Seeing SA through the lens of cricket

There is an unspoken injunction in the newsroom that we should not interview our own. But I beg your indulgence while I make an exception for Niren Tolsi.

He is charming, erudite and, above all else, a true believer in the “truth to power” school of journalism. His 10-year slow journalism project “After Marikana” is the kind of inspiring work that wins him all the prizes and the fellowships.

But I am sitting at Chopstix in Blairgowrie in the thick of a torrential highveld storm to talk cricket. I am an unlikely interlocutor on this front — my thoughts on cricket have been stuck in a juvenile theory loop that I developed back in high school.

Basically, I believe that cricket is a well-disguised coming of age ritual for young men of colonial bent, dressed in virginal whites, played on a green and sprinkled with many barely disguised allusions to their burgeoning malehood — what with the maiden overs and the suggestive crotch adjacent rubbing activities. 

I am here feasting on outrageously wonderful steamed buns, fish, cucumber salad and fried rice (Niren is a regular at the Melville branch and wanted to come to the new Chopstix outpost so he can disabuse me of my fixed cricketing ideas and enlighten me).  He has spent the past month launching his book of essays: Writing around the Wicket — Race, Class & History in SA Cricket all over town.

His collection of essays is culled from a lifelong fascination with the sociopolitics of the sport.  “I started getting back into cricket after the Nicholson commission. The profile of the South African team was changing at the time. My mom, for example, is still ‘anyone but South Africa’ when it comes to cricket. So, I started appreciating characters like Hashim Amla, JP Duminy, Makhaya Ntini ... and I started returning to the cricket stadium. Then I started thinking more about cricket in terms of politics and society, identity, nationalism, all these kind of things which, if you go back to CLR James, the Trinidadian Marxist, and people like Neville Cardus — there's a long literary tradition.

“So, I'm reading a lot of that stuff and then thinking about the sociopolitics of South Africa through the lens of cricket. It was a nice respite from writing about intergenerational trauma and state violence all the time, you know? It allowed me a little space to kind of wiggle and be a bit more poetic and elegant and literary about the state of the nation.”

You see, it’s working! I am already thinking about cricket differently. It’s a metaphor for practically everything. What then is his conclusion regarding the state of the nation? I might have even asked him to compare rugby and cricket so that we can really delve into this properly.

“Like most sports, they mirror the fractures that exist in our society. So that kind of comes out in the writing I do. I mean, rugby for me — and I read it a little bit from the outside because I don't follow rugby that much — took the political will of somebody like Rassie Erasmus. That focus and will led to the team that we have now, which is a lot more representative than the cricket team.

“The other thing is that, essentially, there's an indigenisation of cricket that happens in the form of the colonies, which then allows the sport, which has been instrumentalised to expand Victorian morality and colonialism and extractivism, to be reinterpreted and used to speak back to the centre of empire.

“And you see that with, for example, the great Indian teams of the '70s, '80s and '90s, where you have, like, Viv Richards listening to Bob Marley. He wears the reggae wristband. Marcus Garvey is an influence. You have people like Gordon Greenidge (Barbadian cricketer) who was part of the Windrush generation, and they've experienced fascism first-hand when they go to play in England.

“So you have these players who are kind of like politically sussed. And you’re talking about this impulse emerging in the West Indies at that particular time around independence, which coalesced with this idea of identity and cricket, and using this instrument to really reassert yourself in a different way, outside a colonial imagination, or the apartheid imagination — back to the centre.

“And so all these things coalesce in a way which, for me, doesn't really happen in South Africa because our cricketers come through the elite-school system. There's no egalitarianism. We don't live in a normal society so there can't be normal sport.”

How has that changed? “There is that class transformation, I suppose, but what you're seeing are middle class, black and brown kids who are making it into the cricket team, but we have a long history of cricket in South Africa, among black and brown communities, which are not embedded in this and for a long time, the impulse by a white-dominated media was to ignore or even erase history and excellence in sport, in cricket, for example.

“Now my book is not a definitive kind of history or a definitive alternative history. I think there are scholars like Andre Odendaal and Chris Reddy who’ve done much better work. What mine is is a collection of essays which I’m hoping will get people to reflect through sport on where we are.”

Which is why he is really interested in the women’s game. “That's where you see queerness being articulated quite proudly. You're seeing people from different walks of life and socioeconomic backgrounds in South Africa. And so I think it is happening there not because of Cricket South Africa, but because of something natural that’s happening in the women’s game that isn’t happening in the male game.”