Peter Hain and André Odendaal, Pitch Battles: Sport, Racism and Resistance (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2021)

THIS book marks the fiftieth anniversary of the exclusion of apartheid South Africa from world cricket. At first sight it is joint autobiography. But it is, more precisely, a history of the struggle to make South African cricket a truly national game into which the authors have written themselves. While perfectly acceptable, this is a more challenging venture than straight autobiography especially in terms of the boundary between objectivity and subjectivity.

The British Stop The Seventy Tour (STST) campaign of 1969–1970 that was later successfully transplanted to Australia was a tribute to the bravery and resourcefulness of Peter Hain; plus the spirit of the 1960s. Its genius lay in the creation of a broad, tiered movement ranging from saboteurs, direct action demonstrators and the Anti-Apartheid Movement to liberal sympathisers in the Fair Cricket Campaign and even sections of the British establishment. Its spontaneity enabled Hain to evade those who pursued him in the courts with charges of conspiracy. The wounds inflicted on racist South Africa were illustrated by the dirty tricks played by the Bureau for State Security assisted by the British authorities that resulted in the Putney Plot and an overtly political trial from which Hain again emerged victorious. While the end of apartheid vindicated the STST campaigners, their opponents in the guise of a new generation of right-wing nationalists are all too visible in Britain today.

South African cricket was warped by British imperialism and white South African nationalism and their mutual interests. For decades it thrived within a white racial nexus of Britain, Australia and New Zealand. Black aspiration was disparaged and written out of the official narrative even though the non-racial South African Coloured Cricket (or Barnato) Board was one of the world’s oldest national cricket bodies. South Africa was not, however, out of step. As this book shows, the Nazi Olympics of 1936 were sanitised by the IOC.

Much of this book concentrates on the internal struggle against apartheid cricket. Overseas, Dennis Brutus and Chris de Broglio maintained SANROC in exile, wisely keeping it independent of the ANC, and mobilising Third World opinion and activism. It consistently checkmated the Pretoria regime’s friends among the aristocrats, bankers and financiers who all too often turned out to be the administrators of cricket as well. Some of the latter like Wilf Wooller of Glamorgan were rabid in their support of the status quo, including apartheid, and feared that challenges to it meant the end of civilisation. They were up against one of the great moral causes of the century.

The early 1970s saw the rise of Black Consciousness, the emergence of independent workerist unions and the South African Council on Sport (SACOS, 1973). For the next ten years SACOS kept several steps ahead of the government’s attempts to use reform in sport as window dressing to obscure the conservation of apartheid. One major asset was recognition by the sports bodies of other African countries. Apart from its adherence to non-racialism, SACOS produced key, memorable slogans and principles – ‘No normal sport in an abnormal society’ and the double standards resolution; and continued the tradition of non-collaboration with the regime.

One of the latter’s ploys was chequebook sport: amendments to tax regulations meant that the government was in effect underwriting sanctions busting tours. White cricket was now led by hard-faced businessmen only too happy to subscribe to the National Party’s total strategy. Hain and André Odendaal provide a sharp analysis, although they go along with a common misconception: these were mercenary, not rebel, tours.

By 1987 circumstances were changing and SACOS, accused of being too doctrinaire (in other words too principled) was manoeuvred into obscurity. In a personalised history like this a particular view is to be expected. The authors paint a favourable picture of the emergence of the National Sports Congress (NSC), which by 1989 had become the face of anti-apartheid sport and was subsequently aided by the blundering insensitivity of the Gatting cricket tour. There are more critical interpretations: that the NSC was simply part of an ANC power grab at the expense of many organisations, including the United Democratic Front (UDF), thus engineering a quick return of South Africa to international sports competition. Whites were to be deprived of their political cake, but could keep the cherries from the top. This book shows that the supposed precepts of the NSC such as unity, then development, then participation were immediately trashed by fast-tracked readmission. Five criteria laid down for unity were largely ignored; some are unfulfilled to this day. The rhetoric of a mass-based sports organisation proved typically hollow, especially the idea that sport can build a nation. The suggestion that ‘the NSC’s rise had amounted to a step-by-step march with history as it unfolded’ (p. 336) may be interpreted in a number of ways.

The authors provide a very strong analysis of the twenty-first century commodification of sport and its ongoing tendency to ignore racism. For instance, the Black Lives Matter campaign was the catalyst to expose widespread racism in South African cricket spanning the thirty years since liberation, Ashwell Prince and Makhaya Ntini providing eloquent and painful testimony. Logically this invites another look at the role of the NSC in 1990 and the side lining of SACOS. Its non-racial principles and emphasis on community sport as liberation were simply brushed aside by the white sport establishment assisted by the ANC with an assumption of business as usual and prioritisation of elIte competition. Had whites been educated about SACOS principles rather than accommodated by the NSC, Prince’s and Ntini’s pain might have been avoided. There are dots to be joined between then and now. And there is irony in emphasising that the ANC in the late 1980s promoted the ‘individual rights of every South African’ (p. 291).

Even international publishers are falling short on proofreading these days; while there are a few errors of fact. Rick Turner was murdered in January 1978 (not the ‘early 1970s’, p. 186); the UDF was restricted, not banned (p. 296); and Sir Hilary Beckles, vice-chancellor of the University of the West Indies and a cricket historian of note, would probably not appreciate appearing as Backles (p. 362).

Book after book about post-liberation South Africa provides evidence of continuity rather than change and this one is no exception. Rugby World Cup and African Cup of Nations wins have been brief parties. The 2010 FIFA World Cup was successful because Sepp Blatter and his hard-nosed officials ran South Africa for a while. The concept of the Rainbow Nation is seductive; but it forgets that rainbows have no material form and are just optical illusions.