Black African mafia the latest in a long line of cabals to rule the game in South Africa.
Sunday Times
TELFORD VICE in Cape Town
THE dysfunction of cricket’s relationship with race in South Africa has always run deep, but it is scraping new lows.
Some black people, it seems, are not black enough. They used to be. No longer.
A hundred years and more ago the game’s controlling mafia was a jumped up gang of British colonialists, white to a man. And they were all men.
They passed the bat to English-speaking white South African men, who after a few decades allowed Afrikaans-speaking white South African men into they thought was their exclusive club.
Then came a jewish tendency, followed at last by blacks of all shades and cultures. But not many black Africans. Then Asian, mostly muslim, people earned authority and influence.
All of those mafias got a lot wrong and a lot right, and cricket survived. More often than not it prospered.
A decent argument could be made that the game is the closest thing — besides, possibly, football — we have to democracy in what remains, almost 24 years after we first had an election worthy of the name, a starkly, cruelly, disgustingly undemocratic society.
That money’s vote is still the only vote that matters tells us how dismally we have failed to build the country of which Luthuli and Sobukwe dared to dream.
And even though cricket has tried, and sometimes succeeded, to do its duty and rise above the stinking badness of all that, it is not and has not been immune to falling into the abyss of wrong.
That brings us to these sad days, when blacks who are not black African look at whites with what learned people might call “cryptomnesia”, which dictionaries define as, “the reappearance of a suppressed or forgotten memory which is mistaken for a new experience”. Whites look back at those suddenly not black enough blacks with tingles of deja vu running up and down their spines.
“This is unfair,” the blacks say to the whites.
“Welcome to our world,” the whites reply.
That’s out of order. Typically those now not black enough have done and are still doing more to unify cricket and work for its healthy future than too many whites, who even now have an unfortunate and self-defeating problem with acknowledging that all of us, whatever our race, own the game and are entitled to play, umpire, score, administer, report on, follow and love it to the limits of our passion.
Whatever bleating you may hear from whites about being drummed out of the game in this country isn’t worth the paper a Kolpak contract is printed on. Look around: cricket at all levels is riddled with white people. This columnist is among them, and has been for almost half his life.
So, who or what is causing this desperate and dangerous state of affairs? Cricket’s new elite, who will struggle to convince neutrals that they are not cynically fostering racial division to keep themselves on top of the heap.
There has been too much worried whispering in the corridors adjacent to the corridors of power to dismiss that notion easily, and last week at the Wanderers there was fire to add to the smoke.
With reporters handily present to attend press conferences before the fourth one-day international between South Africa and India, a briefing was called. The subject was an update on Cricket South Africa’s plans to recover from the mess that became the aborted T20 Global League.
Only black African reporters were invited, which made at least one of them uncomfortable: did the suits think they could get away with saying what they wanted on a sensitive issue and trust that it would be reported uncritically because everybody in the room was of the same race?
What message did they think they were sending to journalists present who were not invited and who included some of the most senior members of cricket’s press corps reporting for major publications? Some were black. None were this columnist.
Don’t hold your breath waiting for answers. The mafia doesn’t work like that.
Comments
No comments yet. Start the conversation.