Pretoria News

Mandela would’ve been pained by the disunity

WHAT would Nelson Mandela have made of the Cricket for Social Justice and Nation Building (SJN) hearings being conducted by Cricket South Africa?

The SJN project was started to get to the heart of racism in South African cricket, which reared its head in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement last year.

It was Lungi Ngidi, a child of Mandela’s “new” South Africa, who inadvertently opened the can of worms. An innocent, though thoughtful call from Ngidi, for the Proteas to show support for the Black Lives Matter movement, unleashed a storm from the country’s black cricketers, including notably Makhaya Ntini, about discrimination they had suffered as part of the Proteas.

Mandela used all the country’s national teams to highlight the kind of unity from which the country could draw inspiration. The national football squad of 1996 and the South African rugby team of 1995 gave Mandela an opportunity to use potent symbolism through the country’s sports teams to portray a South Africa which its citizens should strive for.

Cricket too played a crucial role in that regard, despite not achieving the continental or global success that the other two prominent men’s national

STUART HESS Cricket Writer for Independent Media. teams were able to celebrate.

Cricket played an important role in Mandela’s formative years as he highlighted in a foreword he wrote for The Story of an African Game, written by Professor Andre Odendaal, which outlined the rich history of cricket among South Africa’s black population. “In Long Walk to Freedom, I recalled the values we were taught as pupils at Healdtown College in the late 1930s,” Mandela wrote.

“The educated Englishman was our model; what we aspired to be were ‘black Englishmen’ – as we were sometimes derisively called. We were taught – and believed – that the best ideas were English ones. In line with those ideas, sport, particularly cricket, was given a high priority.”

Mandela wrote that while athletics and boxing were his favourite sporting pastimes as a youth, he was aware of the importance of cricket and the deep roots the sport had in the Eastern Cape, where he grew up.

Having his background so intimately linked with cricket, it would have pained Mandela to hear the testimony of black players and officials at the SJN hearings. Advocate Dumisa Ntsebeza, previously a commissioner with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, in his role as the ombudsman for SJN, has heard painful testimonies about how black players felt undermined, disrespected and discriminated against within the South African cricket system.

Furthermore, many endured loneliness and despair at moments which should have been the highlight of their international careers as part of Proteas teams touring the world and supposedly providing a picture of a unified South Africa.

Often they were alone in their hotel rooms, not invited for social activities with teammates, never given proper explanations for why they didn’t play, losing out on money and, in one case highlighted by Ntini, choosing to run back to the team hotel while on a tour, rather than share the bus with teammates. Ntini is the most prominent black African cricketer from this country, and for years was among the most popular sportsmen in the country. For him to feel that way is a damning indictment of cricket’s leadership and the management of the national team.

The SJN hearings have heard testimonies from players who don’t have as much prominence as Ntini. Aaron Phangiso played 37 matches for South Africa, but outside cricket circles is not as well known as Ntini. Phangiso told the hearings how he had no one to talk to in the Proteas set-up, would go to World Cups – what should be the highlight of any sportsman’s career – and all he wanted to do was come home.

Roger Telemachus, part of the Proteas World Cup team in 2007, said he would have happily paid for his own ticket to fly back from the tournament early, so distressed was he by what he experienced within the South African squad in the tournament.

Omar Henry, the first black player to be picked for a South African World Cup squad in 1992, had to be talked out of leaving the tournament by the then president of the United Cricket Board of South Africa, Krish Mackerdhuj, after an argument with the captain, Kepler Wessels.

“Is it any wonder, South Africa has never won a World Cup,” said Thandi Tshabalala, who played four times for the Proteas and admitted, during his testimony, that he “rejoiced”, in seeing the team lose.

That is not what Mandela would have wanted from the generation that should have benefited from the sacrifices he and other activists made when protesting against apartheid. The 27 years Mandela spent in jail were supposed to lead to a South Africa where all were treated equally, but as Ntsebeza has heard at the hearings, that has not been the case for the country’s black cricketers.

The SJN has an incredibly important role to play in forging a new era for South African cricket.

Mandela would have appreciated the raw honesty of the participants and would have demanded of Cricket SA’S new administrative leadership, that in implementing the recommendations made by Ntsebeza and his assistants, they ensure that cricket is the vehicle for unity that he wanted it to be in the 1990s.

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2021-07-31T07:00:00.0000000Z

2021-07-31T07:00:00.0000000Z

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African News Agency