white supremacy – Bulletproof Truth

The prodigal returns. Now what?

“I understand the importance of standing against racism, and I also understand the responsibility of us as players to set an example.” – Quinton de Kock

Telford Vice | Cape Town

LOOK who’s back. Forty-five hours after he cast South Africa’s T20 World Cup campaign into chaos by pulling out of an important match in defiance of a reasonable directive from his employers, Quinton de Kock recanted.

He did so in a written statement of 682 words in which he said he is now willing to comply as instructed: “If me taking a knee helps to educate others, and makes the lives of others better, I am more than happy to do so.”

That’s a u-turn from the stance De Kock took on Tuesday in the wake of CSA’s board running out of patience for the players to settle on a uniform gesture to signal their support for the global fight against social justice, and ordering them to take a knee. The globally accepted practice hasn’t been acceptable to all of South Africa’s players, and it’s not difficult to see who. All of their black and brown players take a knee. All of the players who remain standing, some with fists raised, are white.

South Africa were under pressure to beat West Indies in Dubai on Tuesday in the wake of losing to Australia in Abu Dhabi on Saturday. But, rather than kneel for a few seconds — like all of his teammates did, apparently as effortlessly as most of the other players at the World Cup have done — then get on with the game, and then revisit the matter with the suits, De Kock not only refused to do so but also withdrew from the XI. He left his team in the ditch. Happily for them, they didn’t need him to win by eight wickets.

Forty-five hours on, what had changed? Not a lot, if we take De Kock’s statement at face value. But that would be to fail in our duty to interrogate what he wrote.

“I understand the importance of standing against racism, and I also understand the responsibility of us as players to set an example.” Unless De Kock had come to this realisation since Tuesday, he knew that going into the match. And still did what he did. And didn’t do. Something doesn’t add up.

“I did not, in any way, mean to disrespect anyone by not playing against West Indies, especially the West Indian team themselves.” Not especially the millions of South Africans of all races — the people his playing shirt says he represents — he caused, as he admitted, “hurt, confusion and anger”?

De Kock, who is white, wrote that he has brown half-sisters and a black stepmother. Ergo, “For me, black lives have mattered since I was born. Not just because there was an international movement. The rights and equality of all people is more important than any individual. I was raised to understand that we all have rights, and they are important.”

That could be derided as “some of my best family members are black and brown”. It could also raise questions about how someone who, because of the healthy dose of melanin in his family, should be in tune with what hurts black and brown people. So how can he not get the significance of refusing to take a knee? He should have known that what he didn’t do made him a standard-bearer for racists and racism.

Disappointingly, De Kock used his promising indication of social consciousness and the importance of respecting rights to justify his hotheaded — dare we say kneejerk — reaction to the board’s decree: “I felt like my rights were taken away when I was told what we had to do in the way that we were told.”

But it seems he has come down off that ledge: “Since our chat with the board [on Wednesday] night, which was very emotional, I think we all have a better understanding of their intentions as well. I wish this had happened sooner, because what happened on match day could have been avoided.”

On June 26, Lawson Naidoo, who chairs CSA’s board, told Cricbuzz: “Ideally I’d like to see the Proteas take a strong stance as a unified team” on social justice gestures, and that he would “try and persuade them that they need to adapt what they’re doing, because visually it doesn’t come across well. It sends out a message that there are divisions of approach.”

That was four months — 122 days — before the game against the Windies. How much more time did the players need to get the board’s drift? Or did they think, as powerful figures, they could simply ignore the alarm from on high?

There was more from De Kock in that vein: “I didn’t understand why I had to prove it with a gesture, when I live and learn and love people from all walks of life every day. When you are told what to do, with no discussion, I felt like it takes away the meaning.

“I won’t lie, I was shocked that we were told on the way to an important match that there was an instruction that we had to follow, with a perceived ‘or else.’ I don’t think I was the only one.”

You’re an accountant for the world’s biggest toothbrush company, representing thousands of households’ incomes. Unsurprisingly, you are an ardent believer in maintaining good dental hygiene. Your boss hands you one of the firm’s finest and instructs you to stand on the pavement outside your office and brush your teeth in public for 30 seconds. No toothpaste will be involved, so you won’t spit onto your shoes. You know it’s fakery. But, hey, it’s harmless, she’s the boss, everybody else agrees to do it, and you believe in this stuff, anyway. Besides, you have a major task waiting on your desk, a job you know you have to do properly for the sake of the company and all your fellow employees. Do you tell the boss to go to hell and embark on a one-person strike?

“Those who have grown up with me and played with me know what type of person I am. I am not a racist. In my heart of hearts, I know that. And I think those who know me know that.”

How could De Kock know he isn’t racist? As a white person in a white supremacist society, he cannot know what it is to be a victim of racism. Only the black and brown members of that society can know that. De Kock no doubt knows how not to behave in a racist fashion consciously, but he has no control over what he does unconsciously. Like every other white person, particularly in South Africa and regardless of the end of apartheid, he was born into racism and onto its right side. We were, in effect, born racist. There’s nothing we can do about the accident of our birth, but we can do something with the knowledge of the power of that accident.

That means years of work, some of it involving white people discussing and dissecting with other white people the myriad problems white people have created in the world — and doing something about them. At the very least, it means taking a knee when the black, brown and white world is watching us. To not do so could itself be seen as a racist act. Worse, to not do so is to arm racists’ deadly dangerous ideas. As we speak, many of them are vilifying De Kock on social media in the most disgusting ways for daring to spike their guns by changing his mind.

“I know I’m not great with words, but I’ve tried my best to explain how truly sorry I am for making like this is about me.” Wrong again, but in the right way. De Kock is weirdly wonderful with words. Sometimes he doesn’t use many of them, but we can be sure he says what he means and he means what he says. That makes him a media officer’s nightmare — they know he is going to tell us how he really feels. A press conference with him is an exercise in talking to a real person.

Clearly, De Kock had help crafting his statement. But that’s still his voice ringing through, from the gut and free of cliché. There are holes and clangers in these 682 words, but more than anything else they attest to his authenticity. De Kock isn’t claiming to be a flawless person. He is trying to explain his actions and inactions, and to apologise. He can consider all of that done. But there’s one more thing.

“I love every one of my teammates, and I love nothing more than playing cricket for South Africa. I just want to thank my teammates for their support, especially my captain, Temba. People might not recognise, but he is a flipping amazing leader. If he and the team, and South Africa, will have me, I would love nothing more than to play cricket for my country again.”

Don’t love that so much. Love the people you play for more, and show them that love. All of them.

First published by Cricbuzz.

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Heads up CSA: here comes Lawson Naidoo, ready or not

“I look at CSA in a very similar way that I would at state institutions that have been decimated in recent times.” – Lawson Naidoo, CSA board chair

Telford Vice | Cape Town

LAWSON Naidoo fell truly, madly, deeply in love on the morning of Thursday, February 5, 1970. He was weeks away from his seventh birthday. Fifty-one years on, his passion is undimmed. And thereby hangs a cricket story.

“I was at the 1969/70 Test match against Australia at Kingsmead, when Barry Richards made 94 not out before lunch,” Naidoo told Cricbuzz. “My love of the game goes back to then, and I’ve been a keen follower for all those years.” He relocated to Cape Town in 1994, and says he has missed only one of the 33 Newlands Tests South Africa have played since: against Pakistan in February 2013, when he was on holiday in India.

Naidoo has written on the game for various publications, including the now defunct Wisden Cricketer, and captains the Spin Doctors XI of Cape Town’s Friendly Cricketers’ Association, an honour he has held since the club’s founding in 1998. He self-identifies as “nowadays a lower middle order journeyman”, and describes himself as “a keen observer of the game from a playing perspective as well as its administration and governance”.

About that last bit, as of Tuesday Naidoo has been the chairperson of CSA’s board. And the first independent director in a role that, previously, was reserved for whoever was also the president — who was, and still is, drawn from the ranks of the 14 provincial affiliates and associates. The glaring lack of oversight in that structure led cricket down many a dark governance path.

So Naidoo’s election, enabled by a new memorandum of incorporation (MOI), which stipulates a majority independent board chaired by an independent, is the most heartening sign yet that CSA is sincere about cleaning up its act. Because Naidoo is more than a cricket romantic. He’s a public intellectual who, armed with a masters in law from Cambridge, among many other qualifications, has built a strong record over the past 35 years for not hesitating to tell right from wrong. These days he does so as the executive secretary of the Council for the Advancement of the South African Constitution (CAFAC), a progressive organisation, and is also a founding partner of the Paternoster Group, a political risk consultancy.

A focus of Naidoo’s work has been the interrogation of an establishment he helped create. He was among the political activists who went into exile during apartheid, and from 1987 to 1992 he worked for the African National Congress’ (ANC) mission in London. From 1994 to 1999, during Nelson Mandela’s presidential term, he served as a special advisor to Frene Ginwala, the speaker of South Africa’s first duly elected parliament.

The ANC was an exemplary liberation movement, and for 15 years after the country embarked on the road towards democracy in 1994 — when South Africans of all races, not only whites, voted in a general election for the first time — the party tried to meet the challenges of fairly governing an entire nation. But, with major systems and infrastructure designed to cater mainly for the tiny white minority, that proved all but impossible.

So hopes for “a better life for all” — an ANC slogan — were dashed, not least because of the intractable conflict between the expectations of a newly empowered electorate and a disproportionately white affluent class alarmed by the prospect of the revocation of its unearned privilege. But, in a country where opposition parties range from relics of apartheid to buffoons in berets, the ANC remains the only viable option at the polls even though all classes are dissatisfied with its performance.

The inevitable erosion in the integrity of South Africa’s experiment in democracy, and in the belief that it would succeed, made the ANC ripe for infection by abuse. In May 2009 Jacob Zuma was inaugurated, triggering almost nine years of rampant maladministration during which it was made increasingly clear that the presidency was little more than a front for a slew of corrupt figures. In October last year, Cyril Ramaphosa — also of the ANC — who became president after his predecessor was forced to resign under ever darker clouds, said more than USD34-billion had been stolen from state coffers during the Zuma years.

All of which is relevant, even in a cricket story. Naidoo has written widely on state corruption in South Africa and given evidence as an expert to an ongoing judicial commission launched in order to, government said, “investigate allegations of state capture, corruption, fraud and other allegations in the public sector including organs of state”. If you’ve kept up with developments at CSA since around 2009, that will sound familiar.

“I look at CSA in a very similar way that I would at state institutions that have been decimated in recent times,” Naidoo said. “I think the challenge of fixing CSA is not different from the governance challenges that the country faces in other respects. I see a direct correlation between what I do in my day job and what my role will be at CSA.”

To that end, Naidoo has put his trust in CSA’s new MOI: “Given my background at CAFAC, constitutions are very important. I see the MOI as the constitution for CSA, and we’ve got to live by that. Not just the platitudes about it but demonstrate it in how we operate — with openness and transparency.

“I think there’s been far too much secrecy about what happens, which is unnecessary in my view. We need much more open and transparent, and open to criticism. Because we will make mistakes. We mustn’t try and hide them from the public. If we make mistakes we must take responsibility and account for them. The biggest challenge is to restore public confidence in the administration of the game, and that includes players, fans, media, sponsors, and — very importantly — the ICC.”

The task of setting matters straight with the latter has fallen to Naidoo: on Thursday CSA said the board had decided he would represent the organisation at ICC meetings. In the past that was done by CSA’s president, a provincial leader and thus part of the old problems.

Naidoo will go into those meetings backed by the fact that South Africa is a full member of the ICC, and thus has to be taken seriously. The sponsors who have deserted CSA in recent years owe him no such respect. What might he say to them?

“You’ve been asking for an independent board, you’ve been asking for CSA to clean up its governance structures. I believe this MOI does that. We now have a properly constituted board in place with credible people on that board. You can now trust us with your money again.”

Unlike some of the suits who came before him, and spent thousands in company money on alcohol, Naidoo understands that “without money we’re not able to do what we need to do, which is to grow the game and broaden its appeal among all South Africans”.

And to keep the eyes of those who have made cricket their profession firmly on the ball: “One of our roles is to get cricket off the front pages and onto the back pages. If we fix the administration that will hopefully lead to success on the field, because the players have been distracted by what’s going on. Rightly so, because their livelihoods have been at stake. And not just at international level but at provincial and franchise level.

“We need to take away that concern for them and allow them to do what they’re best at, which is playing the game. Hopefully, by fixing this, we’ll allow the Proteas to resume their position as one of the top cricket teams in the world.”

If that makes Naidoo sound as if this isn’t his first cricket administration rodeo, maybe that’s because it isn’t. In 1991, when apartheid was still the law of the land but the wave of change was rising, Steve Tshwete — an ANC stalwart who would become sports minister — and Ali Bacher, by then the managing director of CSA’s forerunner, went to London to lobby the high commissions of West Indian countries to support South Africa’s readmission to the international game after 21 years of isolation. Naidoo arranged those meetings and accompanied Tshwete and Bacher to them.

That someone so deeply involved in the struggle should credit a man as polarising as Barry Richards with helping to spark his love for the game will make Naidoo difficult to put into one of the boxes South Africans reserve for each other — which will be a key advantage in an often cynically competitive arena where identity can matter more than anything else.

Richards, playing only his second Test, went on to make 140 in that innings, and Graeme Pollock 274: South Africa’s highest Test score for more than 29 years, and a display of batting so arresting it is still spoken of in close to religious tones. The South Africans won the match, the second of the series, by an innings and claimed the other three, two by more than 300 runs. And then they disappeared from view as isolation took hold.

One version of this narrative holds that team up as heroes who were unfairly denied their glory; that they were the best team in world cricket. Closer to the truth is that the Australians were reluctant tourists who arrived exhausted after a long tour of India, and wouldn’t have come at all had England’s 1968/69 visit not been cancelled by the South African government because the English had had the audacity to include Basil D’Oliveira in their squad. How dare they! Everyone knew South Africa didn’t sully themselves playing against opposition that wasn’t entirely white.

Others see that South Africa team as the apex of white supremacy, oblivious to the cruel joke that, had they been born any other race, their talent would have gone as undiscovered as that that lay dormant in their gardeners and maids.

Naidoo will know all that, and a lot more. For instance, the stands at Kingsmead on Thursday, February 5, 1970 would have been racially segregated. He was considered, by law, born not good enough to watch cricket among whites. And yet he still fell in love. A “lower middle order journeyman”? Yeah, right.

First published by Cricbuzz.

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