“You want to lead with authority. You want to say the right things, but you also want to do the right things.” – Temba Bavuma
Telford Vice / Cape Town
BENONI is bleak even when the sun shines. It didn’t for most of Friday, and the bleakness hardened into a monochrome meanness under gunmetal grey skies that whistled with a nasty north-westerly wind. Cricket weather it wasn’t. At least, not in South Africa. In the Netherlands? Maybe.
You didn’t need to know it was cold to know it was cold, even if you were watching on television from a warmer place. Fielders betrayed an abrupt reluctance as they stabbed their hands at the onrushing ball. They were watched by a light dusting not of snow but of 1,800 fans, not many of them without heavy jackets, blankets and beanies.
It says plenty that Benoni’s most prominent living natives — Hollywood’s Charlize Theron, Grace Mugabe, despised widow of Zimbabwe’s despot former president Robert Mugabe, and Charlene Wittstock, once an Olympic swimmer, now princess of Monaco — don’t live there anymore. Oliver Tambo, a contemporary, colleague and comrade of Nelson Mandela who would shudder to see what a wretched rabble their beloved ANC has become, had the misfortune not only to have lived in nearby Wattville — since renamed Tamboville — but also to be buried there alongside his wife, Adelaide Tambo; national heroes both.
Willowmoore Park is in keeping with its squat, unambitious, prosaic surrounds. It seems a waste that, in December 1948, Denis Compton took to this unlovely stage to score 300 in a session-and-a-half. Also that it is here that South Africa should have to come to take the first of their last two throws of the dice to qualify directly for this year’s men’s ODI World Cup. The constant threat of rain remained unfulfilled for long enough, and the Dutch didn’t do much to stop the South Africans from banking another 10 World Cup Super League (WCSL) points on Friday.
Vikramjit Singh and Max O’Dowd shared 58 before the visitors lost all of their wickets for 131 runs in 35.2 overs with Sisanda Magala and Tabraiz Shamsi claiming three each. Scott Edwards told a press conference that a significant chunk of the credit for that happening belonged to the visitors: “Everyone in our top six; I don’t think they got us out. Their better balls were actually missing, and we found ways to get ourselves out.”
South Africa reached their target of 190 in 30 overs with eight wickets standing, and with the unseparated Temba Bavuma and Aiden Markram making 102 of those runs off 69 balls. Bavuma finished 10 runs shy of what would have been a fourth century in his last eight Test and ODI innings. “It gives you confidence,” Bavuma said of his purple patch. “As a leader you want to be able to lead with authority. You want to be saying the right things, but you also want to be doing the right things.”
The home side will have a last chance to advance their WCSL tally against the same opponents at the Wanderers on Sunday. If the result is similar only an unlikely 3-0 sweep by Ireland of Bangladesh at Chelmsford in May will force South Africa to go to a qualifier in Zimbabwe in June and July. Should that befall Bavuma’s team they could tell Grace Mugabe, in person, that Benoni does not send its regards.
While Friday’s match was going through its motions, some 7,200 kilometres away, across the Indian Ocean and the equator, the scene couldn’t have been more different. Narendra Modi Stadium in Ahmedabad was lit up like Willowmoore Park will never be for the sold out opening match of the IPL. More than 100,000 people — around 56 times as many as braved Benoni’s boundaries — watched Gujarat Titans take on Chennai Super Kings in the warm embrace of an evening that followed a 28 degrees Celsius day. David Miller and Magala would have been there, too. Instead, as per CSA’s understandable orders, they were wrapping up in Benoni.
Cricketminded South Africans would have planned to keep an eye on both games. But, on Thursday, SuperSport shocked the nation by announcing it would not broadcast the IPL after “unsuccessful commercial discussions with the rightsholder”.
Cue outrage from would-be warriors behind their keyboards. What do you mean you’re not showing the IPL? You always have, along with what can seem like every smidgen of sport — important or relevant or far from it — in the world. Besides, with the state-owned South African Broadcasting Corporation an unmitigated disaster of governance and delivery and everything else, what choice is there for sport-watchers who are no longer 12; or young enough to be able to hook up the dingle to the dangle to the dongle and latch onto a stream, legal or not.
These unfortunates seemed unable to understand the difference between the equivalent of the USD55 many of them pay monthly for the service’s premium package — expensive in South Africa but a pittance in global terms, considering the one-stop shop that is SuperSport — and the reality of the bidding process on the open market, and how that translates into what they see on their televisions. You get what you pay for. And sometimes you get more than what you pay for.
But, less than an hour before the start of the opening ceremony in Ahmedabad, came the happy news that, “following new conversations with the rightsholder”, the tournament would indeed be seen on the screens of more affluent South Africans. Thousands of keyboards groaned in relief — their hammerers were becalmed.
Normal service had resumed, off the field and on: suddenly no-one remembered November 6, when the Dutch put South Africa out of the T20 World Cup. Benoni is no-one’s idea of gracious Adelaide, but maybe it isn’t so bleak.
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“I’m always nervous, whether I’m playing a club game or my son is throwing balls at me.” – Khaya Zondo
Telford Vice / London
HYDE Park looked like an African savannah on Thursday. Not that lions or lionesses, or indeed cricketers or footballers of any kind, roamed the vast undulations of London’s usually green and pleasant heart. It was too hot for that. Aside from the baroque splendour of its trees, the parched park was a patchwork swathe of beige.
The UK’s most intense summer since 1976 will do that to even the most lush spaces. Like Lord’s, less than three kilometres to the north, where the Test series between England and South Africa starts on Wednesday. What has the heat done to pitches at cricket’s grandest ground?
Not the obvious and helped the spinners, it seems. They have claimed only 18 of the 186 wickets to fall there in first-class matches this season. That includes the Test against New Zealand in the first week of June, when Lancashire leg spinner Matt Parkinson had to come haring down the highway to make his debut as a concussion substitute for Jack Leach.
Parkinson had Tim Southee caught at slip in New Zealand’s second innings — the only wicket of the 35 that fell in the match that belonged to a slow bowler. No spin was bowled in either team’s first innings, and only 18.3 overs in the 170.2 overs bowled in the second innings. In the most recent first-class match at Lord’s, between Middlesex and Sussex three weeks ago, spin accounted for three of the 29 wickets and 54 of the 365.1 overs. If mad dogs and Englishmen really do go out in 2022’s midday sun, not many of them are spinners.
According to Southern Water, this region of England had less than two-thirds of its average rainfall for the first six months of 2022 and only four millimetres in July — when the long-term average is 50.3 millimetres. Temperatures have hovered around 30 degrees Celsius for weeks, and the rain that has been forecast for next week will come — if it comes — as a relief to everyone except cricket aficionados who have turned their attention to Lord’s.
Doubtless Khaya Zondo isn’t thinking about any of the above. For one thing, he’s not in London. For another, he can’t do anything about the weather. For still another, he is focused on staying in the selection frame for the first Test. He did that on Tuesday and Wednesday by batting for more than three hours for his 86 in a tour match against England Lions in Canterbury. It was the South Africans’ biggest innings in terms of runs and deliveries. Importantly, Zondo showed a level of patience that earned 130 dot balls from the 166 he faced. He was undone on the second morning without adding to his overnight score, when he left an inswinger from Sam Cook and had his off stump rattled.
“I’ve accepted my limitations,” Zondo said in an audio file released by CSA after the close on Tuesday. “I’ve also accepted where I am good and I’ve just kept working, trying to get better with each ball I face, just keep adding building blocks on top of each other.”
The first of those blocks was laid during practice — “I went into the nets and worked on my balance, worked on playing the ball late” — to help him adjust to the conditions: “It’s definitely different to South Africa. The ball nips a lot more, and you never really feel like you’re in; you’ve got to make sure you’re always awake. As soon as you think you’re comfortable, that’s when the ball does something you don’t expect it to do and that’s when it catches you off guard.”
After 213 first-class innings, he was not immune to anxiety: “I’m always nervous, whether I’m playing a club game or whether my son is throwing balls at me. So I’m always nervous when I pick up a bat. That’s good nerves.”
Zondo scored two half-centuries and a century in nine innings for Darwen in the 2015 editions of the Northern Premier League and the Lancashire Cricket Board Cup. He last played in England on South Africa A’s tour in May and June 2017, when he made 66 runs in four 50-over innings and a single in each trip to the crease in a four-day match. His effort this week is his best anywhere since he reached a career-high 203 not out in a domestic first-class match in October 2021. In eight subsequent innings in the format he has twice passed 50.
Zondo’s latest effort has complicated South Africa’s selection deliberations. He batted at No. 7 with Ryan Rickleton, Rassie van der Dussen and Aiden Markram above him. All could be competing for one place in the Test XI. Markram made 10 and Van der Dussen 75 in the first innings, and they were 20 and eight not out at stumps on Thursday. Rickleton suffered a first-baller on Tuesday.
The naked numbers say Zondo has done the most among them to crack the nod, but rarely are these matters so simple. Markram played himself back into confidence and form at the IPL, and just more than three weeks ago Van der Dussen, a reassuring presence in South Africa’s line-up, scored a yeoman 134 in extreme heat in the first ODI in Chester-le-Street. Rickleton reeled off two centuries, a 95 and three half-centuries in eight first-class innings for Northamptonshire in June and July.
You might have heard Zondo’s name mentioned for reasons other than his achievements on a cricket ground. In October 2015 he was, at then captain AB de Villiers’ insistence — and with the acquiescence of Hussein Manack, the selector on tour — left out for the deciding match of an ODI series at the Wankhede. CSA investigated and decided his omission was wrong, and Zondo’s testimony to the Social Justice and Nation Building project in August last year revealed how deeply affected he had been by his treatment.
“I switched off mentally for the rest of the day and I detached myself from the team because it was clear I was not wanted,” Zondo said. “Switching off helped me cope with everything that was happening. The hardest part was watching players who were selected ahead of me having the opportunity to shine for South Africa on a world stage, in India, and having a chance to play and potentially impress and get future IPL opportunities.”
Dean Elgar’s flight to India for the subsequent Test series was brought forward to enable him, rather than Zondo, to feature in the white-ball decider. It is not often remembered that South Africa piled up 438/4 in that match, with Quinton de Kock, Faf du Plessis and De Villiers all scoring centuries, and also largely unhighlighted that the visitors won by 214 runs. Neither is it recalled that Elgar took guard at No. 7 with four balls left in the innings, faced only two of them and finished five not out. Was Zondo, albeit then uncapped, honestly not trusted to do something similar, or better?
If you’ve heard Zondo’s name for still another reason, it might be because his father, Raymond Zondo, was appointed South Africa’s chief justice in March. In June 2017 Zondo senior was named as the presiding high court judge in an inquiry into allegations of state capture and corruption during Jacob Zuma’s tenure as president from May 2009 to February 2018. In a damning and shocking report that runs to more than 5,000 pages, Zondo found that “the [ruling party] ANC under Zuma permitted, supported and enabled corruption”.
Zondo junior and the rest of South Africa’s squad have found in England circumstances that will feel oddly familiar to them. They are no strangers to the water restrictions that are being implemented here, and the planned power outages that loom because of the surge in energy prices — prompted by Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine — are common on the sharp tip of Africa.
Then there are the dots connected by history. When the English refer to 1976 as their last properly hot summer, they’re not only talking about the weather. In the build-up to a Test series that year, Tony Greig said of his team’s imminent opponents: “You must remember that the West Indians, these guys, if they get on top are magnificent cricketers. But if they’re down, they grovel, and I intend to make them grovel.”
Greig’s words, spoken in the thick, rough accent of the Eastern Cape of his birth, where he had leaned on his privilege and the luck of having a Scottish father to make the leap to England, did not land well. A white South African who had failed to denounce apartheid or racism telling black people he wanted to make them grovel?
Michael Holding and Andy Roberts answered the question on behalf of millions worldwide by taking 28 wickets each in the series, and Viv Richards and Gordon Greenidge by scoring three centuries each. And they were only the brightest stars in West Indies’ 3-0 triumph.
Also in 1976, indeed during that series, South Africa’s winter was turned white hot by government’s insistence that Afrikaans — the language of the country’s oppressors — be used in black schools. The reaction was what became known as the Soweto Uprising, which killed between 176 and 700 mostly young people and lit the touchpaper for what became, in 1994, the defeat at the ballot box of apartheid.
Raymond Zondo was 16 when Soweto’s flames were lit, and almost 34 when Nelson Mandela became South Africa’s first rightfully elected president. Khaya Zondo is 32 and still fighting for fairness. Will he get it on Wednesday? And, if he does, will it rain? In Africa, that would be a blessing. But not at Lord’s.
First published by Cricbuzz.
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“To explain racism in sport you’ve got to go back to colonialism; the first British warships arriving, and cricket bats and bayonets coming off together.” – André Odendaal
Telford Vice | Cape Town
IF André Odendaal says he isn’t writing a book, collaborating on a book, or about to have a book published, call a doctor.
Since December alone he’s put out “Pitch Battles: Sport, Racism and Resistance” with Peter Hain and “Robin Island Rainbow Dreams: The Making of Democratic South Africa’s First National Heritage Institution” with Neo Lekgotla laga Ramoupi, Noel Solani and Khwezi ka Mpumlwana.
Stand by, in April, for “Dear Comrade President: How Oliver Tambo Laid the Foundations of South Africa’s Constitution” with Albie Sachs. It will be the 13th book he has written or co-written.
When last hasn’t Odendaal been busy with a book? “That’s a good question … I started at university, which means I’ve published every decade for the last five,” he tells the FM. “That makes me a hell of an old toppie!”
Queenstown born and raised Odendaal is 67. A writer in residence and honorary professor in history and heritage studies at the University of the Western Cape (UWC), his Wikipedia page lists his 61 on debut — his only first-class half-century — for Cambridge immediately below the fact that he earned a PhD in history in the famously spired city. It seems rude to ask which he prizes more highly.
After Cambridge he was at UWC for 13 years, establishing and leading the Mayibuye Centre for History and Culture in 1991, and in 1996 becoming the founding director of the Robben Island Museum. In 2015 he retired after 10 years as chief executive of the Western Province Cricket Association. He has since published or co-published 20 books in his African Lives Series.
“When I left Newlands I said to my wife [civic activist Zohra Ebrahim], ‘I’ve been running organisations for 20 years. I’d love to just go read, write and do research for a couple of years. Call it a second PhD.’ So I’ve been writing fulltime for the last six years. In the last 12 months I’ve signed off on three books. But they came from six years of process and engagement.”
All of Odendaal’s works deal with sport, politics or, more often, both. He runs towards that nexus. The second chapter of “Pitch Battles” — which ends with an examination of what the pandemic and Black Lives Matter mean for sport — is titled: “Empire and the British roots of sports apartheid”.
“I said to Peter that we must explain how racism became embedded in South African sport. To do that you’ve got to go back to colonialism; the first British warships arriving, and cricket bats and bayonets coming off together.”
The Robben Island book was informed by what he encountered there: “I went through a very profound experience taking it from a prison to a museum, and a privilege in terms of my own identity — who I am and how I think. On top of that, we were a pilot case for state capture. The same tactics and, in some cases, even the same people were involved.” Chapter 13, “Downward spiral of an institution and its vision”, begins: “Farce became reality on Robben Island after the banal campaign to replace the management in 2001 and 2002 and the travesty of a staged ‘hunger strike’ in the hallowed former prison, which made a mockery of the ‘triumph of the human spirit’ vision of the museum.”
More happily, Odendaal says: “I spent six New Year’s Eves on the island looking at fire crackers going off at different times of the night in Cape Town. Twelve o’clock wan’t the same everywhere in the city.”
A chance meeting with Sachs at the memorial service for activist Sadie Forman in 2014 led to bigger things: “He said come and join our project on the making of the constitution.” And so to the Tambo book, which deals with the important but under-explored events of 1985 to 1991: “It’s about how the ANC turned to constitutionalism in the middle of a revolutionary struggle. Everybody starts this story with De Klerk unbanning the ANC in 1990. But, strategically, the ANC were miles ahead of the apartheid government by then. When they started negotiating they had their principles in place. The state was going left, right and centre; it had no plan.”
Odendaal has been whirling through words for more than an hour. Told that the coffee sat in front of him must be cold, he reaches for the crestfallen flat white anyway.
“Ag,” he says in his untouched Eastern Cape accent, “I drink cold coffee.”
Straight, no chaser.
First published by the Financial Mail.
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“I would hope they support South African cricket rather than a 50-year-old vision of what South African cricket was.” – Lawson Naidoo, CSA board chair, on his compatriots.
Telford Vice | Cape Town
JAMES Brown was in jail. But that didn’t stop the queue from coiling around the block to see the James Brown All-Stars at the Jazz Café in Camden Town in London. Lawson Naidoo was happy with that: not because the “Godfather of Soul” was in the tjoekie but because more punters meant more money to fight apartheid.
It was circa 1990 and one of the venue’s owners, Jon Dabner, supported SA’s freedom struggle by donating the door takings from certain gigs. Naidoo, who worked for the ANC mission in London from 1987 to 1992, was instrumental in establishing the arrangement.
The story captures one of his Naidoo’s numerous lives and a sliver of his colourful times. If you’re old enough to remember the start of SA’s journey towards democracy in 1994, you recall Naidoo as a special advisor to Frene Ginwala, the post-apartheid parliament’s first speaker. If you fancy yourself a builder of a better world, Naidoo’s name registers as the executive secretary of the Council for the Advancement of the South African Constitution. For politics junkies, Naidoo is a founding partner of the Paternoster Group, a risk consultancy.
If you’re a certain kind of cricket person, you know Naidoo as the founder — in 1998 — and captain of the Spin Doctors XI, who delight in their flannelled foolery in Cape Town’s Friendly Cricketers’ Association. If you’re a more sensible kind of cricket person, you know Naidoo has been chairperson of Cricket SA’s (CSA) board since June.
It’s the most recent CV entry that jars. Not because Naidoo isn’t fit to hold the office, but because of the sorriness of the suits who have too often been charged with stopping SA cricket’s buck.
Ray White, who was forced to resign for undermining transformation efforts, damned the board as “little more than the cricket organ of the ANC”. Famously, Percy Sonn “fell out of his pants”, according to a parking lot eyewitness, after a long and liquid night during the 2003 World Cup. Chris Nenzani’s super power was inflicting something close to death by circumlocution on anyone uninformed enough to ask him a question.
They all came to CSA’s presidency from the provincial structures, where they spent years knee deep in manure backing the right horses until they were the horse to be backed. Naidoo is an independent member of the first majority independent board the game in this country has known, and the first independent director to lead the board. That changes things.
“This is not an ordinary organisation; it’s very complex,” Naidoo told the Financial Mail. “Fundamentally it’s a public asset. It’s not a private entity. It belongs to all South Africans. That brings a greater level of responsibility to everyone that’s involved in it. We’re custodians of a game that’s going to be here long after we’ve gone.”
Naidoo was at Kingsmead on February 5, 1970. He was not quite seven years old. By lunch, when Barry Richards was 94 not out having flayed Australia’s bowlers to all parts, the youngster had found a lifelong passion.
The Group Areas Act had slithered onto the statute books the year before. It would force the removal of the Naidoo family from Durban’s old casbah to Chatsworth. At 12, Naidoo was spirited away from the evils of apartheid to join an elder brother in the UK. He would remain in the other hemisphere for 17 years and earn a Masters in law from Cambridge.
Music became a tether to the real world: “I got to know some of the exiled jazz artists, Julian Bahula in particular and later Dudu Pukwana, and others like Hugh Masekela and Jonas Gwangwa. I got drawn into South African jazz through them.” So much so that, from 2011 to 2014, Naidoo managed the Mahogany Room, a jazz club in Buitenkant Street in Cape Town. Bra Hugh himself graced the stage.
Cricket, too, kept Naidoo from disappearing into Englishness: “The first thing I would check in the newspapers was how the South African players had done in the county championship — Barry Richards, Mike Procter, Clive Rice …”
Many of that generation would struggle to credit people like Naidoo with using sport to help change our society for the better. “I would hope they support South African cricket rather than a 50-year-old vision of what South African cricket was,” he said. “Some of them just don’t get it. The game has moved on and they’ll get left behind.”
To paraphrase James Brown, they won’t feel good.
First published by the Financial Mail.
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“I look at CSA in a very similar way that I would at state institutions that have been decimated in recent times.” – Lawson Naidoo, CSA board chair
Telford Vice| Cape Town
LAWSON Naidoo fell truly, madly, deeply in love on the morning of Thursday, February 5, 1970. He was weeks away from his seventh birthday. Fifty-one years on, his passion is undimmed. And thereby hangs a cricket story.
“I was at the 1969/70 Test match against Australia at Kingsmead, when Barry Richards made 94 not out before lunch,” Naidoo told Cricbuzz. “My love of the game goes back to then, and I’ve been a keen follower for all those years.” He relocated to Cape Town in 1994, and says he has missed only one of the 33 Newlands Tests South Africa have played since: against Pakistan in February 2013, when he was on holiday in India.
Naidoo has written on the game for various publications, including the now defunct Wisden Cricketer, and captains the Spin Doctors XI of Cape Town’s Friendly Cricketers’ Association, an honour he has held since the club’s founding in 1998. He self-identifies as “nowadays a lower middle order journeyman”, and describes himself as “a keen observer of the game from a playing perspective as well as its administration and governance”.
About that last bit, as of Tuesday Naidoo has been the chairperson of CSA’s board. And the first independent director in a role that, previously, was reserved for whoever was also the president — who was, and still is, drawn from the ranks of the 14 provincial affiliates and associates. The glaring lack of oversight in that structure led cricket down many a dark governance path.
So Naidoo’s election, enabled by a new memorandum of incorporation (MOI), which stipulates a majority independent board chaired by an independent, is the most heartening sign yet that CSA is sincere about cleaning up its act. Because Naidoo is more than a cricket romantic. He’s a public intellectual who, armed with a masters in law from Cambridge, among many other qualifications, has built a strong record over the past 35 years for not hesitating to tell right from wrong. These days he does so as the executive secretary of the Council for the Advancement of the South African Constitution (CAFAC), a progressive organisation, and is also a founding partner of the Paternoster Group, a political risk consultancy.
A focus of Naidoo’s work has been the interrogation of an establishment he helped create. He was among the political activists who went into exile during apartheid, and from 1987 to 1992 he worked for the African National Congress’ (ANC) mission in London. From 1994 to 1999, during Nelson Mandela’s presidential term, he served as a special advisor to Frene Ginwala, the speaker of South Africa’s first duly elected parliament.
The ANC was an exemplary liberation movement, and for 15 years after the country embarked on the road towards democracy in 1994 — when South Africans of all races, not only whites, voted in a general election for the first time — the party tried to meet the challenges of fairly governing an entire nation. But, with major systems and infrastructure designed to cater mainly for the tiny white minority, that proved all but impossible.
So hopes for “a better life for all” — an ANC slogan — were dashed, not least because of the intractable conflict between the expectations of a newly empowered electorate and a disproportionately white affluent class alarmed by the prospect of the revocation of its unearned privilege. But, in a country where opposition parties range from relics of apartheid to buffoons in berets, the ANC remains the only viable option at the polls even though all classes are dissatisfied with its performance.
The inevitable erosion in the integrity of South Africa’s experiment in democracy, and in the belief that it would succeed, made the ANC ripe for infection by abuse. In May 2009 Jacob Zuma was inaugurated, triggering almost nine years of rampant maladministration during which it was made increasingly clear that the presidency was little more than a front for a slew of corrupt figures. In October last year, Cyril Ramaphosa — also of the ANC — who became president after his predecessor was forced to resign under ever darker clouds, said more than USD34-billion had been stolen from state coffers during the Zuma years.
All of which is relevant, even in a cricket story. Naidoo has written widely on state corruption in South Africa and given evidence as an expert to an ongoing judicial commission launched in order to, government said, “investigate allegations of state capture, corruption, fraud and other allegations in the public sector including organs of state”. If you’ve kept up with developments at CSA since around 2009, that will sound familiar.
“I look at CSA in a very similar way that I would at state institutions that have been decimated in recent times,” Naidoo said. “I think the challenge of fixing CSA is not different from the governance challenges that the country faces in other respects. I see a direct correlation between what I do in my day job and what my role will be at CSA.”
To that end, Naidoo has put his trust in CSA’s new MOI: “Given my background at CAFAC, constitutions are very important. I see the MOI as the constitution for CSA, and we’ve got to live by that. Not just the platitudes about it but demonstrate it in how we operate — with openness and transparency.
“I think there’s been far too much secrecy about what happens, which is unnecessary in my view. We need much more open and transparent, and open to criticism. Because we will make mistakes. We mustn’t try and hide them from the public. If we make mistakes we must take responsibility and account for them. The biggest challenge is to restore public confidence in the administration of the game, and that includes players, fans, media, sponsors, and — very importantly — the ICC.”
The task of setting matters straight with the latter has fallen to Naidoo: on Thursday CSA said the board had decided he would represent the organisation at ICC meetings. In the past that was done by CSA’s president, a provincial leader and thus part of the old problems.
Naidoo will go into those meetings backed by the fact that South Africa is a full member of the ICC, and thus has to be taken seriously. The sponsors who have deserted CSA in recent years owe him no such respect. What might he say to them?
“You’ve been asking for an independent board, you’ve been asking for CSA to clean up its governance structures. I believe this MOI does that. We now have a properly constituted board in place with credible people on that board. You can now trust us with your money again.”
Unlike some of the suits who came before him, and spent thousands in company money on alcohol, Naidoo understands that “without money we’re not able to do what we need to do, which is to grow the game and broaden its appeal among all South Africans”.
And to keep the eyes of those who have made cricket their profession firmly on the ball: “One of our roles is to get cricket off the front pages and onto the back pages. If we fix the administration that will hopefully lead to success on the field, because the players have been distracted by what’s going on. Rightly so, because their livelihoods have been at stake. And not just at international level but at provincial and franchise level.
“We need to take away that concern for them and allow them to do what they’re best at, which is playing the game. Hopefully, by fixing this, we’ll allow the Proteas to resume their position as one of the top cricket teams in the world.”
If that makes Naidoo sound as if this isn’t his first cricket administration rodeo, maybe that’s because it isn’t. In 1991, when apartheid was still the law of the land but the wave of change was rising, Steve Tshwete — an ANC stalwart who would become sports minister — and Ali Bacher, by then the managing director of CSA’s forerunner, went to London to lobby the high commissions of West Indian countries to support South Africa’s readmission to the international game after 21 years of isolation. Naidoo arranged those meetings and accompanied Tshwete and Bacher to them.
That someone so deeply involved in the struggle should credit a man as polarising as Barry Richards with helping to spark his love for the game will make Naidoo difficult to put into one of the boxes South Africans reserve for each other — which will be a key advantage in an often cynically competitive arena where identity can matter more than anything else.
Richards, playing only his second Test, went on to make 140 in that innings, and Graeme Pollock 274: South Africa’s highest Test score for more than 29 years, and a display of batting so arresting it is still spoken of in close to religious tones. The South Africans won the match, the second of the series, by an innings and claimed the other three, two by more than 300 runs. And then they disappeared from view as isolation took hold.
One version of this narrative holds that team up as heroes who were unfairly denied their glory; that they were the best team in world cricket. Closer to the truth is that the Australians were reluctant tourists who arrived exhausted after a long tour of India, and wouldn’t have come at all had England’s 1968/69 visit not been cancelled by the South African government because the English had had the audacity to include Basil D’Oliveira in their squad. How dare they! Everyone knew South Africa didn’t sully themselves playing against opposition that wasn’t entirely white.
Others see that South Africa team as the apex of white supremacy, oblivious to the cruel joke that, had they been born any other race, their talent would have gone as undiscovered as that that lay dormant in their gardeners and maids.
Naidoo will know all that, and a lot more. For instance, the stands at Kingsmead on Thursday, February 5, 1970 would have been racially segregated. He was considered, by law, born not good enough to watch cricket among whites. And yet he still fell in love. A “lower middle order journeyman”? Yeah, right.
First published by Cricbuzz.
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“I don’t even know this person who you are talking about. Who’s that person?” – committee chair Beauty Dlulane fails to recognise the name of Naasei Appiah, who is mentioned 10 times in a summary of the Fundudzi report.
TELFORD VICE| Cape Town
CSA will hold its board’s feet to the fire for losing its way before, during and after the tenure of Thabang Moroe, who was not qualified to be appointed chief executive. But the findings of the forensic investigation that was used to sack Moroe and might yet cost others their positions will not be made public.
Also, the conflict of interest inherent in CSA’s upper structures must be undone, the game will be in trouble if international teams do not resume touring soon, and government should interfere in cricket if needs be.
That was the extent of the value of the almost four hours CSA spent discussing the Fundudzi forensic report with a parliamentary committee on Tuesday. For the rest, CSA were in the unusual position of appearing to be the more competent people in the room. Then again, the other people in the virtual room for the online meeting were shockingly out-of-touch with the state of the game — and thus woefully unsuited to their roles.
Although the oversight committee, comprised of MPs from a range of parties, was furnished with the 468-page report on Friday, it was apparent that most members hadn’t bothered to give the document more than a cursory glance.
On being informed that Naasei Appiah had joined the meeting despite having been being fired as CSA’s chief operating officer — a decision he says he will fight — Beauty Dlulane, the committee chair, said: “I don’t even know this person who you are talking about. Who’s that person?” Appiah is mentioned 10 times in the summary of the forensic report released on October 5, and presumably more often in the full version. If Dlulane had been familiar with either document she would have known who he is.
Consequently, CSA’s representatives were able to deal easily with half-volleys instead of snorters and yorkers, correcting umpteen errors of fact committed by ignorant committee members as they went. The meeting was an exercise in worthlessness mitigated only by the contributions of Marius Schoeman, the CSA independent director who chairs its audit and risk committee.
“There is clarity that what happened happened under the watch of the board, and accountability rests with the board,” Schoeman said. “The board appoints the executive and has an oversight function. The current board has an accountability and a responsibility to address the findings [of the report]. No finding can be left and not be actioned on, and that’s the responsibility of the current board.” And the buck doesn’t stop with board members: “Every [CSA] employee who is implicated in the report will be addressed within the disciplinary code.”
When will the rest of us get a look at those 468 pages? “The report will remain confidential,” Schoeman said. “The feedback to stakeholders will be the actions that have been taken. We will not reveal details within the document. We will get a third-party assurance provider that will confirm that specific matters have been addressed.”
Much of the report deals with the failings of Moroe, who was dismissed in August. Should he have landed the post at all, considering he came to it from a midlevel position with a cellphone service provider? “As far as the question of the appointment of Mr Moroe, that he didn’t meet the minimum requirements, yes — you are correct,” Schoeman told a curious committee member. “It’s a finding that I find astonishing, in that one has minimum requirements. The report also indicates that the advertisement was different from the job description. In my experience those are things that should not happen.”
Much that shouldn’t happen does happen at CSA, not least because its highest authority, the members council where each of cricket’s 14 provinces is represented, also takes seven places on the 12-member board. That could change at the annual meeting, which is scheduled for December 5. “We realise that there’s much work to be done insofar as regaining the trust of our stakeholders, including the public,” Schoeman said. “One of the key factors, and it comes out of the report, is the inherent conflict of interest that exists because members of the members council are also board members. In terms of the members council charter and MOI [memorandum of incorporation] they have to act in the best interests of the affiliate members that has nominated them, but as a director they have to act in the best interests of CSA. I do not want to be in their shoes, because it’s difficult to wear those two hats. The priority is on doing what’s best for CSA, because the role of directors is governed by the Companies Act and overrides charters. Poor oversight, poor governance — it’s evident from the report; no doubt.”
Schoeman was supported by Dheven Dharmalingam, another CSA indepedent director, who said: “We need to make sure that, at the annual meeting, this board ends up with a majority of independent directors.”
Dharmalingam, CSA’s finance committee chair, made the case for government to allow South Africa to host international teams again in the wake of the coronavirus lockdown: “If we don’t start playing cricket, we don’t earn content revenue [from broadcast rights] and we don’t earn our share of the profit from the ICC, [and] this organisation will be in trouble.”
Teams from countries that have high virus infection rates need government permission to visit South Africa. England, who CSA hope will arrive near the end of the year to play six white-ball matches and put up to USD4.2-million into the coffers, is such a country. Will they be allowed to come?
Not by the tone of committee member Nocks Seabi’s view: “CSA is a public entity. It is running cricket as a sport on behalf of South Africans. If there is a need for government to intervene in the interests of South Africans, we do so.”
Seabi is an MP for the ruling African National Congress, which also counts sports minister Nathi Mthethwa among its members. In a letter, seen by Cricbuzz, to CSA’s acting president, Beresford Williams — who was forced to recuse himself from Tuesday’s meeting because he is implicated in the report — Mthethwa rasps that Williams is “kindly reminded that as a sovereign country in which I am the minister responsible for sport … there is a raft of laws at my disposal that empower me to deal effectively with recalcitrant behaviour within my portfolio”.
That authority includes the withdrawal of national colours, which would prevent South Africa’s teams from representing the country. As bad as things are, they could get worse.
First published by Cricbuzz.
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“I think cricket gets in its own way too often. You’ve got to be handling your stuff well, and we don’t do that.” – Graeme Smith
TELFORD VICE| Cape Town
GRAEME Smith says he has received death threats in the wake of expressing his support for Black Lives Matter (BLM), the newest twist in a tangled race debate that is never far from the surface in a society where prejudice was until relatively recently rendered as law. That conversation has exploded in cricket in the past few weeks.
During a webinar hosted by a financial services company on Tuesday, the former Test captain, who is now Cricket South Africa’s (CSA) director of cricket, said: “It’s been a really challenging experience. All of us have found ourselves in a really heated space. We’ve taken an immense amount of abuse, death threats. It’s been an eye-opening experience. It has shocked me how heated things have got.”
The fire was lit on July 6, when Lungi Ngidi was asked during an online press conference whether BLM would be a topic of discussion among South Africa’s players. He said it would, and welcomed it. Ngidi was assailed by white former players, among them Pat Symcox, Boeta Dippenaar and Brian McMillan. That prompted support for Ngidi from Tabraiz Shamsi, Rassie van der Dussen, Faf du Plessis, Hashim Amla, Anrich Nortjé, Marizanne Kapp and Dwaine Pretorius.
On July 18, at the 3TC Solidarity Cup in Centurion, all the players involved along with Smith and Makhaya Ntini — who were commentating on the game — and 1995 rugby World Cup-winning Springbok captain Francois Pienaar — a 3TC organiser — took a knee and raised a fist in solidarity with BLM. Smith issued a statement of support on the same day, saying there was “no room for neutrality on this topic”.
No chance of that. The issue has exposed South Africa’s divisions on race as still raw even though they stretch back to the first European invasion in 1652. Black and brown former players have lined up to articulate their experiences, and CSA seem to be planning to compensate them financially. Whites have threatened to boycott matches if CSA do not scrap their rules on racial selection. And it all started with Ngidi’s answer to a question.
“Lungi, to my mind, said nothing wrong,” Smith said. “He expressed an opinion. He didn’t make a statement. He expressed the fact that the team was going to get together and have a conversation. In no way did he deserve to be attacked. What happened to him and the way the guys came at him is entirely wrong.”
Painful though the episode has been, it has prompted a readdressing of matters of race. “Within the space we’ve handled it extremely maturely,” Smith said. “We got together, we listened, the conversation was open, people shared, and we decided to support each other on this movement. The conversation’s open, people can listen, people can debate. We can talk to each other.
“I get that in South Africa we’ve got so many issues. In some ways it’s felt like we’re bearing the brunt for government not having delivered on a number of things over the years, and the frustration over that. You pick up the paper or you click online and you see all the negativity and the disappointment and the frustration in people’s lives, and livelihoods being affected.”
Smith may regret the latter assertion. CSA are due to appear before a parliamentary committee on Friday, and South Africa’s government — dominated by the ruling African National Congress, and in which corruption, wasted resources and ineptitude are widespread — will likely grasp a diversionary straw to beat the back of a sport like cricket, which is seen as largely white even though it’s mostly black and brown.
But being the butt of opportunistic criticism is nothing new for Smith, who has been mercilessly targetted, sometimes groundlessly, since his appointment in December. The fact that cricket was, as he said, “a giant mess” when he took the position seems to have been forgotten.
South Africa’s men’s team had limped home from losing four of five completed matches — including all three Tests — in India, sponsors were walking away, and governance problems were piled high, as were financial losses. Since Smith’s appointment South Africa have won seven and lost eight matches: not great but better. Sponsors are trickling back, and the suits and the players are on better terms.
The suspension of chief executive Thabang Moroe helped slow the bleeding, but eight months on his fate remains undecided. Moroe’s acting replacement, the significantly more competent Jacques Faul, resigned on Monday — two days after the eminently dispensable Chris Nenzani, CSA’s president, abandoned ship.
All the while a pandemic has threatened the viability of almost every industry on earth, and exponentially more so in an already struggling South African entity trying to recapture its squandered stature in a global game suddenly focused on the survival of the richest.
“Covid has hit corporates and business extensively. Finding people that have the money to spend is very challenging. You want the people who want to be associated with your brand want to be proud to be there. We’ve got to clean up the game.” – Graeme Smith
Are things better than they were in December? Are they worse? Who can tell? “When we jumped in in December cricket had fallen into really tough times; from performance on the field and within the business side,” Smith said. “My job was more cricket-focused, but then you start having to repair a number of relationships — from sponsors to player bodies to fixing TV-rights deals, deals that were done in the past but haven’t been paid for … and, and, and … You make it through the summer through trial and error, you rebuild some things. And then Covid hits and you face the next phase of those challenges.”
Quite apart from the coronavirus emergency demanding “plans and costs that are now coming into our game that weren’t there before”, it has also meant extensive negotiations with authorities who have kept South Africa’s borders closed — meaning that, in terms of the current regulations, teams cannot go overseas and foreign sides cannot tour in the coming summer. And that’s without considering the rest of the game.
“Cricket is such an extensive sport,” Smith said. “You think down to the private coaching, the clubs, the schools, the whole pipeline. How we get that open is going to be a huge challenge. Opening up international travel so that cricket … home tours for us is how we generally earn the major part of our income, and at the moment that’s all on hold. We’re working with government to see what the plans are. It’s challenging.”
Smith sounded more hopeful of South Africa’s women’s team being able to fulfill their commitment to play two T20Is and four ODIs in England next month: “I must commend the ECB. The money that they’re investing on even trying to get our ladies over there — looking to charter planes then putting them into bio bubbles. They’ll be spending an extensive amount of money to get this tour underway.”
Less than seven hours after he said that, the tour was called off. The overhanging reality is that the combination of the economic fallout from the pandemic and CSA’s failure in their duty as custodians of the game could shrivel cricket in South Africa to a far smaller, impoverished, internationally insignificant version of its past self.
“Covid has hit corporates and business extensively,” Smith said. “Finding people that have the money to spend is very challenging. You want to be putting out the right stories. You want the people who want to be associated with your brand want to be proud to be there. That’s what we’ve got to create. We’ve got to clean up the game.
“The money that gets invested into growing the game and transformation and the development of the game — those are the stories you want to be making headlines. But I think cricket gets in its own way too often. Whether it’s people finding themselves in the wrong position at the right time or bad decision-making, or egos that get into positions of power, it’s unfortunate and it takes away from the beauty of our sport.”
Kolpak agreements and player free agency have hit South Africa hard — exhibit A: AB de Villiers — and “New Zealand are head-hunting our youngsters at a rate of knots. And then you deal with the world and the opportunities that are out there. You’ve got to be handling your stuff well, and we don’t do that.”
Against that background, an escalating screaming match on racism was the last thing CSA needed. Or not. Maybe it’s the best time to hold a culture camp, which 32 of South Africa’s current players are doing in Skukuza this week.
“The way the guys have handled things is fantastic,” Smith said. “The messages are good coming out of there. We’ve got to be able to listen and understand the stories that other guys are bringing to the fore; where they’re coming from. The goal is to try to move forward in the right direction and create a better path.”
But South Africa’s problem is that there are two paths, one far less even and more difficult to follow than the other — even 26 years after institutionalised racism was banished from the statutes. So when one of Smith’s first decisions is to appoint Mark Boucher, his friend, former teammate and beneficiary of the same white privilege that helped Smith make the most of his skill and talent, he should expect people to be angry. Especially when a follower of the other path, Enoch Nkwe, is effectively demoted from interim team director to assistant coach to make way for Boucher.
“Sport is brutal, and that’s the challenge,” Smith said. “Cricket is brutal. It’s a high-performing environment. Your personal performance is always under scrutiny. You also have the element of people who feel begrudged by not getting that opportunity, not getting enough of a chance. It’s a fine line between the two. Cricket is such a brutal game when it comes to that. There’s going to be so many people across the cricketing fraternity who have been affected by that.
“There’s lost heroes everywhere. That’s why it’s important to have these conversations and to open that channel. We’re growing the game, we want to see the game represent all the people, we want to be successful. Let’s get it going. That’s what taking a knee [at the 3TC game] meant for us — we’re all together. I haven’t seen the team have such an honest conversation in a few years, which is great. People could share, listen to all sides, have an open discussion, and represent not only the BLM movement but the GBV [Gender Based Violence] movement as well, and raise R3-million [USD173,000] for charity. How do you become a better person? How do you affect your environment in a positive way? Everyone’s hanging onto their cause and forgetting about the bigger picture at this stage.”
There can be no bigger cause than overcoming Covid-19, followed by achieving racial equality. South Africans who transpose the two are trying to put out the fire in one house on one street while the city beyond and the world itself are ablaze with a far greater threat. Already there are signs that the rest of the game is getting on with rebuilding itself while shutting out the noise coming from the troubled streets on the sharp tip of Africa.
The fire next time has been here since 1652 and it isn’t going away. It’s the bigger, badder fire this time that needs fighting now.
First published by Cricbuzz.
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“Chris Nenzani’s resignation in no way absolves him from any wrongdoing.” – you know you’re in trouble when minnows like the Democratic Alliance bully you.
TELFORD VICE| Cape Town
MONDAY went from bad to bizarre for Cricket South Africa (CSA) when, hours after they announced president Chris Nenzani’s resignation, acting chief executive Jacques Faul also walked away.
Life for those still attached to the ailing organisation could get yet more complicated, what with the country’s official opposition demanding sweeping action — including the resignation of the entire board — ahead of CSA’s appearance in front of parliament’s portfolio committee on sport, art and culture on Friday.
A safe pair of hands who guided CSA through another crisis in 2012 and 2013, Faul was appointed in December in the wake of the suspension of Thabang Moroe on allegations of misconduct. Who his replacement might be was not clear on Monday, but CSA company secretary Welsh Gwaza and chief commercial officer Kugandrie Govender would seem to be the prime candidates.
Faul confirmed his decision to Cricbuzz, but was not free to say more: Monday was his wife’s birthday. He said last month he would leave CSA on September 15 and return to his permanent position as chief executive of the Titans. Even so, his dramatic exit on Monday in the throes of a stormy board meeting will rock a game still reeling from Nenzani’s exit. Nenzani’s days, too were numbered — his tenure was due to end at the annual meeting on September 5.
But the twin shocks will only add to the pressure on CSA to pull out of the spiral of disaster they have been in since Moroe’s suspension, which followed more than two years of increasingly alarming decision-making under his authority.
All of which will add to the intensity of the focus on Friday’s parliamentary meeting. On Monday, the opposition Democratic Alliance (DA) issued a statement by shadow minister Tsepo Mhlongo, who wrote, “While the DA welcomes the resignation of … Nenzani, his resignation in no way absolves him from any wrongdoing.”
Mhlongo demanded Nenzani’s attendance at Friday’s meeting, and that vice-president Beresford Williams, who has been named acting president, and the rest of the board also resign.
Although they are the official opposition, the DA are small fry who hold only 84 of the 400 available seats in a parliament dominated by the African National Congress (ANC), who have 230 seats. But, at CSA’s last appearance in front of the committee in June, Nenzani angered the sports minister, the ANC’s Nathi Mthethwa, in a discussion about transformation. “I felt insulted with your intervention when you said you only take people on merit‚” Mthethwa told Nenzani.
In South Africa, if you earn the disapproval of a ruling party who have failed on every front and remain in power after 26 years only because of an utterly miserable cast of alternatives and voters’ tragically misguided loyalty, you must be getting a lot wrong. Faul’s resignation is only the latest evidence that CSA are deep in the abyss.
First published by Cricbuzz.
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“I needed to bowl at 150 kilometres an hour for people to notice me. I got injured because I had to work harder than the white guy next to me.” – Mfuneko Ngam
England U21 hockey player Darcy Bourne cuts to the chase. Photo: Twitter (@MissanHarriman)
TELFORD VICE| Cape Town
DOROTHY Tsotsobe is formidable. Not solely because she is a woman, nor because she is a black woman. And from the Eastern Cape, no less, where South Africa raises, from the depths of hardship, giants in all areas of life. Neither is she celebrated only as the wife of a fine rugby player, nor as the mother of three children, two of whom carved careers in international sport. Tsotsobe is, in her own right, in her tall, confident, focused, serious, smiling self, in the very fact of her life, formidable.
As someone who was born into a time when millions like her had their lives systematically broken by evil engineered to do exactly that, she had no choice. She had to stand tall, confident, focused and serious or, like so many others, be broken.
So did another Tsotsobe, Anthony, who was among three members of uMkhonto We Sizwe, or the Spear of the Nation, the armed wing of the then outlawed, now ruling African National Congress (ANC), who were condemned to death for high treason in 1981 after, in 1980, attacking a police station and a state-owned oil-from-gas installation. Their sentence was commuted to life imprisonment in 1983, when they were moved from death row to Robben Island, the infamous prison off the coast of Cape Town where Nelson Mandela, the world’s most renowned political prisoner, spent 18 of his 27 years bend bars.
The head of the snake was chopped off in 1994, when for the first time South Africans of all races exercised the right to vote. But apartheid’s scaly carcass writhes still, its coils stunting the lives of the generation born of those it had lawfully subjugated, violated, imprisoned and murdered.
Living while black in South Africa’s cities remains an unfairly heavy burden, and exponentially more so in the black residential areas, where the mass media rarely go, where police are part of the problem rather than the solution, and where politicians pitch up only every few years trying to secure votes with promises and T-shirts, both of questionable quality. Anthony Tsotsobe is a case in point. He was released in 1991 and served as a bodyguard for Mandela and other ANC luminaries. On September 2, 2001, the night before what would have been his 47th birthday, he was shot dead in front of his house in Soweto.
Authority and needs don’t disappear because they have been abdicated and unmet. Sometimes they end up in the wrong hands. Other times good people stop the buck. People like Dorothy Tsotsobe, who in 2004 capped her career in sport by becoming the first woman to serve on the South African Rugby Union’s presidents’ council, the game’s highest authority in this country.
Three years earlier she achieved something more impressive. Prejudice has poisoned all of South Africa’s communities, not just the white component. Women playing rugby? In the Eastern Cape, where black men have kept rugby’s heart beating for longer than anyone has been alive? Who did she think she was establishing rugby for women in KwaMagxaki, a black area in Port Elizabeth?
“Some men [on club executives] don’t want to be told by a woman what to do,” she said in 2017. “They are holding on to the African mentality that women have no say; only men must speak.” In 2012 parents were in her firing line: “When a child is in a [formerly white] model C school the parents will attend all the activities. But if the child is in a [black] township school you hardly see parents watching their own kids playing or attending meetings. We will always complain that there is development in other areas while we are not promoting sport and events or programmes in our areas, and complaining about crime and substance abuse. What are we doing to combat these challenges?”
We have achieved little in the past 26 years besides making a pitifully small percentage of blacks as affluent as most whites.
Tsotsobe’s daughter, Nomsebenzi, played in South Africa’s inaugural women’s rugby international, against Wales in May 2004, and was named captain for the next match of that series a week later. Now 41, she became the team’s manager in May last year.
She was an imposing presence on the flank. Her father, Toto, sped down the touchline on the wing for the Leopards, the black national team during South Africa’s racially riven past. He played against the British and Irish Lions in 1974, for an Invitation XV against France the next year, and against the All Blacks the year after that. Also in 1974, he was part of a squad that — unusually for black representative teams of that era — was let out of the country. Toto Tsotsobe scored three tries in the six games the Leopards played in Italy.
These are a few of the bare bones in the immense body of work the Tsotsobe family has done for sport, much of it against the grain of what it meant and still means to be black in South Africa. To be born healthy, to grow up strong, to garner an education, to earn decent money, to forge a life — simply to survive — was and is far more difficult for black South Africans than it is for whites. Democracy has succeeded apartheid as the law of the land, but not as the everyday reality. We have achieved little in the past 26 years besides making a pitifully small percentage of blacks as affluent as most whites.
Not only did the Tsotsobes survive. They prospered, in a community rather than a material sense. And so others prospered, too. If a Tsotsobe was involved, you knew what needed to be done would be done. And done well. They are firmly among the giants the Eastern Cape has produced, an honour roll that includes Mandela.
But mention the Tsotsobe name outside of the province now and none of those good things are evoked. Instead, because of the choices made by a single member of the family, there is cutting disapproval and the stink of fecklessness.
Here it comes, what you might have been waiting for since the second word of this piece: Lonwabo Tsotsobe was a lazy, uncommitted, failed fixer who was lucky to get away with an eight-year ban for his part in South Africa’s 2015 T20 spot-fixing scandal, which cost seven players their careers. He admitted to 10 charges, among them an attempt to manipulate a match — Cricket South Africa said no fixes were successful — and there is evidence to support the other claims made against him.
In 2011, while on a short contract with Essex, Tsotsobe tweeted: “I’ve never felt like this ever. This is the worst two months of my life. And you know when you start regretting yourself it ain’t good. It’s just impossible to work in this environment.” The county promptly sacked him, with coach Paul Grayson telling the BBC Tsotsobe’s “attitude and work-rate are not to the standard of an international cricketer”.
Tsotsobe shouldn’t have vented on social media, and not only because in three first-class matches for the county he had taken five wickets at 77.60. Maybe he shouldn’t have signed to play for a team in damp, dreary England in the first place. Or perhaps he was expected to be grateful that a country built on the profits of enslaving blacks, that colonised his, that had been instrumental in establishing, maintaining and protecting apartheid and entrenching systemic racism, that has done much to ensure that black lives don’t matter as much as others, had seen fit to exploit him.
It’s difficult not to go there in light of some of Grayson’s other comments at the time: “We’ve given him a great opportunity to come and play county cricket and what he has said about us is downright rude. He has got to take a look at himself. He has not made the most of this opportunity. To hear the things he said about our dressingroom, it’s very annoying.”
Thami Tsolekile was there, he was ready, he was able, he had spent years preparing himself for the moment. And yet Mark Boucher’s place went to AB de Villiers.
Two years later Tsotsobe was again in the headlines for questionable reasons. Having upped sticks at the Warriors, where he spent his first six seasons as a senior player, he went to the Dolphins, playing nine list A games in four weeks but nothing else in his only summer there. In 2013, after he had left Durban, his coach at Kingsmead, Lance Klusener, told us what he really thought of him: “He is unfit. Bottom line, plain and simple. Just look at him. I’m a big fan of ‘Lopsy’. I think he is a very good bowler when he is fit. That’s why I was so excited to get him to Durban, but all in all I was generally disappointed with his attitude and his workload with us.”
Earlier that year, coaches and reporters waited almost an hour-and-a-half past the appointed time at the Wanderers on a grey off-season day. When Tsotsobe eventually turned up for his net session, he offered a veiled admission as the reason for his move to the Lions: “This is about my career. If I stay in the same place and slip into a comfort zone I become lazy. I wanted to associate myself with a team that’s good in all formats. I’m not saying the Dolphins weren’t — the coach and the players were great — but I need to get out of my comfort zone.”
Heads nodded. At his first two franchises he had earned a reputation for going missing — he played no first-class cricket from January 2012 to February 2014, but not least because he featured in 50 games for South Africa during that period — and for being indulged by administrators — he was in the squad that toured Sri Lanka in July and August 2013 despite falling short of the required fitness levels. But, that day at the Wanderers, it seemed he had finally wised up to what was expected of him. He was 29. It was not too late …
Alas, it was. Tsotsobe was hounded out of the game two years after that with the disgust of the nation burning his ears. Long expected to come to a sticky end, he duly did. Let his fate be a lesson to all. But what is that lesson?
Tsotsobe has admitted that his work ethic was not what it should have been. Tellingly, more than that has been held against him. He was mistrusted for his entire career, and for reasons that have not been properly explored. Besides, it’s not as if working hard is any gaurantee of opportunity.
Thami Tsolekile did plenty of that as Mark Boucher’s understudy, series-in, series-out, tour-in and tour-out. When Boucher had to be replaced after his career was ended by an eye injury on the first day of South Africa’s tour of England, in 2012, Tsolekile wasn’t given his chance. He was there, he was ready, he was able, he had spent years preparing himself for the moment. And yet Boucher’s place went to AB de Villiers.
That undoubtedly strengthened South Africa’s batting. De Villiers’ genius was such that he had taken guard everywhere from No. 1 to 8 in the 125 Test innings he had had by the time he settled in behind the stumps at the Oval in the first Test of that series. If you could find a spot for him, you did. If someone had to make way for him, tough. But what did denying Tsolekile say to all of South Africa’s players who were not in the Test XI, particularly if they were black?
At the time Makhaya Ntini, South Africa’s original black Test player and still the only one among the nine with more than 50 caps, dared voice what many thought: “Tsolekile would have been playing if he was white. People will say we are talking politics but we need to say these things.”
Whiteness has stood in the way of truth for centuries, and so well that many blacks believe the lies conjured to keep them in chains.
The converse applied in Tsotsobe’s case: people said he was picked for South Africa because he was black. Unlike other black and brown cricketers who reach the top in South Africa, he was not an emphatic player. He had neither Ntini’s relentlessness nor Kagiso Rabada’s outrageous ability. Herschelle Gibbs cut sixes for fun. Hashim Amla set himself to bat for days. Paul Adams fetched a bowling action from the far side of human physiology, and has somehow retained a straightish spine. Mfuneko Ngam and Monde Zondeki were similarly freakish in the load they put on their bodies, but their bodies couldn’t cope.
“I needed to bowl at 150 kilometres an hour for people to notice me,” Ngam said in 2013. “I got injured because I had to work harder than the white guy next to me. It’s always a survival situation for black cricketers. Talent alone is not going to make it happen.”
Why hark back to what Ntini and Ngam said long ago? Because South Africa have capped 33 players in Test cricket since Ntini made his assertion, and only four of them are black. Eight are brown. The rest — 21, or almost two-thirds — are white. Arching over that awkward truth is another: that South Africa is, economically and socially, the most unequal society in the world. Mike Marqusee, a cricket-loving American activist and author, was never more right than when he wrote that “the level playing field is enclosed within a society which is anything but equal. Access to the level playing field has always been unequal.”
From that inequality came Tsotsobe. Discounting his batting inability and unwillingness to put in the hard yards, he was a left-arm facsimile of Shaun Pollock: accurate, canny, subtle; a player who thought as much as he bowled, who always had a plan. Thus he wasn’t what South African cricket expected, and still doesn’t expect, of black players. Aaron Phangiso also didn’t fit the mould. Nor does Andile Phehlukwayo. Will they share, along with their initials, a career curve that droops into disappointment? Will cricket waste the keen intelligence of Temba Bavuma because, while easily good enough, he is not stupendous enough? Did Ntini play as many as 101 Tests by sheer force of will alloyed to an outsized public persona?
Accordingly, to silence his critics, Tsotsobe couldn’t be merely good enough to play international cricket. He had to be super good enough. For a while, he was. The No. 1-ranked bowler in ODIs? Tsotsobe, for six months in 2012. The fastest South Africa bowler to reach 50 wickets in ODIs? Tsotsobe, in 26 games. The record stood until March when Lungi Ngidi — another out-and-out black star — got there one match faster.
And yet, despite Tsotsobe’s talent and skill, the progress he made, and the granite grounding given him mostly by his mother — his father died when he was nine — he faltered in a way that is, for many, unforgivable. Tsolekile went the same way, and is similarly despised.
Less so Hansie Cronjé, whose family are as prominent in sport in their community as the Tsotsobes, and who worked as hard at his game as Tsolekile. From what we know, Cronjé was significantly more crooked than Tsotsobe or Tsolekile. But, 21 years after his corruption was exposed and 18 years after his death in a plane crash, honesty about Cronjé’s fall from grace is difficult to find.
Either his innocence is steadfastly proclaimed or his guilt is explained as an act of nobly “taking the fall” for others, who are never named. Or it is accepted faithfully that, as Cronjé wrote in a confession he faxed to his pastor, Ray McCauley: “In a moment of stupidity and weakness I allowed Satan and the world to dictate terms to me. The moment I took my eyes of Jesus my whole world turned dark.”
Unlike Cronjé, Tsotsobe and Tsolekile have not had their misdeeds cushioned. Instead they have been branded, simply and simplistically, as bad. After their banning they faced uncertain futures at every level. So did the ringleader of the 2015 scandal, Gulam Bodi, who sold vegetables to get by in the wake of his expulsion.
That’s another contrast with Cronjé, who at the time of his death was working as a financial manager for an earth-moving equipment company and was studying towards a MBA. His life was back on track, his respectability largely restored. How can his whiteness not have been an important factor in his blithely accepted rehabilitation? How can the blackness of Tsotsobe and Tsolekile not be part of their ongoing vilification? What difference might being able to hide behind and lean on the privileges of whiteness have made to their lives before, during and after they transgressed?
We cannot know, and that is the real sadness. Whiteness has stood in the way of truth for centuries, and so well that many blacks believe the lies conjured to keep them in chains. “The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction,” Toni Morrison wrote. “It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and you spend 20 years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn’t shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says you have no art, so you dredge that up. Somebody says you have no kingdoms, so you dredge that up. None of this is necessary. There will always be one more thing.”
This article was commissioned a month ago, a dozen days after George Floyd’s lynching lit a righteous fire that roared around the world. Even though the piece was always going to involve many more words than other articles, and despite the unusual challenges presented by the requisite complexities, it should have been published before now. But it has faced another hurdle: the writer is white, the relevant sources black.
There can be no constructive discussion on what whiteness has done to blackness, and how to begin to try and repair the damage, without talking to blacks. But who can blame blacks if they are tired of talking? Some 494 years after a Portuguese ship left the shores of Africa bound for Brazil to mark the first voyage in the transatlantic slave trade, 213 years after slavery was outlawed in the UK, 156 years after it was abolished in the US, and 26 years after apartheid was officially scrapped, blacks are still having to argue that their lives matter.
It is the necessary duty of the rest of us, not blacks, to make that case and to ensure it is won and stays won. This is a white problem, not a black problem. Maybe that was why several blacks in cricket who have for years been happy to talk on and off the record on a range of subjects — some political, others not — found reasons to, politely, demure.
Lonwabo Tsotsobe was approached, told the premise of the piece, and asked for his mother’s number, which he kindly provided. Dorothy Tsotsobe was briefed on what was to be discussed with her, but did not respond to two messages. Asked if he would agree to be interviewed, Lonwabo Tsotsobe said: “No. I don’t want to talk about that.”
“Black lives matter only if they propel administrators’ careers by serving the elite — professional cricketers — while the majority of black cricketers, young players and amateurs, are left in the wilderness to fend for themselves.” – Omphile Ramela
Happily, not all the doors knocked on remained shut. Omphile Ramela is another of those black cricketers who reject the boxes others try to squeeze them into. For one thing, he is a batter. For another, he holds a Masters in economics from Stellenbosch University, one of the country’s best and previously a bastion of white academia. He has toiled away at a decent first-class career, playing for the Cobras, the Lions and South Africa A, without reaching the senior international stage. At 32, that now seems unlikely. But, as a senior pro, he has given the game much that is not fully appreciated except by those in his dressingroom. The game needs solid citizens like Ramela, and the fact that he is the serving president of the South African Cricketers’ Association (SACA) is testament to his status as exactly that.
He declined to be interviewed, but offered a written statement. Here it is, unabridged: “In 2011 it was a pipe-dream for South African domestic cricket to have one black African cricketer per team. In other words, on a weekend with all six franchise teams playing you would have fewer than six black players on show.
“In fact, my estimates suggest that for a period spanning 20 years since unity in 1991, black African representation was around 4% to 5% in four-day professional cricket. In international cricket, for the same period, black African representation was at an estimated 10%. In Test cricket, for the majority of 20 years, Makhaya Ntini was the dominant black African representative.
“From 2012/13, government insisted that CSA take action against the lack of transformation within the game. Gradually, each team would be compelled to play one black African for year one; next season two per team. The targets settled at three black Africans per team. This radically shifted black African representation from a low base of 4% 5% to a minimum of 27% in three years. International cricket would similarly move from a low base to 27% black African representation. This policy implementation coincided with the buoyant national mood for transformation under former president Jacob Zuma’s administration.
“I, fortunately, was a beneficiary of the policy. In all fairness, without the policy, I would not have had the privilege to play professional cricket, be president of SACA and even write this. In fact, many black African players that fans have come to admire would never have made it.
“What does the future hold? We have had approximately eight years of targeted transformation for greater black African presentation. More specifically, we have had five years of stable implementation of this policy, at three black Africans per team.
“However, there are already two opposing schools of thought. The cricket community is divided: one group believes targets should be done away with and often cite meritocracy as their defence. The other group says without a transformation policy the system would gravitate towards its discriminatory nature. In my view, meritocracy arguments are used to insinuate that black players are not competent relative to their white counterparts. And they often hide racism. The reality is black African cricketers have had five years of affirmative action. It goes without saying that it is not enough and it is clear that cricket was unable to self-transform and lead the process. As a country, if we are serious about transformation, we will demand more of it. And we will demand that the system gives us the best version of ourselves.
“I’m sharing this chronology of events in the hope that it is self-evident that, firstly, cricket was struggling to self-transform, and, secondly, the need for transformation given the inherent discrimination within the system.
“However, despite the upward trajectory in transformation at a professional level, there has been significant decline in grassroots and developmental cricket within the township and rural areas. The throughput rate of quality is lower. Young people are getting less exposure and opportunities to showcase their talent. This is symptomatic of our times, where black lives matter only if they propel administrators’ careers by serving the elite — professional cricketers — while the majority of black cricketers, young players and amateurs, are left in the wilderness to fend for themselves.”
Not all of us are capable of offering arguments as impeccably reasoned as Ramela’s. Not all of us are as formidable as Dorothy Tsotsobe. Not all of us have Anthony Tsotsobe’s patriotism and sense of duty. Pray none of us suffer his cruel, unfair end. None of us have Ntini’s inexhaustible energy. Few of us have had the privilege of his company when he is alone and earnest and out of the cocoon of craziness he wears like a shield. All of us should know that Rabada has a razor-sharp mind, which he applies to cricket and a lot more besides. And that Bavuma is a philosopher in pads wising up the world one well-considered word at a time. Also that some of us, like Lonwabo Tsotsobe and Tsolekile, will veer off the straight and narrow and be disproportionally punished.
It’s tempting to represent these lives as shades of grey. That would be wrong. They are, each of them separately and all of them together, a handful of the myriad and varying black lives that have given the world so much, had so much taken from them or not been given so much of what is rightfully theirs.
All lives should matter. Millions of black lives do not. That must change, and keep changing. Until there is no them. Only an us.
First published by Cricbuzz.
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In South Africa, an already groggy game faces the distinct possibility of going down for the count for good.
TELFORD VICE| Cape Town
NOT for the first time in one of the most disunited societies on earth, South Africans are not speaking with the same voice. Some are adamant that almost nine weeks of lockdown have not been enough — or stringent enough — to slow the spread of the coronavirus. Others are outraged the country hasn’t taken more steps towards normality. Sadly, as with everything here, the issue has become politicised.
Supporters of the ruling African National Congress (ANC) are broadly in favour of the measures taken. The opposition, notably the Democratic Alliance (DA), want the rules relaxed. The ANC speaks largely for the majority black population. The DA is the standard-bearer for the white minority. Blacks and whites have taken to social media to attack each other in tirades fuelled by ignorance, unfairness and abuse.
Like every industry, cricket is caught in the middle of all that. Unlike almost every other industry, millions of South Africans think they own shares in the company. Heaped on top of everything else the game faces — an apparently bottomless pit of financial woe, a mounting governance crisis, a struggling men’s team, the public’s dwindling confidence in cricket’s chances of pulling itself out of its nosedive on and off the field — little wonder the mood is gloomy. “We have an existential crisis,” Andrew Breetzke, the chief executive of the South African Cricketers’ Association (SACA), said during on online press conference on Thursday. “The future of cricket is at stake. We’ve all got to work to make sure the game survives, and then prospers.”
What would South Africa’s priority be, and why?
To make some money, fast. Even before the virus changed everything we knew about the world, Cricket South Africa (CSA) were forecast to lose up to USD55.9-million by the end of the 2022 rights cycle. Now no-one can put a number on how much they won’t have in the bank in the next few years.
When could it possibly happen?
India are being courted ardently to come and play three T20Is near the end of August, which would boost CSA’s coffers to the tune of USD10-million. That would win back some of cricketminded South Africans’ belief that CSA had a clue what they were doing. With that would come renewed interest from sponsors, currently an endangered species.
What are the (other) roadblocks?
Lockdown regulations in both countries may not have been sufficiently lifted by August to enable Virat Kohli’s team to make the trip. If they come they are likely to have to spend 14 days in quarantine before the series and another 14 days afterwards, and spend all their time here in a sanitised biobubble. An attractive proposition, no? South Africa will be far from the only country trying to woo world cricket’s cash cows, so the lobbying for India’s presence will be intense. Graeme Smith, CSA’s director of cricket, did his bit in that regard at Thursday’s presser by punting BCCI president Sourav Ganguly for ICC president as hard as he used to hammer legside deliveries to the boundary.
That aside, what does the future look like?
CSA are considering scrapping what would otherwise be the first half of the season, and using the Mzansi Super League to get things going in January. That would look good on television, but the stark reality is that some of South Africa’s domestic players are already resorting to mental health counselling and emergency funds to pay their living costs, both provided by SACA. An already groggy game faces the distinct possibility of going down for the count for good. South Africa could become nothing more than a supplier of players to foreign teams and competitions, in the same way that baseball’s minor leagues exist only to produce individual players for the top level. The slightly better news is that CSA’s operational staff, led by acting chief executive Jacques Faul and Smith, seem to be determined not to allow that to happen.
First published by Cricbuzz.
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Bulletproof Truth 