Empire Cricket Booklet

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RICHARD PARRY

school path were evident and his apparent failure to take a sufficiently condemnatory approach to African traditions led in due course to an accusation of gross misconduct. Despite being considered the 'most enlightened' African on the missions, he followed in his father's footsteps and was accused of treason for failing to support the colonial war against the Ngqika Xhosa in 1877-1878, the final formal episode in the century-long frontier wars. 19 This episode demonstrates the extent to which Umhalla and other mission-educated Africans were not simply puppets of the colonial regime and often made principled, if difficult, choices. Despite putting principle above self-interest, and in a tribute to his ability to maintain his position in the precarious and highly competitive system, Umhalla moved to a government job in King William's Town (KWT) where he immediately became active in developing black cricket. In 1884, he captained KWT's Champion Cricket Club to victory in the first black inter-town tournament in Grahamstown which, in addition to the hosts, included teams from East London, Queenstown, and Port Elizabeth. The winners received a trophy presented by J. T. Jabavu, editor of Imvo Zabantsundu. Shortly after this tournament, Umhalla played against the (white) Alberts team in KWT which included four players who had played in the Champion Bat tournament, and showed he was worthy to compete in the highest company by scoring 46 (run out). 20 Umhalla was employed as the interpreter for the KWT Magistrate's Court, a post which many cricket playing mission-school graduates held in the various Cape towns. It was inevitably a role of considerable power and authority and his appointment, despite his apparently 'treasonous' views in the 1870s, and the heavy competition for the few such prestigious posts, indicates the extent of his talent and esteem in which he was held. This role of interpreter was essentially that of mediator between Africans and the colonial world. Interpreters sought to put African perspectives into a form which would make sense to the colonial legal system, and to guide Africans through the ritual of an alien legal system and process. This experience meant that it was not only their superior education which ensured that interpreters

war and famine changed relationships to the land and broughtforwardopportunitiesforsomeanddisasterfor others. Colin Bundy has persuasively demonstrated the flexibility which African peasants showed in respond ing to the demands of the growing market in the 1850s and 1860s and the pressures of colonial tax systems. 17 But, as Jack Lewis has argued, African responses, particularly the movement from cattle herding to agricultural production, werefarfrommonolithic. Their ability to respond was dependent not simply on external pressures but on the way productive relations worked within African society itself. Production, he argues, was skewed in favour of homestead heads who controlled access to cattle and women. Even among the Mfengu in the Healdtown area, who had been most effective at exploiting opportunities arising from the dislocations of colonial wars and the cattle-killing catastrophe, only 25 per cent of households had sufficient oxen to pull a plough. 18 Thus the demands of mining capital were not the only factor in the creation of a migrant labour force, but economic relations within and between rural households themselves provided the spur towards the mining compound or the mission school. Given the economic precariousness of their position, it is not surprising that mission-school Africans became skilled at maintaining links with both rural and colonial institutions. Once again, Nathaniel Umhalla's career illustrates the extent to which Africans bought in to aspects of the colonial system while simultaneously retaining their relationships and involvement in the communities from which they came. His case is an early example of African flexibility faced with demands and needs of a complex world of African structures and traditions, along with the opportunities and pressures provided by colonial skills and behaviour patterns. But this reality, which rewards an ability to understand and play off various aspects of urban/rural as well as traditional and colonial culture, has since been the basis of survival for millions of Africans living under colonial domination. Following his time at Zonnebloem, Umhalla went back to the Eastern Cape, to St Mark's Mission School, which encouraged cricket as well as Christianity and hard work. In 1870, he played cricket for St Mark's against Queenstown. The stresses of the mission