Empire Cricket Booklet

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ANDRE ODENDAAL

how cricketers participated in the subsequent rise of the Johannesburg stock exchange; • how the first Currie Cup tournament in 1890 was in part a launching pad for the Pioneer Column, whose task was to open up 'Rhodesia', with the youngest English cricket captain as a celebrity participant; • how cricketers were active in the subsequent colonisation of Zimbabwe, which was designed to unlock further gold (and a path to Cairo), to the extent that a long-serving administrator of Rhodesia was one of the early South African cricket captains; • how, further south, cricket was a metaphor for the change in emphasis in 'native policy' from the early Cape liberalism, which emphasised individual advancement and opportunity regardless of colour in a free market, to a situation where 'labour now lay at the heart of policy' and racial segregation was promoted in order to ensure cheap, forced supplies of it; • how cricketers were active in plotting the Jameson Raid and participating in the South African or Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902) as part of the imperial design to reshape South Africa politically so that Britain could secure control of the mineral wealth of the country; • how cricket was part of the political efforts to reconcile the two 'races' - Afrikaner and English - at the expense of Africans after the war, which led to the new Union of South Africa with its 'colour bar' in 1910, the subsequent deep institutionalisation of segregation and racism and, eventually, formalised apartheid; • and, finally, how South African gold propelled South Africa from the margins to the mainstream of British foreign policy, to the extent that mine magnate Abe Bailey was able to initiate the Imperial Cricket Conference in 1909 to regulate international cricket, making South Africa part of a select club together with England and Australia. (The revered Lord Harris of cricket lore was at the time also 'simultaneously both treasurer

of the MCC and Chairman of Consolidated Goldfields'.) These deep insights fundamentally enhance, if not substantially reshape, our understanding of the foundation narratives of South African cricket. The first four chapters provide the solid foundations on which Empire and Cricket rests. The sports historian, Jonty Winch, whose research and output in recent years deserves more recognition, and the university scholars Richard Parry, Goolam Vahed and Vishnu Padayachee not only provide a solid framework within which we can understand the beginnings of international tours and organised cricket under the whites-only South African Cricket Association, but also offer a useful overview of how black cricketers fitted into the picture. These traditionally 'own affairs' stories here become part of an integrated narrative of the game in this country. Vahed and Padayachee, co-authors of the seminal Blacks in Whites (2002) together with Ashwin Desai and Krish Reddy, bring their sophisticated insights of early Indian cricketers in Natal into the realm of general cricket history, while Parry adds to our knowledge of early African and so-called 'Malay' cricketers (a term used loosely then to describe 'coloured' Muslim and Christian players, often to their displeasure). For this author of The Story of an African Game (2003), Parry's contribution is like a fresh breeze, marking the arrival, after a long wait, of a kindred spirit who adds substantially to our knowledge of the remarkable black pioneers of cricket in the Eastern Cape, Western Cape and Kimberley. It is a great pleasure to read something newly researched in an area which for a while now has been more or less a one-person domain. After Parry's elegant sketching of the context, Winch, refining his earlier work in England's Youngest Captain (2002), provides what is perhaps the core part of this book. He details in clear terms how the British colonial political and sporting elite in Cape Town, centred around the arch-imperialist and then prime minister, Cecil John Rhodes, systematically hounded and excluded the talented black cricketer, 'Krom' Hendricks, from provincial and international cricket, and ultimately league cricket, over a period