“We won’t throw him into the lions’ den. We need to protect him.” - CSA board member Eugenia Kula-Ameyaw on Graeme Smith’s absence from a meeting with black and brown former players.
TELFORD VICE | Cape Town
CRICKET South Africa’s (CSA) latest attempt to deal with the race issues that have long blighted the game in the country went well. Or less well than was hoped. Or not at all well. The truth is in there somewhere, but it won’t show itself easily.
On Friday, CSA announced the establishment of a new project, Cricket for Social Justice and Nation Building (CSJNB). The first meeting was called for Sunday. So far, so necessary — since Lungi Ngidi said on July 6 that cricket needed to have a Black Lives Matter (BLM) conversation, racial division has returned to the top of the game’s agenda.
White former players took issue with Ngidi, often along lines that veered into debunked conspiracy theories about matters not related to cricket. Black and brown former players defended Ngidi, sometimes in ways that stretched the truth and looked like attempts to mount a steadily accelerating bandwagon. An honest broker was needed to separate fact from fiction. Could CSA play that role, given the struggles with unity and integrity that have dogged the organisation since its formation in 1991?
The task of answering that question fell to Eugenia Kula-Ameyaw, one of CSA’s independent directors since May. She co-chaired Sunday’s two-hour online gathering with CSA’s lame duck president Chris Nenzani, whose tenure is due to end in September. She told Cricbuzz on Monday the meeting “went well, I would say, for the start of this process”. She said there would be “continuous engagement” in follow-up meetings every two to three months.
In a society in which every aspect of life passes through the governing prism of race, there is no chance of running out of topics to discuss. “It was good that the players got to talk but it was painful; I cried for a good few minutes,” Kula-Ameyaw said.
The CSJNB project needs to produce more than hot air, however impassioned, if it is to move the debate on race and racism in the game significantly closer to the truth than CSA have managed to do over the years. Summits have been held, committees appointed, reports written, and recommendations made. And still, as the past three weeks have proved, black, brown and white South Africans are starkly divided on issues central not just to cricket but to their wider reality. CSA’s new enterprise could help heal those wounds, but only if it performs exponentially better than any and every other similar effort has done in the history of this chronically divided country.
“As far as expectations are concerned we need to know whether it’s another talk show,” Kula-Ameyaw said, and paraphrased some of what she heard: “‘We have the EPG [Eminent Persons Group], we have other transformation initiatives. What’s the guarantee that you are going to deliver this time?’ People are hurt.”
Between 30 and 40 black and brown former players spoke of their experiences during the meeting. Several board members listened. Crucially, Graeme Smith was not involved.
CSA’s director of cricket since December, Smith has become a lightning rod for criticism from black and brown quarters — despite the fact that he was appointed by a largely black board to a position that did not exist previously. But he is seen as central to what many call a “white coup” in which several senior black figures have been replaced by whites.
When invitations for the meeting were sent out on Saturday, some included in their response a request that Smith attend. Kula-Ameyaw said she had decided against that happening, but also that Smith would feature in future meetings. “They were looking for Graeme,” she said. “He was invited, but I thought it was not right. When there’s an issue you listen to the people first. It helps that they talk and help prepare Graeme for what he needs to answer. The concept doesn’t focus on personalities; it’s about the process, it focuses on the solution. It’s not an issue about Graeme. We won’t throw him into the lions’ den. We need to protect him.”
Some of the meeting’s other participants said Smith’s absence “disappointed” them and that were thus “sceptical” about the venture’s prospects. “We didn’t get closer to finding solutions,” one said.
It will hardly come as a surprise, then, that CSA’s first draft of a statement on the meeting was rejected by the former players. “The release I saw had no input from the [former] players in it,” a source said.
At least, that’s what Cricbuzz has been told. Alviro Petersen saw fit to dispute the assertion on Twitter: “As far as I know, no-one rejected [CSA’s] draft statement.” That only lent weight to Kula-Ameyaw’s theory that “there are always three versions of the story — yours, mine, and the truth”. Everyone in South African cricket is either black, brown or white. But, regarding the truth of everything else, there are a lot more than three versions.
First published by Cricbuzz.
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