An Ivy League of about 25 schools have, still do, and are likely to continue to supply the bulk of South Africa’s male players.
TELFORD VICE in Paarl
STRANGE symmetry struck across the Indian Ocean last Sunday. Within the same minute, Quinton de Kock hoisted Adam Zampa to Mitchell Starc at mid-off and Dané van Niekerk slapped Sophie Ecclestone to Tammy Beaumont at point. Both De Kock and Van Niekerk were captaining South Africa in a T20 and both were opening the batting. But they were more than 22 yards apart. South Africa’s men’s team were playing Australia at St George’s Park. The women’s side were up against England at the WACA. Port Elizabeth and Perth are 8,112 kilometres from each other. So South Africa’s teams might as well have been on Mars and Venus. But that’s the case even when they’re in the same city.
King Edward VII School — otherwise known as KES — Afrikaanse Höer Seunskool — or Affies — Maritzburg College, Grey College, St Stithians and Hilton were the schools attended by De Kock, Faf du Plessis, David Miller, Pite van Biljon, Kagiso Rabada and Lungi Ngidi, who were all members of Sunday’s XI. Those institutions are likely to feature in the past of any South Africa men’s XI. As well as De Kock, KES has given cricket Ali Bacher and Graeme Smith: one school, three South Africa captains. And a host of mere internationals aside. Along with Du Plessis, Affies has produced AB de Villiers, Kruger van Wyk and Neil Wagner, among many others. The school’s website doesn’t bother listing alumni among first-class players: “Scores of Affies old boys currently play for senior provincial teams.” Graham Ford, Jonty Rhodes and Kevin Pietersen went to Maritzburg College, and Kepler Wessels, Hansie Cronjé and Ryan McLaren to Grey College. As did too many other prominent players to mention. The same is true of the rest of an Ivy League of about 25 schools that have, still do, and are likely to continue to supply the bulk of South Africa’s male players.
Those schools used to be reserved exclusively not only for whites but for the most privileged among them, and their status as cricketer factories is undiminished even in the modern, racially more equitable era. Soon after Makhaya Ntini was discovered in the impoverished village of Mdingi he was packed off to Dale College in King William’s Town. Geographically, that’s a journey of eight kilometres. In every other sense, it’s as far as Venus is from Mars. Ngidi followed a similar path to Hilton, and Andile Phehlukwayo to Glenwood High. So the school sport system has, in a handful of cases, proved a more effective mechanism for pulling blacks out of the economic and social deprivation they were assigned by dint of their race than almost 26 years of post-apartheid life. Cricket has helped propel them into the middle class.
But the homogeneity of that process means men who play cricket at a high level in South Africa have grown up with largely the same set of values and a similar regard for discipline and tradition, which would be recognisable to anyone who has been to an elite alma mater of the British or colonial sort. Apartheid tried to ensure that Mark Boucher and Ntini would live in starkly different worlds. But, thanks to cricket and the schools, that is not the case. Much of Boucher’s worldview would have been formed while he was still at Selborne College. So the authority he wielded, both as a senior player and now as South Africa’s coach, was and is readily understood and accepted.
That is not the reality in the South Africa women’s team. Sport is a major factor in maintaining the prestige of boys’ and co-ed schools. But in girls’ institutions academic performance matters far more than anything else. Hence no girls’ schools have a track record for producing top class cricketers. Rather, girls have to work their way into the game, vaulting prejudice as they go. They were accepted into the boys’ soft-ball cricket programme at a particular Cape Town co-ed junior school. But only for training: they weren’t allowed to play matches. Their parents objected, and won the right for their daughters to appear in games. When the players progressed to hard-ball cricket, the girls were again excluded. Another argument ensued, another victory was won. Cricket South Africa have made moves towards gender parity, but cricket as played by girls and women struggles to be taken anywhere near as seriously as that played by boys and men. Below international level women’s cricket structures are not as established as they need to be, and unlike on the male side of the divide the only women paid to play cricket in South Africa are in the national set-up. Consequently, in another departure from the men’s game, women’s teams are collections of contrasts. They haven’t been inculcated with uniform values that cut across race, class and religious lines. So Mars and Venus are in the same dressingroom.
The least conventional aspect of Mignon du Preez’ life would appear to be that she plays cricket for a living. She is married. To a man: Tony van der Merwe. Who is an urban planner. Without trying to be snide about Du Preez or Van der Merwe, that’s about as mainstream as modern life gets. Van Niekerk and Marizanne Kapp are also married — to each other. Shabnim Ismail and Trisha Chetty are in a long-term relationship. Sometimes. Laura Wolvaardt has put a career in medicine on hold to see how this cricket gig works out. Some of the players don’t need to know the price of a pair of batting gloves. Others wish they didn’t know. Still another knows the price of illicit drugs well enough to have fallen prey to substance abuse. None of the above would be accepted in a prominent men’s team in South Africa, much less the national side.
Imagine Rabada marrying Keshav Maharaj. That would be unfathomable to some, even those who know it would be legal and that they wouldn’t blink should two men whose names they didn’t know announce their engagement. They would also acknowledge that, statistically, some male players have to be gay. Steven Davies, who played 13 white-ball games for England between March 2009 and February 2011 and 225 first-class matches, most of them for Worcestershire and Surrey from May 2005 to September last year, came out as homosexual in February 2011. But there are none in his league of bravery in South Africa and few in the wider world, as there are in other sports considered central to sadly conventional ideas of masculine identity.
Are lesbians in sports like cricket tolerated by the majority of game’s traditional audience because the assumption is they are trying to be like men, and are thus hopelessly harmless to what is considered the norm? Would that ilk of cricket follower denigrate male gay players if they knew of them, because they would threaten the perceived manliness of the status quo? Does that traditional audience not give a damn about women’s cricket anyway, so they don’t care who plays it? The answer to all of these questions is, probably, yes.
For a minute last Sunday, none of this mattered nearly as much as De Kock and Van Niekerk getting out at awkward stages. Both their teams recovered well enough to win narrowly. While the joy was shortlived for De Kock’s lot — their loss at Newlands on Wednesday confirmed their fourth consecutive series defeat — the women have secured a place in the T20 World Cup semi-finals.
Infamously, South Africa have yet to win a World Cup. Deep inside every cricketminded South African a small thought is growing: what if the women get there first? For some, that comes from a place of fear and insecurity. For many more others, it is a spark of wonder waiting to catch fire. If that happens, cricket in South Africa — regardless of who plays it — will never be the same.
First published by Cricbuzz.
Bulletproof Truth 