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission is important. That was a process of acknowledging wrongs in exchange for forgiveness.

It is also a false equivalency to equate the public’s embrace of Kartel, a convicted murderer, and the absence of official endorsement of Rowe. Indeed, Rowe has been involved in private cricketing activities in Jamaica, including at least one cricket festival hosted by the Melbourne Cricket Club. And neither is it true that there has been no effort to reconcile with Rowe.

When Rowe led the West Indian rebels to South Africa, in defiance of a sporting ban on that country, it was nearly a decade before Nelson Mandela was freed from decades in jail for opposing white minority rule. It would be a dozen years before the black South Africans had the right vote for a government of their choice.

HONORARY WHITES

Rowe and company entered South Africa as honorary whites. And up to the day the Jamaica-based members of his team slithered out of the island, some denied they would break the boycott. That day, at a lunch in the honour of cricketers, Allan Rae, the president of what was then the West Indies Cricket Board of Control, thanked the players, some of whom were in the room, for not “stretching the big right hand for the South African rand”.

For 28 years, until 2011, when the Jamaica Cricket Association decided to name a stand at Sabina Park in his honour, Rowe largely held his public counsel on his actions.

When it seeped out the day before the event that the ceremony would take place during the break of an England-West Indies Test match, there was a campaign for the move to be abandoned, given that Rowe had not apologised for the rebel tour. One was negotiated overnight, which he delivered at the ceremony.

But within days, Lawrence Rowe, then age 62, effectively withdrew that apology.

Asked by journalist Dionne Jackson Miller on RJR Radio programme Beyond the Headlines whether he now acknowledged that he had been wrong to go to apartheid South Africa, Rowe said: “I’m not saying that I did wrong. The whole point about it is that history will prove if I’m wrong. History will prove that. If we check it out, some of our own national heroes were crooks.

“Paul Bogle was vilified and then he becomes a national hero. So you don’t know. Probably when I’m gone, probably 40, 50 years from now, I might be a national hero; wherein something that was extremely negative and thought of as being wrong might be positive 40, 50 years from now.”

Rowe, of course, got his social and political history about Paul Bogle badly twisted. And his apparent allusion to Marcus Garvey as a crook was to uncritically imbibe America’s 1920s establishment’s poisonous campaign against the Pan Africanist Garvey.

It is Lawrence Rowe’s obligation to jump-start truth and reconciliation.