Empire Cricket Booklet

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GEOFFREY LEVETT

-South African team had been raised by the chief justice of the Cape at the end of the English tour to South Africa during the winter of 1906 when in his toast to the South African team he stated that 'it must be a matter of great pleasure to every South African that nine of the eleven men comprising the team were born in South Africa, and that, therefore, they were truly representative of South Africa'. 58 This goes to the heart of what the South Africa tour meant in imperial terms. A team was representing a country that was not yet a country, and whose population (of all races) was made up of a substantial number of immigrants from all over the world. The Rand Daily Mail put up a strong argument for the inclusion of Mackay, urging that he was not a bird of passage, having made South Africa his home: There are times when sentiment is as strong as reason, and it is sentiment that in this case will object to Mackay. He has logical claims, but South Africa loves a side essentially South African, though in the cricket team, even as it is now constituted, it is not composed of men all South African born. This sentiment is capable more of being felt than expressed or debated. It cannot be ignored. It is a powerful factor for good. It is the expression of an ideal - the ideal that the South Africans by their own efforts can carve out a destiny for their country. It is possible, however, that 'South African' might be used in a narrow and restrictive sense, and that it might stand for exclusiveness. No journal believes in cultivating the South African sentiment more than this one; yet it cannot find that sentiment would be outraged by the selection of Mackay if the committee thought proper. 59 In this passage we find the dilemma of the British administrators in South Africa. There was a strong movement to build a unified South African nation in which, as the chief justice of Cape Town put it in his toast, 'no one asked whether the names were English or Dutch; they all embraced in the term South Africans'. 60 The fact that the English were in such a minority among whites in South Africa meant that it was a struggle to create a dominant British culture for the country. Afrikaner nationalism was proving difficult to accommodate within the South African

identity, despite the rhetoric of political leaders of both races that there should be assimilation between the two white communities. For example, when General Louis Botha gave his speech in Afrikaans to the mining magnates at the Savoy on 2 May 1907 his translator refused to translate a reference to Britain as the 'Mutterland' as 'Mother Country' until forced to by the protests of the British present. 61 But there was a third element to the white community, especially in mining areas, which was the many immigrants who came from other parts of the empire, Europe and other places besides. The correspondent of the Rand Daily Mail seemed to feel that they had as much right to become South Africans as the British or Boers, and yet this conflicted with the idea of South Africa being a wholly British colony. The fact that Mackay could not be considered to be British may be indicative of the nascent strength of the Australian identity at this time. 62 With the strongest backing for Mackay coming from the Transvaal it is clear that the leaders of the mining industry, Bailey especially, were intent on fielding the strongest-possible South African team on the cricket pitch in order to increase South African prestige within the empire. In the event Mackay was excluded; the committee voted 8-6 against him, and decided that 'the inclusion of Mackay'... would destroy the South African character of the team'. 63 Any chance that Mackay would have of proving his South African credentials in future series was ended by a serious injury received as a result of a work accident in 1907, which put an end to his career in South Africa. 64 In the discourse surrounding the South African tour of 1907, there was congruity between the interests of the British press and establishment, and those of the British South African press and establishment, that made itself felt in the team selection and the way that the team was presented to the public. For the British, it was important that the team was seen to be an expression of the colonial Briton made good, and it is hard to believe that the effects of the South African War on the confidence of the public in the imperial ideal did not have something to do with this. In the wake of the war, 'which cast a sulphurously long and exceedingly sober shadow', there was something of