A half-breed like Hendricks in South Africa’s Test team? Unthinkable. No matter how good he was as a player, he was born not good enough.
TELFORD VICE | Cape Town
THREE white men are at a Cape Town bookshop talking about a work two of them have written about a black cricketer. Three of the questions from the audience come from women. Two of the questioners are black. Discuss.
Not that there is a lot of discussion in South African cricket. What there is a lot of is shouting — from whites at blacks who question why they do not have a bigger presence in the game in all avenues and at all levels, from blacks at whites who highlight failings by those who are black, and from brown people who lament that once they weren’t white enough to be considered equals and now they aren’t black enough. All too often, the shouting is a kneejerk defence against the indefensible.
Chris Nenzani, Cricket South Africa’s president until their annual meeting on September 5, when he is due to vacate that office, is a lightning rod for much of that anger. Respected for most of a tenure that started in February 2013, he will leave the game stained by the past 18 months, which have seen galloping financial losses, compound fractures of governance, dwindling sponsorship and mounting public and stakeholder disapproval.
Thus, and perhaps unfairly, Nenzani, who is black, will go down as CSA’s worst ever leader. But say a word against him and, regardless of the unimpeachable facts of the matter, if you are white or brown you will likely be met by irrational, abusive screeching in his defence. The reasons why go beyond what one person, black, brown or white, competent, mediocre or inept, could ever achieve.
“What did you expect? I don’t know why we’re so surprised. When you put your foot on a man’s neck and hold him down for 300 years, and then you let him up, what’s he going to do? He’s going to knock your block off.” There’s a chilling jolt of currency in those words in the wake of the public killing of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis on May 25, and the nuclear reaction that has spread far beyond that street of unnecessary death. But they were said by Lyndon B. Johnson in the angry aftermath of the assassination of Martin Luther King in April 1968.
Forty years later enough of the United States’ white majority voted for Barack Obama to make him their country’s first black president. Four years after that, they kept him in the job. But then, in retaliation for eight years of what looked like progress, they elected Donald Trump, a shameless juggernaut of retrogression and division who represents the seething rejection of racial and gender justice. For Americans of every stripe, it’s back to the past.
Similarly, not nearly enough about the reality of black South Africans’ lives have changed since they won their freedom 26 years ago. Instead, whites remain on top of almost any pile worth measuring, including cricket.
Thirty-six men have captained South Africa’s official Test team since March 1889. Thirty-four have been white. Of the 29 debuts handed out across the formats since the start of 2019, only four have gone to black Africans, who comprise more than 80% of the population and form the majority of cricket’s player base and following. These figures are crude but rude with the truth that the game, despite significant efforts to darken it, remains unbearably white.
Among the major sports only football puts national teams on the field that demographically represent the nation more or less accurately. Much has been made of the racial rainbow that was the South Africa rugby side that won the 2019 World Cup, but only five of the XV who started the final against England were black African. Then there’s the shibboleth that in South Africa blacks play football and whites play rugby and cricket. It is a lie invariably peddled maliciously.
Apartheid was consigned to history in April 1994, but anyone who argues that the country isn’t still in structural and systemic racism’s dismal grip lives in a universe parallel, and at least as warped, to that occupied by Chris Nenzani’s noisier supporters.
On June 4 the minister of sport, Nathi Mthethwa, met with the Eminent Persons Group (EPG) and, a release said, “was concerned about the lack of implementation of the EPG team recommendations; and went as far as proposing an enforcement mechanism using legislative instruments to ensure that all the transformation objectives are realised”. The EPG reported that “more than 50% of the audited federations have achieved their transformation targets”, but also that “black Africans and women are underrepresented in every sphere of South African sport”.
The same could be said about all aspects of modern South African life. Apartheid was consigned to history by Nelson Mandela’s election as president in April 1994, but anyone who argues that the country isn’t still in structural and systemic racism’s dismal grip lives in a universe parallel, and at least as warped, to that occupied by Nenzani’s noisier supporters.
How much of all that might Krom Hendricks have helped change, for the better, had he been given the opportunity he earned rightfully? Considering the forces ranged against him, maybe no more than minimally. But it is a thought worth exploring nonetheless.
Hendricks was a rock star fast bowler from the Cape who was in his pomp in the 1890s. Tall, broad and moustachioed, he ripped through batting orders like a demon — the English team that toured South Africa from December 1891 to March 1892 compared him favourably to Fred Spofforth himself — and he should have roared into the Test team. Doubtless he would have if not for the accident of his birth.
Hendricks’ father was white. His mother was black. Such mixing and matching in the gene pool was not unheard of in Cape Town, a port city, after all, where the world’s disparate peoples met on more equal terms than in less liberal places. But the products of such unions were not welcome in the polite white society that held their superiority in all circles — including on the cricket oval — to be at once self-evident and inviolate.
A half-breed like Hendricks in South Africa’s Test team? Unthinkable. No matter how good he was as a player, he was born not good enough. Nothing could change that. As one of the members of South Africa’s inaugural Test XI, Augustus Bernard Tancred — his best friends, all of them white, no doubt, called him “AB” — wrote in the Standard and Diggers News of February 14, 1894 of the possibility of Hendricks being picked to tour England later that year: “To take him as an equal would from a South African point of view be impolitic, not to say intolerable, and I would not have him on those terms if he were a better bowler than [former England ace George] Lohmann.”
Tancred’s vile words live and breath again on page 62 of Too Black to Wear Whites, a study of Hendricks’ life and career and the context in which he lived. Two of the white men at that Cape Town bookshop were the authors, Jonty Winch and Richard Parry. The third, André Odendaal, wrote the foreword. All are historians, and cricket people with a gift for marrying research with passion to tell stories that enrich our understanding of the past and so the present.
Hendricks deserves his due, not least because he has never had it before. He would have been, in his day, prominent in any reckoning of who the best and quickest fast bowler in the world might be. But, in 848 pages of Maurice Luckin’s supposedly authoritative history of South African cricket, published in 1915, Hendricks appears in prose only once, as “the Cape coloured boy, Hendriks [sic]”, and features in a solitary scorecard.
He was a victim of his time and his circumstances, with powerful figures like arch-imperialist Cecil John Rhodes personally involved in stymieing his progress. This disgrace reached the level of preventing Hendricks from earning a living by playing professionally for clubs. But he was not about to go quietly, writing bristling letters to newspapers and even enjoying the support of some of those the white elite considered “gentlemen”.
Hendricks himself was not above apparent prejudice, firing off a missive to the Cape Times in January 1894 in which he “must disclaim any connection with the Malay community. My father was born of Dutch parents in Cape Town, and my mother hails from St Helena — then why am I termed a Malay?” Why was he anxious not to be counted among the Malays? Perhaps because they were Muslim. Or because they were brought to the Cape as slaves. Or he was pulling the race card to try and be regarded as white, and so be permitted to earn money from playing cricket.
Winch and Parry have done the game a great service by delving deeply into their subject to knot the loose ends of Hendricks’ previously barely told story, and in the process weave a vibrant vision of the South Africa of the time. While much has changed, it is depressing how much has not.
Hendricks was indeed too black to wear whites at a high level in his country in the 1890s, and he would have been for the next hundred years. More than 130 years have passed since his outrageous talent for taking wickets became impossible to ignore. South Africans are now parsing the difference between who is merely black — indigenous and mixed race brown people and those of Asian heritage — and who is black African, and on that basis making important decisions about the lives of individuals as they attempt to redress the viciously legislated social engineering of the past.
Mostly, care is taken to ensure this happens with due regard for all involved: there is no question that Kagiso Rabada, a black African, is South Africa’s best fast bowler in a generation. But it is equally true that black Africans are, rightfully considering the grotesquely skewed reality that went before, afforded more life and career opportunities than other race groups. Whether they are able to take them in a society where too much of the past infects the present in ways far bigger than cricket — the World Inequality Database reports that 1% of South Africans earn 20% of the country’s income, while 90% take home only 35% — is a different conversation.
Rabada, for instance, is the son of middle-class parents. But they rose from the desperately difficult beginnings universal to black lives of that time to become a doctor and a lawyer. Would their son be where he is had their hard work not paid for a place at a prestigious school that had produced seven international cricketers?
Rabada’s route to fulfilling his potential would not have been open to Hendricks, no matter how much talent he had or how hard his parents toiled to see it fulfilled. Even now he might consider the door half-closed rather than half-open. Then, he was not white enough. Now, he may not be black enough.
First published by Cricbuzz.
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