Cracking the nod at Kelvin Grove

“I played him pretty well. Until a brain fart. A big one. Then I sat in the changeroom.” – Dean Elgar’s not quite haiku on his dismissal.

TELFORD VICE at Newlands 

YOU can see the backside of opulence from the toilet windows at the rear of the upper floors of the massive curve of concrete and glass that hugs Newlands’ northern boundary. Cream walls of various sizes and green roofs of differing heights are ranged over an area that seems bigger than the ground sprawling behind you. You’re looking at the Kelvin Grove Club, which has given its name to one of the ends at what Faf du Plessis has taken to calling “the new home of cricket”.

No doubt the members would approve. Each “ordinary” specimen of that ilk pays R6 318 a year for the privilege of being welcomed through the grandly gabled facade of the manor house designed by Herbert Baker, British colonialism’s unofficial architect-in-chief, that faces away from Newlands. It’s the kind of club that is not nearly common enough to bother with making a Wikipedia page. You just don’t know what sort of ghastly riff-raff reads that stuff. And might think of joining. It doesn’t simply have a squash court; it has eight. Not only does it boast 11 tennis courts, eight of them are floodlit. Don’t forget the four croquet lawns. And the wine cellar. There are seven bars and restaurants, including one specialising in sushi and champagne. How utterly splendid.

When the club was founded in 1924, would it have accepted as members people like Dean Elgar or Rassie van der Dussen? Despite sharing a surname with a favourite of Victorian and Edwardian England who set pomp and circumstance to music, Elgar is a steak-and-chips fella from Welkom in the Free State gold fields, and as blue-collar in the flesh as he is at the crease. Van der Dussen’s pronounced Afrikaans accent would probably have been enough to blackball him — Afrikaans was the language spoken by the people the British, and their South African-born descendants, employed to manage the black workforce. They couldn’t very well be let into The Club. The same would have gone for Du Plessis, and none of the four black players in South Africa’s team for the second Test against England would have bothered trying to join. If they had, in 1924, the police would have been called.   

But it was Elgar and Van der Dussen who bossed Kelvin Grove on Saturday, and there was nothing the sushi snobs could do about that. The Kelvin Grove End, that is. For more than three hours, and for 291 balls, they kept England’s bowlers at bay with batting that at times looked like what a couple of decrepit old men, having had too much champagne, might come up with on the croquet lawn. Sorry, one of the croquet lawns. But it served its purpose.

Elgar has made a career out of hanging tough, so his grit was no surprise. Expected, even. Van der Dussen came up hitting the white ball ball using authentic strokes but with nuclear power. Saturday’s innings, Elgar said, was proof that Van der Dussen was not a “trap en klap” player. The Afrikaans phrase defies translation, but is perhaps best rendered as “step and smash”.

And so they went, adding 117 runs. Until Elgar slapped an apparently innocuous delivery from Dom Bess, the debutant off-spinner, straight to Joe Root retreating from mid-off. It was a right-arm version of exactly the kind of filth that has earned Elgar 15 Test wickets. Small wonder he stood there and smiled like a loon. Talk about trap en klap. “I played him pretty well,” Elgar said. “Until a brain fart. A big one. Then I sat in the changeroom. It’s not right of me as a senior batter to play shots like that. But I’m a human with two arms, two legs and the other thing, so I’m also allowed to make mistakes.”   

Batting had to be done at the Wynberg End as well, of course. But the hotter spot was 22 yards north. The surface has been fair to all who have batted and bowled on it, but there has been noticeably more zip and zap at the Kelvin Grove End — not least because a significant crack outside the right-handers’ off-stump has opened after two days under an intense sun. It’s also where most of Saturday’s important moments happened, including all three of Van der Dussen’s brushes with dismissal.

He was given out by Paul Reiffel despite edging the cover off a James Anderson delivery. Then he was caught off a Stuart Broad no-ball. Both times replays righted the umpires’ errors. And only Ben Stokes’ elbow juddering into the ground after he dived to take what would have been a fine catch — which spilled to earth — at second slip stopped Van der Dussen from falling to Anderson. In the same over that Board overstepped, Elgar had to hit the ball a second time after it spun back at him and his stumps. “That’s the game, hey,” Elgar said with a shrug about all that.

But England roared back into the contest in the last hour, removing Quinton de Kock, Van der Dussen — for 68, a consecutive half-century — Dwaine Pretorius and Keshav Maharaj for only 24 runs. “They got one foot ahead of us,” Elgar admitted. 

This time, he didn’t say anything about his arms, his legs. Or the other thing.

First published by Cricbuzz.

Baklava, bridges and brutality: inside Erdoğan’s Turkey

The hand of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan the closet islamist – some accuse him of practising neo-Ottomanism – trying to subvert Turkey’s decades of secularism is plain to all who want to see it.

TELFORD VICE in Cape Town

“ARE you a christian?” The question was trapped in the amber of the muslim call to prayer ringing out all around. It was asked by an old man as we stood across the street from the Armenian Orthodox Patriarchate and in front of St George Church in the Fatih area of Istanbul upon a golden Sunday evening a few weeks ago.

I said I was free of faith. He looked bemused.

“Free of faith? Free of faith! Hmph! But without faith you cannot live.”

I did not argue the obvious: here I was, alive, well and happy. Probably, in significant part, because I was free of faith.

He didn’t pursue the issue, no doubt considering me a lost cause. Instead he unfurled priest’s vestments, all but disappeared into their billowing blackness as he donned them with a flourish, bade us farewell, and marched theatrically into the church to solemnise a wedding. Father Elvis, not his real name, had entered the building.

In a restaurant in thoroughly hipsterised Karaköy, a young woman sat among friends who had gathered to mark one of their birthdays. Only she wore hijab. But, like everyone else at the table, she smoked and swigged beer from the bottle.

Was she rebelling against her culture? Was she a subversive in disguise trying to undermine the faith that signals that culture? What would the Istanbullus who are adamant that the nation is divided strictly into those who drink alcohol and those who do not make of her? She had faith, it appeared. Would Father Elvis have approved?

Like baklava, Turkey has many layers. It is more probable than possible, in only a few of Istanbul’s teeming streets, to find cafés serving muddy Turkish coffee alongside those offering the jet fuel that is Antipodeans’ gift to espresso.

Or classy bars and restaurants showcasing some of the 61.5-million litres of wine the country producers annually — much of it of high quality, but only 5% of it exported — to a nation of more than 82-million, 99.8% of whom call themselves muslim.

Or nostalgic shrines to Mustafa Kemal Atatürk — the modernising secularist who was galvanised by leading an army to victory over the Allies, commanded by Winston Churchill, at Gallipoli in 1916 into the founding father of modern Turkey in 1923 — within sight of staunchly sacrosanct places of worship.

Or luridly pink-mouthed, wigged, tight-topped transsexual sex workers leaning out of first-floor windows and trying, loudly, to fish customers from the streaming pavements leading to a market frequented by conservative Kurdish women, identifiable by their penchant for snowy, delicately tassled, almost gossamer hijab.

Or 3.6-million Syrians, having fled the war at home, transposing their lives — complete with cardamom-laced coffee, a type of dried spinach called molokhiya, and restaurants using the same names, offering the same menu, staffed by the same chefs and waiters, serving the same customers as they did in Damascus and Aleppo — onto a city that has shape-shifted through the ages from being called Lygos, Augusta Antonina, Byzantium, Stanbulin, Constantinople, Islambol, Polin, Bolis, al-Qustantiniyya, the New Rome, the New Jerusalem, to Throne of the Romans.  

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has mastered separating the layers of the baklava just far enough — while also keeping the whole in one piece — to stay in power.

Born, on February 26, 1954 in Kasımpaşa, an ancient section of Beyoğlu on Istanbul’s European side whose hills tumble into the Golden Horn, Erdoğan grew up selling lemonade and simit, a kind of crisp, sesame-seeded bagel that is the breakfast of choice for almost every Turk, in the streets — where he also played football.

Rather than a prolific scorer he was blessed with the foresight to create goals, and played professionally for Kasımpaşa. These days the club’s stadium, immaculately appointed but small with a capacity of only 14 000, bears his name.

That doesn’t fit with rest of the Erdoğan story, because what he does he does big. Bridges swoop and gleam, one, across the Golden Horn, comes replete with a metro stop, another is the third suspension bridge across the Bosphorus. A mosque in the grand imperial manner, big enough to hold 63 000, looms lumpily in the distance. A vast new international airport is slickly efficient and almost an enjoyable place to be. A tunnel has been burrowed under the Bosphorus, all the better to apply a laxative to Istanbul’s chronically car-clogged colon.

Erdoğan holds a Trumpian perspective laced with Putinesque overtones, which never fails to quicken the patriotic pulse, particularly of Turks outside the main centres. At the Bosphorus bridge’s opening in August 2016, he presented a Turkish proverb as his own profundity: “When a donkey dies it leaves behind its saddle. When a man dies he leaves behind his works. We will be remembered for this.”

But, as with Donald Trump, there is dodginess in the details. The running track that hugs the shore under the bridge over the Golden Horn looks like something out of user-friendly Brisbane. Alas, it peters out in less than a kilometre.  

Similarly, kiosks flutter with all manner of newspapers, 45 of them national dailies, and another 15 exclusive to Istanbul. And few will say less than a glowing word about Erdoğan, not least because 231 journalists have been jailed in the wake of a failed coup on July 15, 2016.

The hand of Erdoğan the closet islamist — some accuse him of practising neo-Ottomanism — trying to subvert Turkey’s decades of secularism is plain to all who want to see it.

Mosques are built in spaces previously dominated by churches, and like all the others in the country they are funded by the regime, which pays everything from the salaries of clerics to the cleaning bills — and controls what is preached. Every Thursday evening the sermon for the next day’s juma service, the week’s most important and best attended prayer for muslims the world over, flutters into the inbox of every imam in Turkey. That’s not to say the men of the cloth don’t have a choice: either they relay the message as is, or follow the themes outlined, helpfully, in the same document.

Lessons on evolution and Atatürk and his successor, Ismet Inönü, have been removed from the school curriculum amid promises to teach “from the perspective of a national and moral education” to “protect national values” — code for a more conservative, religious approach.

And it’s working. Turkish flags displayed prominently in the streets, and there are many, have been put there either by overt nationalists or immigrants desperate to proclaim their affection for the country. 

If you want to research why that has happened if you are in Turkey don’t bother with Wikipedia: since April 2017 the site has been banned there in the wake of articles that said the country was a state sponsor of terrorism.

“My motherland, my beautiful but bruised motherland, is not a democracy,” Turkish author Elif Shafak wrote in an article for Politico last year. For views like that she is routinely rubbished in Erdoğan’s press, and never given the right of reply.

Yet erudite, impassioned opposition to the president and his government’s policies is as easy to find in Istanbul’s streets as crisp baklava and muddy coffee.

People speak openly about their fear of where Turkey might be after Erdoğan, who has ruled since 2003, is no longer in office; when his powerful allies in the construction industry finally run out of money. But some of those same people decline to accept the fact of the genocide, perpetrated by the Ottomans, that claimed the lives of 1.5-million Armenians between 1914 and 1923. On that score they are one with Erdoğan’s regime, which protested petulantly in April when France and Portugal officially recognised this systematic mass murder for what it was.

The Kurds will know how the Armenians felt. Erdoğan has long labelled their organised structures as terrorist, and there is evidence that in their attempts to raise funds they operate more like the mafia than political groups. But Turkey’s army didn’t ask who was a member of what when they began driving the Kurds out of northern Syria on October 9 — which they were free to do after Trump withdrew a small force of strategically situated American troops. Erdoğan wanted a buffer 30 kilometres deep and 480 kilometres long on Turkey’s southern border with Syria, and by October 28 his troops had displaced an estimated 130 000 and left 400 000 without access to clean water. How many have been killed in the cause is unclear.

On October 29 the anti-Trump US congress decided, by 405 votes to 11, that the Armenians had indeed been victims of genocide. As a position of principle it came a century too late. As a backlash against their own president it was clear, and derided by the Turks.

“Circles believing that they will take revenge this way are mistaken,” foreign minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu posted on social media. “This shameful decision of those exploiting history in politics is null and void for our government and people.”

The brutality and bloodletting has ceased, at least until Erdoğan makes good on his threat to chase the legions of Syrian refugees back from whence they came. But the damage has been done. It didn’t help the Kurds that most of them are, like Erdoğan, Sunni muslims. Not that they would have been spared had they been something else.

Because Erdoğan is, at his core, once all his artifice is stripped away and his ambition exposed, that thoroughly human thing: free of faith.

First published by New Frame.