Empire Cricket Booklet

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RICHARD PARRY

Grey also strengthened traditional authority by providing headmen with the power to allocate land based on individual tenure, further exacerbating the problems that Lewis described with regard to traditional access to land. 98 Rhodes had effectively turned George Grey's policy on its head substituting tribal authority for educated elites, communalism for individualism in land tenure, and segregation for integration. Rhodes claimed that Africans preferred councils to parliamentary representation. He told parliament 'as to the question of voting ... they were in a sense citizens, but not altogether citizens'. This was ridiculed by Campbell Kupe, an Mfengu who circulated a petition asserting that the council 'does nothing for the benefit of the people. They are acting apart from us ... the magistrates and headmen ... [are] rejoicing in destroying us.' 99 The institution of apparent'self government' at the local level disarmed liberals who were themselves loathe to view Africans en masse as more than'children' and divided African opposition.Jabavu cautiouslysupported the measure while African political opposition was piecemeal and struggled to unite round a common programme. In 1898, the South African Native Congress was finally set up in opposition to Jabavu who continued to support the Bond-liberal coalition in the Cape parliament. By this stage, Rhodes was himself in the political wilderness following the Jameson Raid debacle. 1 00 He was deserted by Jabavu and supported the establishment of a rival newspaper to Jabavu's Imvo, the Izwi Labantu edited by Walter Rubasana, a cricket administrator and umpire in the Eastern Cape, and Nathaniel Umhalla whose exceptional cricket skills had been developed and polished at Zonnebloem College 35 years before. 10 1

window on the way society coped with massive social, economic and political change in the years after 1860. It is easy to forget the key role of individuals in this process. Nathaniel Umhalla, Isaiah Bud-Mbelle, Abdol Burns, Robert Grendon, 'Krom' Hendricks, J. T. Jabavu, the Glovers, and H. G. Cadwallader all created possibilities for a different kind of South Africa than one based on racial exclusivity. But ultimately the politics and economics of the 'liberal' Cape defeated this vision. For Milton, as for Rhodes, the line had to be drawn and Milton and Rhodes drew it in the statute book through Glen Grey and franchise measures, and on the sports field through the struggle over who would represent South Africa. 'Coloureds', whether Muslim or Chris tian, were for Milton outside the South African social net, and their success was profoundly threatening to the new hegemonic British/Afrikaner racial order at the Cape. Ironically, much of the support for bringing 'Krom' Hendricks and other coloured players into the southern African teams over the next few years came from 'Barberton' Halliwell, Abe Bailey and other cricketers from the Transvaal whose racial landscape was far more clearly delineated than was the case in the complex Cape. And this was part of the problem. Milton's motivations may have been complex - partly his desire to retain Cape hegemony, partly Rhodes's pan-southern African politics which had no room for coloured visibility, and partly his snobbery and personal distaste for coloureds which saw cricket as a game for white gentlemen and did not like the threat of potentially better players challenging white hegemony. But if cricket played an important role in the redefinition of what the Cape stood for, it provided an important means for Africans and coloureds to reinforce and develop their own communities and to challenge South Africa's growing racial hegemony. In the end, the fact that Hendricks and the others may simply have been too much of a challenge for Milton and whites at the Cape to tolerate as equal competitors itself created a legacy of pride that would last through the long years of segregation.

Conclusion

The history of cricket in South Africa is essentially political in nature. The persons who determined who played the game and in what context shaped the game's development. And cricket provides a