“Maybe the controlling interests in cricket are not politically progressive. So they have a problem when Lungi Ngidi wants to do something different.” – Wahbie Long, psychologist, academic and author
Telford Vice | Cape Town
TIME ticks towards a match in a stadium that shimmers with promise. These are the snap, crackle, pop moments when hope knows no bounds. Anything could happen in the coming seconds, minutes, hours, days.
Where you have come from to be here doesn’t matter. Neither does your race, gender, sexual orientation, size or age, nor to which religion, culture or worldview you ascribe. What does matter is that you are here now, united in the cause of supporting your chosen player or team. Can there be a more pristine democratic space in any society, emptied of agendas and utterly apolitical?
Except that politics is everywhere here, and not least in South Africa. Can you spare the money to buy a ticket? Are you among the masses in the stands or have you set yourself apart in the splendid isolation of a private suite? Do you belong to the credentialed classes in that bubble of contending egos and ideologies, the press box? Or are you working a proper job: behind a broom, a bar or a food counter?
How did you get here? In a bus, a minibus taxi (or three), an Uber, or your own car? Do you live close enough to walk or ride a bicycle? Are you in your comfort zone of town, or have you had to leave the township for the suburbs, or the suburbs for the city centre?
Each of these questions has a political dimension. You aren’t at the stadium by happenstance. You are here because of decisions, large and small, taken by you and others. Some were made hundreds of years ago by people who held the power to shape your destiny.
Although these truths should discomfort us, they are unlikely to anger us. But, should the players we have come to watch dare to state their position on issues that go beyond the narrowly defined boundaries of sport, outrage there will be. Certain issues, that is.
When the Proteas turn out in pink to raise funds for and promote the fight against breast cancer, no-one objects. When they take a stand against rhino poaching, no-one objects. When they give all the credit for their success to their idea of a god, no-one objects. But the gods help them should they decide to oppose racism, the most murderous, debilitating chronic disease of all time: the objections drown out every other opinion.
“I’m thinking of Lungi Ngidi wanting to take up the Black Lives Matter (BLM) cause and getting a lot of flack from white former players,” Wahbie Long, a clinical psychologist and academic and the author of “Nation on the Couch: Inside South Africa’s Mind”, told New Frame. “Maybe the controlling interests in a sport like cricket, in South Africa, are not politically progressive. So they have a problem when a sportsman like Lungi wants to do something different.”
Ngidi is not alone. From Muhammad Ali to Colin Kaepernick to Naomi Osaka, players who make plain their politics have been vilified by a public that wants them to turn up, play, and go home — like that old Fatti’s & Moni’s television commercial where the wisened Italian nona is wheeled out of the kitchen cupboard to cook and then spirited out of sight once the pasta is ready. Have we confused sport with video games? Players aren’t human; they’re simulations that go back into their boxes after the game.
LeBron James and Kevin Durant felt the sting of that view in February 2018 after they released a video criticising Donald Trump, then the US president. Trump, James said, didn’t “give a fuck about the people”.
Laura Ingraham took offence on Fox News: “Must they run their mouths like that? Unfortunately, a lot of kids — and some adults — take these ignorant comments seriously. Look, there might be a cautionary lesson in LeBron for kids: this is what happens when you attempt to leave high school a year early to join the NBA. And it’s always unwise to seek political advice from someone who gets paid a hundred million dollars a year to bounce a ball. Oh, and LeBron and Kevin: you’re great players but no-one voted for you. Millions elected Trump to be their coach. So keep the political commentary to yourself or, as someone once said, shut up and dribble.”
Invariably Black players suffer more for holding political opinions. Is that unavoidable in a white supremacist world, or a reflection that, too often, their white teammates don’t stand with them? When they do — as in England’s football team taking a knee — the shock and horror in the stands and beyond is palpable.
In 1967, when Ali refused to be drafted into the US military because of his opposition to his country’s involvement in the Vietnam War, he was fined, sentenced to prison — he remained free on appeal — and stripped of his world title. He also wasn’t spared in the press.
Here’s Jimmy Cannon, doyen of New York’s tabloid sport columnists: “The fight racket since its rotten beginnings has been the red light district of sports. But this is the first time it has been turned into an instrument of mass hate … Clay is using it as a weapon of wickedness. I pity Clay and abhor what he represents. In the years of hunger during the depression, the communists used famous people the way the Black Muslims are exploiting Clay. This is a sect that deforms the beautiful purpose of religion.”
Here’s another luminary of the New York sport press pack, Red Smith: “Squealing over the possibility that the military may call him up, Cassius makes as sorry a spectacle as those unwashed punks who picket and demonstrate against the war.”
The feeling was mutual across the country, with Jim Murray writing in the Los Angeles Times: “Cassius Marcellus Clay, one of the greatest heroes in the history of his people, has decided to secede from the Union. He will not disgrace himself by wearing the uniform of the army of the United States … From the safety of 103 years, he waves his fist at dead slave owners. Down to his last four Cadillacs, the thud of communist jackboots holds no dread for him. He is in this country but not of it.”
The use of Clay instead of Ali, which the boxer had adopted three years previously, was no oversight. It took another three years for the New York Times to require its reporters to call Ali by his chosen name — to accept his dictum, which he had unfurled after beating Sonny Liston in 1964: “I don’t have to be what you want me to be. I’m free to be who I want.” Cannon, Smith and Murray were, like most of their editors and readers, white: still the colour of power and authority in the many societies where whites think it is their right to define Blackness. It has fallen largely to Blacks to expose and oppose that reality.
“Causes like BLM are going to resonate with players who come from under-privileged backgrounds,” Long said. “They are going to want to be active on those kinds of platforms, and then they’re going to run into problems like Lungi has. The establishment, in certain instances, doesn’t look kindly on political activity by sportspeople.”
Even Black players who don’t take political stances are targets for racist abuse. As we learnt from social media during the Euro finals in July, having a penalty saved while Black is a crime against football. But should a white player balk at explaining his decision not to take a knee, or raise a fist, or stand to attention in support of the fight for social justice — but be happy to discuss rhino conservation — the fans come down on the reporters who had the audacity to ask him why. Will the real Quinton de Kock please stand up.
But De Kock, too, is not alone. Bafana Bafana have played 15 matches since George Floyd was murdered by Minneapolis police on May 25, 2020. Not once have they taken a knee. Why?
“If I think about how racially divided South African society is, and the fact that South African football is a predominantly Black sport, then it may well be that our Black footballers are moving mainly in Black circles,” Long said. “So all that stuff that kicks in when social comparisons are activated isn’t relevant. For someone like Lungi Ngidi, who is a Black man from an under-privileged background moving in white circles, race and privilege are more salient. All those contrasts are in your face. It’s hard to not feel some degree of resonance with a cause like BLM.
“There’s that great passage from Marx where, to paraphrase, his point is that the problem with inequality is not that you live in a shack but that the shack is in the shadow of a palace. That’s what fuels the tinderbox of emotion.”
Some don’t need injustice spelled out so clearly. Graham Mourie refused to captain the All Blacks against apartheid’s Springboks in 1981. Thousands of New Zealanders protested the tour, and were met with state violence. Socrates’ Corinthians insisted on filtering everything they did through a political prism: “Ganhar ou perder, mas sempre com democracia.” Win or lose, but always with democracy.
Sadly, for every Mourie, woke Kiwi, Socrates or Ngidi, there’s a Roland Schoeman — once an Olympic swimmer, now the author of bumptious letters to Cyril Ramaphosa offering his services as minister of sport. “For far too long politics and ideology have polluted sports to the point that many federations are in dire straits,” Schoeman wrote on August 3. “We need a minister of sport who is more interested in getting our young men and women to the point of success on major international platforms than the politics of federations and sports clubs. Surely we want to win as a nation?”
And surely we’re willing to sacrifice anything for victory — integrity, conscience, the responsibility of not only being in a society but also of it. That’s what’s coming soon to a stadium near you. Anything could happen, but not if it’s political.
First published by Cricbuzz.
Bulletproof Truth 