Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
Uncovering SA cricket’s hidden history
An exercise to tell the non-racial history of South African cricket reveals a staggering delusion
BUNTING fluttered from tents and refreshment booths for the well- attended late September match, the weather being “charming” for cricket, as “light fleecy clouds played before the sun all day and tempered the rays”.
A big crowd turned out, for there was something novel about this encounter on the crease, a match of rivals in a sporting sense, but also of citizens whose vividly altering worlds seemed as never before to hold the promise of a differently crafted future.
The novelty is hinted at in the scorecard: Fleischer bowled by Benikazi, Nxitanama caught by Back, Xuzo caught by Webster, Xoxo bowled by Stow, Umhalla run out.
The register of the writing – “However good players they may be, the want of united practising must mar madly against their efficiency in a match” – gives the game away, perhaps, and, it’s true, this all happened long ago, so long ago, in fact, that it’s been forgotten.
And who, after all, could be expected to remember a game in Queenstown between the All Queenstown XI and the St Mark’s XI in the last week of September of 1870?
Except, the point is memory is not the problem, erasure is. This is the key to Cricket & Conquest, The History of South African Cricket Retold, 17951914, the first of a four-volume project being published by the Human Sciences Research Council.
André Odendaal and co-authors Krish Reddy, Christopher Merrett and Jonty Winch have spent over a decade trawling the archives to rebuild the real, almost entirely overlooked history of local cricket. The details of that spring match of 1870 offer a small window on this larger view.
Queenstown is not insignificant in Odendaal’s universe; he grew up on a farm in the district and matriculated from Queens College.
He went on to university – Stellenbosch – and an academic trajectory that earned him a doctorate from Cambridge, and has, in the decades since, found him unceasingly engaged in the story of modern South Africa’s emergence from its colonial past.
He went back to his old school for the first time in many years in 2002 and had the pleasure of watching the first rugby team in action.
“I was amazed,” he said, “to note the names of the captains of the first and second teams – Goduka and Sishuba – not because they were black players, but because these were the same names of people who had been prominent in politics, sport and other activities at the turn of the century.
“What was impressive was that despite their systemic exclusion, 100 years later these families were still able to produce children who in a very short time were playing leading roles.”
This was a striking token of the historical lacuna of the intervening century – a blank in the record which, Odendaal said, had left us ignorant about ourselves as a society, and deluded in our thinking about how we got where we are today, in politics as much as in cricket. And the two, as Cricket & Conquest brings out, were inseparable.
The founder of the Mayibuye Centre, former Robben Island Museum chief executive and, latterly, chief executive of Western Province Cricket, hastened to add that “do- gooding moralism” was not his objective.
“When good history becomes vivid to you as a person, you cannot write it off as some formalised narrative. This is what we have tried to do.”
Odendaal added: “If you place this book against the four general histories that have appeared covering South Afri- can cricket from the earliest times to 1960, in those four books there is one scorecard of a black team (the 1891/2 game against the English, featuring stars H ‘Krom’ Hendricks and L Samsodien). In our book, there are 22 tournaments, with over 500 players playing competitive cricket, with scorecards.
“We have managed to reconstitute the record and statistically integrate people who were excluded, black and women cricketers never written about or recorded in official histories. They include leaders in competitive cricket in the world, and we have never known anything about them.”
People could “hardly believe this story”, he said.
“It boils down to the systemic exclusion of black people being turned into normality which occupied all of our minds. This is why former Springbok captains Dawie de Villiers and Hannes Marais could say black people were not interested in Western sports like rugby and cricket and only liked dancing and hunting.
This was a consequence of the “destruction of the black middle class”, formalised through Union in 1910 and the Land Act. “This is the black middle class PW Botha looked for in the 1980s, which had been systematically undermined for 80 years, yet, when model C schools started, began to re-emerge. It is a story of resilience, of people standing together under tremendous pressure to create respect for themselves and lives for their children.”
This is territory Odendaal has been exploring all his life – broadly, the subject of his 10 books to date.
As a Master’s student back in the 1970s, when he was trying to understand “where things started”, he was told there was “nothing on pre-1912 politics”. But when he looked hard, he found there was plenty.
“Forty years later I am still writing on this material.” It was all there, but the narrative of exclusion had effectively obscured it.
“You cannot understand South African democracy if you don’t fully bring out the self- creation that happened through the struggle by black people,” he said.
South Africa’s late Victorian world was distinctive and dynamic. Black people “had more political rights in the Cape colony through the franchise and education qualification even than in Britain until the 1890s… so it was an unusual experiment in the colonial world”.
This “dynamic” enfranchised middle class of some 10 000 former slaves and another 10 000 graduates of the Eastern Cape’s 100 mission schools were “articulate, resilient and creative in starting to mobilise politically and socially”, entering the professions, becoming teachers and journalists, establishing newspapers… and playing sports such as cricket.
Their familiarity with the game, Odendaal argued, was in a sense ironic, as cricket had been at the centre of the colonial depredation across the whole region.
“The violence of colonialism and the mentality of cricket went very much together.
“One of the foundational myths of South African cricket is that it was an essentially innocent Victorian game played by people who believed in fair play. The fact is, step by step through the 19th century, cricket, initially purely a British military sport, accompanied the process of conquest for 100 years.
“That’s the secret of understanding its history, and the mentalities that became fixed in cricket. So when people cannot understand transformation, or react against it, it’s because of this history and the culture – narrow masculinity and class-based – that emerges from it.”
Its “dark and ugly dimension” becomes marked with the decisive economic shift after the discovery of gold and diamonds “when the early ideal of mid-Victorian liberalism was replaced by the political priority of taking over the whole country and securing cheap labour”.
The year 1894 is a key moment for Odendaal, and it’s perhaps no surprise the devil of the piece is Cecil John Rhodes. It was in this year that Rhodes crushed the Ndebele rebellion, introduced the notorious Glen Grey Act, and blocked Achmat Effendi from standing for parliament.
It was also the year in which he and like-minded Cape cricket supremo William Milton scuppered the hopes of one of Cape Town’s star cricketers, H “Krom” Hendricks, by barring him from the 1894 touring side to England.
By international standards, Hendricks was a highly regarded cricketer. The English player William Chatterton said Hendricks was the ablest bowler he had ever met. The cost of Hendricks’s exclusion is bleakly reflected in a single line in his Wikipedia entry: “He instead made gradually reduced appearances in South African domestic cricket.”
Restoring his stature – as Cricket & Conquest seeks to do – is part of what Odendaal regarded as the challenge of “looking at the past in a cleareyed way, so that people can see themselves reflected in history, and we can see the human agency of all South Africans, which has always been there”.