by Arunabha Sengupta
1968.
When the team to travel to South Africa for the winter’s tour was announced, the reactions hovered around two extremes.
For most, the absence of Basil D’Oliveira was shocking. The man had just scored 158 against Australia at The Oval, and the echoes of his strokes had not died down yet. The man himself heard the announcement read out by Brian Johnston on the transistor set of Worcestershire opening bowler Brian Brain. When he was done, D’Oliveira put his head in his hands and wept.
In Potchefstroom, Louwrens Muller, Vorster’s newly appointed Minister of Police, was addressing a Nationalist rally. He interrupted his speech with the news that D’Oliveira had not been chosen. The announcement was greeted by loud and jingoistic cheering. Prime Minister Vorster himself was a relieved man. Veteran cricket writer Louis Duffus observed that there would be “a national sigh of relief.”
Of course after that Tom Cartwright withdrew due to injury problems. D’Oliveira was called back into the side. Vorster famously proclaimed that it was not the team of MCC but the team of the Anti-Apartheid Movement. D’Oliveira would not be welcome.
The tour was cancelled.
This is what Duffus wrote in The Star.
“D’Oliveira was for so long a dagger directed at the heart of South African cricket that surprise and shock at the cancellation of the MCC tour seems synthetic […] the law of the land says drive on the left, D’Oliveira was told to come out and drive on the right. England knew the law when a much greater cricketer, KS Duleepsinhji, could have been chosen to tour this country. He was not selected and nothing was ever said about it.
“MCC […] which exists solely to further the interests of cricket […] made the most crippling decision in the history of the game through blatant ignorance or deliberate ignoring of South African conditions.
“Because of one cricketer, the great players produced in this country and the game itself have both been victimised.
“Posterity will surely marvel how a player, helped to go overseas by the charitable gesture of White contemporaries, could be the cause of sending the cricket of his benefactors crashing into ruins.”
Duffus might have been terribly wrong about posterity, but the reactions to the article were exhilarating. In his autobiography Play Abandoned, he writes:
“The headmaster of an Afrikaans school, of whom I had not heard since we were contemporaries at King Edwards nearly 50 years previously, said extravagantly, ‘Your article should be hung in every cricket pavilion of the country.’
“For the remainder of the afternoon [on the day it was published] and night there was a succession of calls from people, some unknown, anxious to offer their praise.
“There were telegrams and letters and for some weeks, people I met had something to say about it.”
It restores faith in humanity a little when we read Duffus admitting that not all the messages had been complimentary.
The 1970 Spring Annual of Cricketer contained an article by Duffus which ‘clarified some misconceptions’ about non-White cricket in South Africa. “The indigenous African does not readily take to cricket […] Only a small percentage of non-Whites in South Africa are interested in cricket. To some extent their opportunities to play the game are limited but there is nothing in this country to compare with the national enthusiasm for cricket which is evident from childhood in the West Indies.”
It may be that instead of writing deliberately misleading nonsense, if Duffus had really tried to clear the actual misconceptions about non-White cricket, he could have embarked on a trip to Robben Island. But the White South African media did its bit in extending the Saramago-esque white blindness.
Rowland Bowen dismissed Play Abandoned savagely, underlining that the writer did not provide any glimpse of non-White cricket which was such a big part of South African cricket heritage. But, there were plenty of writers and readers of the established cricket world, still basking under the long-departed sun which used to shine on the erstwhile Empire, who hardly wanted to glimpse that side of the troubled society.
The articles of Dufus and the subsequent laudatory messages should be made compulsory reading for this and future generations, just as a reminder of how warped privileged and self-righteous thinking can become. All this is scarily recent. Indeed, these pieces of Duffus should be read to lay bare the convoluted thinking of White supremacists of South Africa and the Old Boys’ Club of cricket prevalent in those days.
Rest assured that all of that has not magically disappeared all of a sudden.
Apartheid regimes cannot operate as openly in the modern world. But systemic and subliminal apartheid continues to exist, not least in the sphere of cricket writing which Louis Duffus used to operate in.
Louis Duffus was born on 13 May 1904.