“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.
Bulletproof Truth 