Empire Cricket Booklet

CHAPTER TWO

Black Cricketers, White Politicians

and the Origins of Segregation at the Cape to 1894

RICHARD PARRY

Introduction

brought history, including sports history, back into focus as a key to understanding the present. 1 Cricket was a key element of the cultural self ex pression of the colonial establishment. The military dominated the Cape from 1806 until the late 1870s, partly because of the slow rate of economic growth and the agrarian nature of the colony based primarily on the wool trade, but mainly because of the ongoing series of frontier wars which only ended in the late 1870s. Much of the participation in cricket in these early years was consequently defined by transience and exclusivity, until regional and club loyalties developed and took hold. In the footsteps of the military came the missionaries and administrators, at first imbued with the early Victorian optimism for human potential and flushed with the success of the campaign for the abolition of slavery. Missionaries were responsible for the setting up of educational projects for Africans at Lovedale, Healdtown, and on numerous other mission stations which exposed black students to a 'civilising influ ence' where cricket played an important part creat ing an alternative cultural hegemony. It ensured that black colonial elites had a clear view of the role which cricket played as a badge of identification in the operation of colonial power, while providing a basis for community development. It has become a

This chapter examines some of the key developments and individuals involved in the evolution of cricket, race and society at the Cape in second half of the nineteenth century. It has two general objectives: first, to document and explain the importance of cricket among African and coloured players through situating it directly in its political, social and economic context, and conversely, to show how developments in cricket can illuminate and interpret the changes in the social order itself. Cricket in southern Africa, as in the rest of the empire, was both shaped by, and helped shape the evolving societies of the late nineteenth century. It meant different things to different classes, ethnic groupings or cultural identities, and played a role in establishing identity and community as well as structuring relationships between communities. The stresses and strains of the social development, organisation and operation of the game were part of the seismology of the broader society. The connection between cricket and politics has always been peculiarly close in South Africa, whether during the D'Oliveira affair in the 1960s, the boycotts and rebel tours of the 1980s, or in the social transformation of the post-apartheid period, but the immediacy of this connection in the turbulent period at the end of the nineteenth century has been generally overlooked, at least until the transformation project which has