Sunday Times
TELFORD VICE, Johannesburg
For 18 minutes this week, a roomful of sportminded South Africans managed not to mention the war; that smouldering unhappiness over the racial imbalance in teams playing at the higher levels of games like cricket and rugby. Mostly, these teams are an awkward shade of pale - even when they purport to represent a nation that is more than 90% black.
The occasion was the unveiling of Hashim Amla as the captain of SA’s test cricket team. He is the first player of colour to be appointed to the position although not the first to do the job. Ashwell Prince led SA in two tests in Sri Lanka in 2006 because Graeme Smith was injured.
Eighteen minutes is how long Amla’s press conference lasted. Not once in that time did anyone present raise the topic of race: not because it would have been impolite to do but because Amla’s talent, skill and record would have made any such reference churlish. To these minds, he was a fine player first and a man of colour second.
Amla was accompanied behind the microphones by SA coach Russell Domingo, selection convenor Andrew Hudson, and Cricket SA chief executive Haroon Lorgat. Among the four, only Hudson is white.
Lorgat might not have noticed. “We’ve passed the time of looking at colour; we’re looking at ability,” he said afterwards. “We’ve got a crop of (black) players who meet the criteria to be in the national set-up and it’s pleasing to be at a point where we don’t have to talk colour.”
And yet, in the most recent test SA played, against Australia at Newlands at the end of February, seven of their XI were white. None were black African, and none have been for three years, five months and 26 tests.
But as few as four whites - as many coloureds, two players of Asian descent and a black African - took the field in SA’s last one-day international, against India in Centurion on December 11.
When SA clashed with India in the World T20 semi-finals in Dhaka on April 4, they sent six whites, three coloureds and two Asianesque players into the fray.
“We’ve done well in many respects, but we are not satisfied with regards to black African players,” Lorgat said. “We want to become aggressive in that space. At the centre of excellence and in our high performance contracts, we are going to focus particularly on black African talent. If we want to sustain the game and grow the game and access the best talent in the country, we’ve got to get to the pool that matters.”
SA have been represented in test cricket since 1889 and in international rugby since 1891. Only five of their 317 test cricketers and 17 of their 751 test rugby players have been black Africans. The percentages are not pretty - 1.58 and 2.26 respectively.
While much about sport can be explained in numbers, the disappearance from its ranks of talented black players when they reach senior levels cannot. This is the single biggest reason why SA’s teams are not darker.
We can blame racism-made-law first by colonialism and later by a regime repeatedly returned to power by a white electorate for the first century or so of SA hardly ever fielding black players in what were laughably called “national” teams.
Twenty years of democracy have given us all 22 of the black Africans who have played test cricket and rugby for SA, but the problem remains unsolved. The effects of more than 350 years of oppression will take more than a couple of decades to remedy to any significant level.
Young players trying to establish themselves in professional sport have more opportunity to take their shot if they are from affluent families who are willing to indulge their dream. Those of lesser means, talented or not, depend on being spotted by development programmes. If that does not happen, they get real jobs to pay the bills.
It does not help that many conversations on transformation are interrupted by a defensive, “Why are we always picking on rugby and cricket? Why don’t you go bother soccer?”
Neil Tovey, the white captain of the Bafana Bafana team who won the 1996 African Cup of Nations, was having none of that: “It’s not right to do that - we’ve been playing multi-racial leagues since 1978 (when the National Professional Soccer League launched the Castle League).”
Seventeen of the 18 players in the Bafana Bafana squad who played against New Zealand in Auckland on May 30 were black Africans. The odd man out was Ronwen Williams, who is coloured.
“We have a lot of white faces in our leagues and in amateur football,” Tovey said. “But can you name one SA soccer player who had a bursary in school? The Jeppes of the world don’t hand out soccer bursaries.
“When talented kids come out of primary school and they have the choice to play anything - rugby, cricket, soccer, table tennis - and they are offered rugby or cricket bursaries, their parents are going to take one of those and soccer falls by the wayside.
“Black and white kids play soccer together all the time; that’s not the problem. The problem is getting all these kids to progress through the structures and make sure they get proper coaching.”
When they do reach the top, footballers are derided by sections of a public who compare Bafana Bafana’s world ranking - currently 65th - to the Proteas’ and the Springboks’. They are both second. Nevermind that 207 teams play international soccer compared to rugby’s 102 and cricket’s 10 test-playing countries.
Tovey listed himself as a good reason for South Africans of all races to stick with soccer: “I’ve made the most of being a white man in a black game - the number of black people who know me in this country far exceeds the total number of white people in this country.”
That adds up to much more than 18 minutes of fame.
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