Hallelujah for perseverance at Takashinga

“We are picnic!” - even the police are cheerful at Takashinga.

Telford Vice / Harare

“ONE-two … one-two … Hallelujah! One-two … one-two …” It isn’t often a soundcheck involves religious incantation. But this was not just another crisp, crystalline winter Sunday morning in Highfields, Harare.

Along with faraway sirens, the amplified words rose into the frozen air and were resurrected several times. That woke the sun, which duly climbed a row of bluegums on Takashinga’s eastern boundary.

The sound came from the Salem Evangelical Bible Institute of Zimbabwe next door to the ground. Not far from there the Old Highfields Methodist Church lay silent and hollow with emptiness, the plaster of its pitched walls flaking, its painted cross fading.

It was 7am. Two hours later the ground would become the 217th to host a men’s ODI — a World Cup qualifier between the United States and West Indies. The sirens heard were the signal that the team buses and their police outriders were on the way. But there was much to be done before an ICC-sanctioned match could happen.

Workers scurried this way and that, carrying tables, chairs and fridges; sticking signs into place on walls; shifting sandbags onto boundary board stays. Another sat statue still, hand-painting with the steadiest hand the metal numeral boards to be used by the operators of the manual scoreboard.

The pressbox was a gazebo opposite the blue gums, or just beyond the point boundary. You knew it was the pressbox because power points mounted onto boards and laid onto the bare earth were marked “journalist”. There was nothing else there. You also knew, had you covered enough cricket in Zimbabwe, that that would not be the case for long. Sure enough, chairs, tables, tablecloths and a fridge were lugged to the spot, a process overseen by a friendly, efficient media manager. While that was happening, the sole reporter silly enough to be in attendance at that hour got out of the way and took a walk around the ground.

“Good morning,” he said to two of the many police present.

“Good morning! How are you!”

“Fine, thank you. And you?”

“We are picnic!”

There’s more to learn from that exchange than most of the billions of words written about Zimbabwe, a place where hope doesn’t always rise but never dies. It glowed in the faces of the pupils of Chipembhera Primary School, which is less than a kilometre from the ground. The children gathered in the bare wooden stands at 8am, smart white shirts and vibrant blue tracksuits their only defence against the cold. The local kids were at the local ground to watch international cricket. In a place like Highfields, which even those who love it and live here call a ghetto, that is a triumph.

Wouldn’t they rather be at Harare Sports Club, where Zimbabwe were due to play Nepal? “We want to watch all the teams,” one said with undisguised audacity that someone should think they were parochial. Not that he was old enough to know what that meant. But he knew what cricket looked like, and when it was delivered as promised at 9am the Chipembhera cheers went up like a hymn to happiness.

The ICC.tv streaming cameras rolled and Brandon King and Kyle Mayers walked out to open the batting, and Takashinga was transformed. It had been a place of magic, myth and mirth. Now it was just another international ground — which it has been since May 2019, when the first of 11 women’s T20Is was played here. But this was different, because ODIs matter more than anything in countries where Test cricket doesn’t exist or has become a lumbering anachronism.

That wasn’t the case in Zimbabwe when Takashinga — the Shona word for perseverance — was founded in the early 1990s. Tests were the world game’s pinnacle, but what mattered in Zimbabwe’s real world was a febrile brand of national politics that torched all it touched. Cricket wasn’t spared. Maybe it shouldn’t have been. Too much of its culture in the country was tethered to the stale, pale, male ways of the past. Takashinga was at the forefront of the charge for change.

Some of their approach was hostile, clumsy and unhelpful. Players who were not black spoke of the overtly racial nature of the aggression they encountered when they took on Takashinga, a largely black side. The club banished Henry Olonga for joining Andy Flower in a black armband protest at the 2003 World Cup mounted to “mourn the death of democracy in our beloved Zimbabwe”.

Happily that desperate time has passed and Takashinga is firmly part of the country’s cricket establishment. And now of the wider world’s. But some of the old helter-skelter magic was in evidence on Sunday: the equipment needed to play the national anthems was installed with minutes to spare. Somehow it was rigged up almost in time — 10 silent, scary seconds passed between the announcement of the Star Spangled Banner and “O say can you see …” ringing out.

The voices of the congregation at the Salem Evangelical Bible Institute of Zimbabwe soared further than that through the now warm morning. Then the faithful in the Old Highfields Methodist Church cleared their throats and added a sweet, sedate note to the neighbourhood proceedings.

Perseverance was all around. Hallelujah indeed.

Cricbuzz