“I regarded my career as a war.” – Ashwell Prince
Telford Vice | Cape Town
THE good, the bad and the ugly have been in the spotlight at the hearings of CSA’s Social Justice and Nation-building (SJN) project this week. Like the fixers who came before him, Thabang Moroe tried to use the platform to polish his tarnished reputation. AfriForum, a pressure group that stinks of white supremacy, was intent on ignoring the elephant in the room — racism — and railing irrelevantly at the supposedly greater evil of quota selection.
And then there was Ashwell Prince, who was everything Moroe and AfriForum were not. In the best way: clear, considered, constructive, and firmly connected to reality. Listening to Prince testify on Monday was like watching him bat. It wasn’t always pretty but it was no less damn fine for that; hard, uncompromising, an honest struggle with the truths of the matter, and good luck getting him out.
“I regarded my career as a war,” Prince said. His testimony was no place for poignance, but every cricket person who heard or has read those words should be shocked enough to think long and hard about what they mean and why he felt that way. Cricket becomes a career for a select few and, for exponentially more others, a passion. Never, under any circumstances, should it invite comparisons with war. What did the game put Prince, and many like him, through as punishment for daring to be part of it?
Moroe’s submission amounted to little more than a vilification of the media — who, according to him, wrote him out of his job as CSA’s chief executive, from which he was fired in August. It was, presumably, the press who hoarded the unprecedented power that ended up in Moroe’s hands, the press who chased away sponsors alarmed by the lack of governance that befell CSA when he wielded that power, the press who spent thousands on booze paid for with Moroe’s company credit card, the press who mentioned Moroe 681 times — mostly in withering terms — in the 457 pages of an independent forensic report on the chaos in cricket, and the press who unfairly withdrew the accreditation of five of its most senior members to hamper their ability to do their jobs.
So far did Moroe veer off the SJN’s stated path that the project’s ombud, Dumisa Ntsebeza, interrupted him to read him the terms of reference. But that didn’t stop Moroe from blaming everyone for what went wrong at CSA during his disastrous tenure. Everyone except himself, that is.
As a black South African, there can be no doubting that Moroe has, does and will experience racist treatment from his white compatriots. To too many of them, he was given his job because he is black and made a mess of it because he is black. For those people, he will never be good enough because he is black. Closer to the truth is that, because he is black, we will never know how good he might have been. Some of those wrongs may well have been instrumental in leading Moroe astray. But he cannot expect to be taken seriously if he maintains, as he did on Tuesday, that he is without fault.
For instance, Moroe’s theory that he was removed to make way for Jacques Faul as acting chief executive, which in turn cleared a route for Graeme Smith to become director of cricket, doesn’t add up. Cricbuzz has seen messages, dated December 2, 2019 — four days before CSA suspended Moroe and nine days before Smith’s appointment was announced — in which Moroe wrote to Smith, “I think you are the man for this job! I really wouldn’t have approached you if I didn’t believe so! … This position is for you chief!”
AfriForum’s Quixotic tilt at the windmills of blackness might have been faintly funny had it not come from people who don’t get the sick joke that they owe everything they have in life to the fact that they were born white. Like so many of their sorry outlook they believe, falsely, that they have integrity. What they really have is the toleration of those they continue, despite everything, to undermine, deny and insult. Not that they can see that. That would require a measure of selflessness, which, like Moroe, they did not show.
The group’s written offering to the SJN was a report titled “The Collapse of CSA”, on its face a fiction because CSA has teetered but never collapsed. It spoke of teams being picked “for cricket reasons and for cricket reasons only”. As if such a thing were possible in a society shot through with septic racism. The top line of a subsection headed 2003 was: “The Proteas selected five POCs [players of colour] in the World Cup squad, as committed to by CSA.” As if that was all AfriForum could see, and as if these “POCs” were subhumans wheeled out from somewhere deep and dark and not cricketers who had built their games to the required standard along with everyone else.
“CSA announced that there would be no quotas for the World Cup in May,” goes the 2019 subsection. “Despite this, the Proteas averaged exactly five POC for the tournament — with only variations in the first two games — and no less than two black Africans featured throughout the competition, despite there being only three in the squad.” Because, you know, black and brown players couldn’t possibly make the XI because they were good enough. Oh no: players like Kagiso Rabada and Imraan Tahir were only in the XI because of the idiots and their politics. What? The number of white players selected is still significantly higher than that of black or brown players? Nevermind that. Quotas! Targets! Unfair!
That isn’t far removed from what Prince discovered when he arrived in the national squad in 2002: “There was no welcome from the coach. There was no, ‘Let’s make this guy comfortable’. It was a lonely place. A person knows when they are welcome, and you know when you are unwelcome. You can get a sense of whether people want you here or don’t want you here. It would have been nice for people to back you. You saw it happening to other guys your age, your peers. You saw it happening to a new player if he was white but it wasn’t happening if the player wasn’t white.”
But the political wasn’t only personal for Prince. Unlike the three stooges who represented AfriForum, he took the race conversation to new, higher levels. “We have got to find ways to select better cricket teams; from junior age groups, right to the top,” Prince said. “Are we really going to have an environment where my son’s friends, who are 12, 13, 14, are not going to get a game of cricket because they are white, or coloured or Indian? Is that the future of our cricket?
“CSA might have a picture in their mind of a team that has so many white players, so many black players, then ‘we feel we have the perfect transformation mix’. If you continue to pick [at a higher level] players who are performing to a lower level … [and] … other players cannot get in the team because they are not the right colour, you are going to forever have a problem.”
That moved Sandile July, one of Ntsebeza’s assistants, to say: “Those things would be said by people who are anti-transformation. They see anything that seeks to change the status quo as a threat to their comfort. There is this notion that competence goes with whiteness. So if you are black you are incompetent until you prove yourself otherwise.”
But, as the argument for a more inclusive, less exclusive future was made by Prince — a product of excellence and hard work given a fairer chance by transformation — it couldn’t be so easily dismissed.
What set Prince’s contribution apart is that it was concerned with more than singling out instances of racism. Prince also didn’t try to conjure grand conspiracies, nor did he focus on himself. Instead he looked, critically, at the realities of cricket as they have been shaped by the wider realities beyond. Of course there is racism in South African cricket: it is part of a deeply racist society. What are we — all of us — going to do about that?
First published by Cricbuzz.
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