Empire Cricket Booklet

RICHARD PARRY AND DALE SLATER

the country and of course the mining industry which was its economic bedrock and, whatever the extent of the tour's role in this process, by 1909 almost as much foreign investment flowed into the industry as had in the previous three and a half years. 70 But the tour of 1907 looked forward to Union as well as back. At the National Convention of 1908 tasked with setting the terms for Union, the decision to deny blacks the franchise reflected the aligned interests of the three most powerful constituencies in South African politics, mining interests, Afrikaner nationalism and the white labour aristocracy. This decision became the basis of an accommodation that was to power the escalation and institutionalisation of racial se gr egation into the 1920s and beyond. Whatever the state of future relations between black and white, this denial was seen as the bedrock of their common interests and the indispensable foundation of further economic and political pro gr ess: blacks were to be labourers, and little else. 71 Though the Cape maintained for the moment its 'colour-blind' educational and property franchise, Rhodes and the Afrikaner Bond had started the work of attrition already by the mid 1880s. 'We are to be lords over them. These are my politics,' Rhodes told the Cape parliament in 1887. 72 By 1894, Milton was able to attack 'Krom' Hendricks's very identity as a South African; denied the right to represent his country, he would in time be denied even the right to representation. By 1906, Smuts could put a stroke through black politi cal interests altogether with a bald 'I don't believe in politics for them'. 73 Powerless, black nationalists were simply swept aside. And though this erosion of rights would be sustained and systematised by

succeeding governments, all the essential themes of black dispossession were already present in the report of the South African Native Affairs Commis sion of 1905. 74 The ultimate goal was a black popu lation stripped of all meaningful political and social identity, or means of economic independence or resistance: disembodied units forced to shuttle cease lessly between reserve and compound as servile, cheap, ciphers of labour, 'voiceless and constrained', commodity not community. 75 As in South Africa, there remained those in the empire who doubted the wisdom of this policy, but they were cowed by the needs of empire, not to mention the complicity of empire, and it was sport in particular - most importantly the rugby tour to Britain 0£1906 and the cricket tour of 1907, but also the home victories of the years 1906 to 1910, predicated on Bailey's gold and Schwarz's googly, that gave those who now spoke for South Africa on either side of the water a public platform from which to preach their message: black rights must give way for the gr eater good. That the invocation of the ' gr eater good' in fact involved the progressive subjugation, immiserisation and alienation of South Africa's majority in order to feed the ease and comforts of a minority reveals that South Africa's 'Double Dealers' were in no sense contained within the boundary of a cricket field. Appropriated as a tool of legitimisation, the googly was a particularly apt symbol: if gold signified riches but entailed the impoverishment of the many, so the googly emphasised unity - Union and empire - but presaged a South Africa animated primarily by mistrust and incomprehension, and divided in fundamental ways.