Empire Cricket Booklet

Preface and Ackno-wledgements

The role of sport generally, and cricket particularly, in the British imperial project has given rise to a fascinating literature, with the volumes edited by J. A. Mangan, The Cultural Bond: Sport, Empire, Society (London: Frank Cass, 1992) and Brian Stoddart and Keith A. P. Sandiford, The Imperial Game: Cricket, Cul ture and Society (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998) providing excellent introductions. This volume makes an important contribution to that literature from the standpoint of South African cricket. It takes forward the new history of South African cricket, intent both on recapturing the history of black cricket and placing the development of the game in its political context. Andre Odendaal's pioneering The Story of an African Game: Black Cricketers and the Unmasking of One of Cricket's Greatest Myths, South Africa, 1850-2003 (Cape Town: David Philip, 2003), the volume co-authored by Ashwin Desai, Vishnu Padayachee, Krish Reddy and Goolam Vahed, Blacks in Whites: A Century of Cricket Struggles in KwaZulu Natal (Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 2002), and the books by Jon Gemmell, The Politics of South African Cricket (London: Routledge, 2004) and Bruce Murray and Christopher Merrett, Caught Behind: Race and Politics in Springbok Cricket Oohannesburg: Wits University Press, 2004) have led the way in this enterprise. Finally, by focusing on cricket and empire, this volume generates a number of critical insights into the socio-economic and political development of the region during its most critical formative period, underlining the extraordinary direct involvement in both cricket and

politics by the same tiny group of imperialists, white colonists, Africans, coloureds and Indians who, in shaping the cricketing domain, also fashioned the political relations of the subcontinent. The period covered in this volume - in imperial terms the late Victorian and Edwardian eras - was a truly formative one for South Africa as well as South African cricket. In cricketing terms it witnessed the foundation of the white South African Cricket Association (1890) and the non-racial South African Coloured Cricket Board (SACCB) (1902), the beginnings of first-class cricket and the inauguration of the inter-provincial Currie Cup competition, the staging of regular inter-provincial tournaments by the SACCB for the Barnato Memorial Trophy, the rapid progress of South Africa to Test match status along with England and Australia, and the key role of South Africa as a founder member of the Imperial Cricket Conference (1909) to regulate Test match cricket. Yet, apart from M. W. Luckin's The History of South African Cricket, published in 1915, and Andre Odendaal's work on 'South Africa's Black Victorians', few specialised studies have been made of the period's cricket and its players, a neglect that is well overdue for rectification. It is not only the highly significant political aspects of cricket's history that have been neglected, but the events and personalities of early South African cricket itself. In Brian Crowley's Cricket Exiles: The Saga of South African Cricket (Cape Town: Don Nelson, 1983), for example, he notes the shock of Tom Reddick, (the