High field of cricket dreams

THERE is a connection between Hamilton Masakadza and the boy holding a piece of firewood.

More than two decades ago in this neighbourhood, Masakadza was handed a foreign object and taught the game based around it.

He went on to use it to become the first black Zimbabwean to score a Test century, inspiring the next generation of black cricketers in the country. Now cricket is embedded in Highfield.

Masakadza looks on as a child finds a well-shaped piece of firewood and uses it to protect a pole in a pick-up game on a dusty school ground.

Over the past 12 years, the group of players at the heart of Zimbabwe’s national team has come from Highfield, a high-density suburb in south-western Harare.

It is no great surprise that the first surge of black cricket players in Zimbabwe emerged from here.

The country’s liberation movements were born here in the 1960s, when three of the foremost black nationalists - Rev Ndabaningi Sithole, Joshua Nkomo and President Mugabe - all lived in the area.

Some of Zimbabwe’s top musicians, including the legendary Oliver Mtukudzi, were born and raised here, and so were a handful of eminent business people.

This is fertile ground, and Main Street represents the supply line along which its produce flows to the rest of the city.

Drive into Highfield along Main Street and Elton Chigumbura’s childhood home will be down a side road to your left, Vusi Sibanda’s on your right.

A left into 111th Street will lead to two landmarks Chipembere Primary School on your left, and on your right a large complex with rows of three-storey flats for policemen, where Prosper Utseya and Stuart Matsikenyeri grew up.

Further on, across a small vlei, Tatenda taibu’s family had their small home.

Masakadza lived in a different part of the neighbourhood, on the corner of Seventh and Chaka, and attended a different junior school, Mbizi.

But the game’s adhesive qualities meant that he became close friends with his Chipembere counterparts: Taibu, Sibanda, Chigumbura, Matsikenyeri and Utseya.

When we drive into the police complex, with Masakadza’s friendly demeanour disarming the policeman at the gate, he shows me the unfinished and unused buildings where Sibanda would give him throwdowns on free afternoons, helping him overcome a “slow start” in the game. Masakadza more than caught up. On a July day in 2001, aged just 17, he ground his way to three figures against West Indies at Harare Sports Club, and into the record books.

The innings nudged open the door for a race, a culture and a new generation.

Cricket culture had officially crossed the racial divide in Zimbabwe.

The first time that cricket came to Highfield with ambitions of putting down proper roots, it rode in on a bicycle.

The year was 1986, and the Zimbabwe Cricket Union had secured sponsorship from a local crisps company to provide facilities and coaching in black areas.

But issuing a vehicle to their coach, Lazarus Zizhou, was beyond their means, and Zizhou was tasked with teaching the game to children in two other townships. A bicycle simply had to do. Zizhou had learnt the game from a white headmaster in Highfield in the years before independence, and been involved in Stragglers, a non-racial club formed by the eminent architect Robert Spencer-Parker back in 1959.

But those initiatives were minor transplants - saplings plonked in otherwise barren fields with minimal support.

What Zizhou and the ZCU began to do in 1986 was sow seeds in a wider pattern, with compost and irrigation included.

While Chipembere would become the suburb’s best-known school because of the success of Taibu’s generation, this was largely due to timing.

The ZCU’s first centre in Highfield was actually at Chengu Primary School, where they installed a concrete pitch and nets.

All of the schools in Highfield would come to make use of those facilities at different times, with Zizhou’s coaching occasionally supplemented by Zimbabwe international Dave Houghton, former Barbados fast bowler Billy Bourne, and the odd visiting English county pro.

One of Zizhou’s pupils in that first year was Patrick Gada, a batting allrounder in third grade.

“I had seen cricket being played in the neighbourhood, but it was only then that I became involved in the sport,” Gada says.

Four years later, as the best junior batsman from Zizhou’s three centres, he was receiving an autographed miniature bat from Michael Atherton and his England A side and posing with them in front of Harare Sports Club’s gabled pavilion.

Yet Zizhou’s pioneers would ultimately fall short of major honours, largely because they were from families with no cricket background and meagre financial means.

Although Gada was one of the first boys to earn a ZCU scholarship, which allowed him to attend Prince Edward High School - one of the country’s best government schools - he was still at a disadvantage to the white players who came from cricket homes where the game’s intricacies could be discussed over dinner.

Still, a movement had been set in motion.

Before long, one of Zizhou’s prodigies from another neighbourhood, a left-hand batsman and right-arm seam bowler by the name of Stephen Mangongo, had finished school and begun coaching at Chipembere.

Along with Givemore Makoni and Walter Chawaguta - two other Zizhou products - Mangongo would play a defining role in the generation that followed, providing the support that the previous one had lacked.

Mangongo guided Taibu’s group through junior school, saw them earn full scholarships to Churchill High School, and was instrumental in the evolution of a club that in many ways came to define cricket in Highfield - Cricinfo.