da dobrowin： The South African cricket team probably don’t know what a stir theirvisit to Port-of-Spain for the second Test caused
da wazamba： John Young09-May-2001The South African cricket team probably don’t know what a stir theirvisit to Port-of-Spain for the second Test caused.On the day the cricketers’ plane landed from Guyana, the TrinidadGuardian published as its Thought For Today a line from Steve Bikoabout black consciousness.Three days later, the racier Newsday ran a colour piece on what fun itwas to be in the happy Test match crowd.The article included a startling line about boundaries being hit bySouth Africans for whom we still hold plenty bitterness in our hearts.The writer, Attillah Springer, didn’t specify, but we must assume thebitterness related to white South Africans. The main boundary hitteron the first day of the Test was Jacques Kallis who was 14 years oldwhen Nelson Mandela was released from prison. Springer really mustbelieve in the sins of the fathers being visited on the sons.Reading the article set me wondering about what the man who definedthe discourse on race, nationalism and cricket would have thoughtabout the South African visit. I think CLR James would have offered avery different perspective.Trinidad is proud that its dock workers were the first to refuse tounload ships carrying South African cargo and with an islandpopulation who suffered slavery and colonial oppression, the affinitywith South Africa is clear.However, Human Rights Day and the 2nd Test match also provoked alengthy, revisionist article in Newsday. Marion O’Callaghan questionedjust how committed Trinidad and Tobago had been to the cause.She asked readers to forgive my cynicism as I watch the to-ing andfro-ing to South Africa … from the same people and the same groups,who were at best silent as South Africans suffered..It was James who most clearly linked the Caribbean and Africa. In TheBlack Jacobins, a study of a successful slave revolt in San Domingo inthe late 18th century, James wrote: The road to West Indian nationalidentity lay through Africa.James organised trade unions in Trinidad, was thrown out of the UnitedStates during the McCarthy era and earned fame as a Marxist historian,but he also wrote a cricket book that changed the way the game isseen. It played a role in changing me too.In Beyond A Boundary James connected cricket to society in a way nowriter had done before.For this white South African, the book was a revelation. I’ve read andre-read Beyond A Boundary several times over.What he wrote of the racial and social castes in the Caribbean, andparticularly cricket in the Caribbean, had many similarities with thepost-colonial, apartheid South Africa in which I grew up. His writingstruck a chord.I was baffled in Port-of-Spain to discover that there is hardly atrace of the great man. There’s an avenue named after a cricketer whoscored a lot of runs in a Test match but there’s no tribute to a manwho wrote, taught and fought on behalf of his fellow man for thebetter part of the 20th century.CLR’s nephew kindly spoke to me, as did Andy Ganteaume, and Lloyd Bestgraciously showed me around Tunapuna, James’ birthplace.To find anything named after CLR James, I would have to have travelledto San Fernando where the Oil Field Workers’ Trade Union has aneducation centre named after James. For a visitor, this was puzzling.I was fortunate to have lunch with Joel Garner during the South Africavs West Indies Board XI match.I have always greatly respected Garner’s bowling but now I’m alsoenvious of him. Not of his bowling (for I know my limitations), but ofthe fact that he met CLR James more than once.Modern South African and African historians are determined to presentAfricans as agents of change rather than simply as victims.James led the way with his book about the slave uprising. He was tiredof reading and hearing about Africans being persecuted and oppressed.He wrote of people of African descent who would themselves be takingaction on a grand scale and shaping other people to their own needs.James wrote with Africa in mind and believed that West Indians had toclear from their minds the stigma that anything African was inherentlyinferior and degraded.Only then could they begin to see themselves as a free and independentpeople.The unbeatable West Indies cricket teams of the 1980s expressed thatspirit.As the South Africa cricket party’s plane touched down for the firsttime on West Indian soil, I spotted two things in my newspapers thatrelated to two of James’ themes: federal co-operation and the linkbetween cricket and politics.One news item reported on a new Caribbean Court of Justice thatreplaces the British Privy Council. The second told of talks betweenthe Organisation of Eastern Caribbean states with a monopolistictelecommunications provider.In those talks, the communications minister of St Lucia was said to benegotiating like Viv Richards.So it seems to this outsider that Caribbean states are trying to worktogether again, and it’s obvious that the link between politicalaction and cricket is still strong.The man who detailed and explained that link so clearly in Beyond ABoundary died on May 31, 1989.CLR James missed Nelson Mandela’s release by eight months and twodays, but his other great book had an influence on South Africanthinking.James met a group of South African students in Ghana in 1957 who toldhim that The Black Jacobins had been of great value to them.A white professor had told them where to find it and they’d learntabout revolutionary inter-race relationships.James recalled: That relation they found very important forunderstanding the relation between the Black South Africans and theColoureds.They typed out copies, mimeographed them and circulated the passagesfrom The Black Jacobins dealing with the relations between the Blacksand the mixed in Haiti. I could not help thinking that revolutionmoves in a mysterious way its wonders to perform.James didn’t live to see a multi-racial team representing a democraticSouth Africa visit Trinidad, but I think he would have been pleased.The welcome I received from the men who knew him well tells me so.
