Empire Cricket Booklet

xvii

FOREWORD

of several years in the 1890s. This act of exclusion was decisive in shaping the subsequent direction of South African cricket. Hendricks was good enough to play at the highest level at a time when inter-racial matches were not uncommon and when influential establishment figures and journalists (such as Ernest 'Barberton' Halliwell, Abe Bailey and Harry Cadwallader) supported the goals of black cricketers seeking merit selection, but the action against him fatally fixed the colour bar. And this, in turn, led South African domestic and international cricket into a long cul de sac. Richard Parry writes thatcricket'was a key element of the cultural expression of the colonial establishment' and here, step by step, we see how Rhodes's acolytes in the Western Province Cricket Club and Western Province Cricket Union - William Milton, W. V. Simkins, Louis Smuts, Edward Steytler, Murray Bisset, John Reid, Maynard Nash, C. Neumann Thomas, Herbert H. Castens, 'Vollie' van der Bijl et al - systematically plotted against Hendricks, despite those arguing in favour of a merit-based system. First, the exclusionists insisted he be left out of the South African team for the first tour overseas in 1894, when he was already part of the squad. In 1895/96, they again held firm when Lord Hawke's team made a return visit. Then they barred him from the top local match between Home and Colonial Born in 1894, the Western Province team to play in the Currie Cup in 1895 and, eventually, from local league matches in 1897, although he had participated and performed outstandingly at this level before. The ugliness of the Hendricks case lies in the systematic insistence of the establishment over a long time that he be exduded; it was not a once-off headline story. In 1904, he was still trying unsuccessfully to get permission to play. Empire and Cricket shows clearly that these moves to impose segregation in sport were part of the broader political project led by Rhodes and his cricketing private secretary (and drafter of legislation), Milton. They happened at the very time that Rhodes and his allies set out to replace old'Cape liberal' notions of individual advancement with a clear segregationist policy (via the Glen Grey Act and other measures) that sought to restrict rather than encourage an emergent black middle class, and

who saw them now as a threat to - rather than a precondition for - future progress. The story of Krom Hendricks has assumed romantic and mythical proportions over the past few decades, both for those trying to gloss over past inequalities -'things weren't always that bad in the past, there was this player, that match etc' - and those deeply angry about white domination and its impact. This comprehensive telling of the story for the first time is both compelling and overdue. It is a classic example of how individual talent and ambition can be thwarted in the most cruel way by a system and elites driven by notions of exceptionalism rather than universalism. Every professional cricketer in South Africa who doubts the need for transformation today should be obliged to read Winch's chapter which, to my mind, is one of the most significant pieces of historical research on sport in South Africa in the past decade. The colonial and cricket elites in the Cape in the 1890s, who exercised power with a polite arrogance against Hendricks, fully confident about their 'civilising mission' and responsibility for 'progress', are still celebrated as founding 'fathers' of South African cricket in standard histories. One such book is Luckin's, The History ofSouth African Cricket (1915), which, incidentally, refers to Hendricks as a 'Cape Coloured boy'. Indeed, as Winch points out, the same establishment that wrote this history literally excised from its 800 pages the name of the remarkable Harry Cadwallader, first secretary of the South African Cricket Association, who had opposed them and championed Hendricks at significant personal cost. Empire and Cricket thus underscores just how necessary it is to revisit, revise and re-contextualise old fixed cricket narratives from the vantage point of today, and how revitalising this project can be. Rigorously examining and critiquing the past is often still seen as being 'political' rather than 'just cricket', but this book, like a soothing psychologist, tells those of us who might still implicitly feel the need to deny and defend the past out of sentimental loyalty to the game and an inherited upbringing that we can now let go without losing face. Heavy old anchors, which weigh us down, can safely be released. And so we