The JRB presents an excerpt from Writing Around the Wicket: Race, Class and History in South African Cricket by Niren Tolsi.

Writing Around the Wicket: Race, Class and History in South African Cricket
Niren Tolsi
2024

~~~

Taking Guard in Inner-city Johannesburg

To the west of downtown Johannesburg is a part of the city where immigrants and their children have changed the course of a country. This is where the Three Doctors’ Pact was signed, where Nelson Mandela practised law, where immigrant communities were built, forcibly destroyed and rose again.

Physically, this area starts at Marco Cianfanelli’s sculpture of Mandela shadowboxing outside the Johannesburg central magistrate’s court. That sculpture stands across from where South Africa’s first democratically elected president had his law offices, in partnership with another future African National Congress (ANC) president, Oliver Tambo.

From there, it moves down Gerard Sekoto Street toward Kholvad House on Market Street. Along the way, the area takes in a mish-mash of shops selling food from paneer masala to amagwinya, the deep-fried balls of dough that fuel the country’s working class. Other stalls are filled with school uniforms, housewares and indigenous herbs for medicine and traditional rituals.

The area follows the incline to Oriental Plaza and continues through Fordsburg before veering right toward Fietas—a place ruined by the bulldozers of apartheid’s forced relocations.

But philosophically and politically, this part of Johannesburg extends beyond street boundaries. Through lines of migration, it connects Johannesburg to places like India, Latvia and Lithuania. All these countries have provided immigrants, like the journalist and anti-apartheid activist Ruth First; her husband, the Communist Party leader Joe Slovo; and Dr Yusuf Dadoo of the Transvaal Indian Congress, whose footprints through these streets have left the mark of an emancipatory politics. There is a thread of progressive thinking and non-racialism woven through consequential buildings, antiracist activists and, seemingly paradoxically, practitioners of the game of British imperialism—cricket.

***

In a country like South Africa, with its segregated history, cricket’s story has, naturally, been a divided one. The game arrived with the British in the early nineteenth century. It was introduced across their colonies in the eighteen-hundreds as a tool of either assimilation or exclusion—in India, for example, cricket was initially the sole preserve of the British, who used it as a sport to ‘get away’ from the clamorous country around them. The latter tack, of exclusion, inadvertently also led to the game’s popularity and indigenisation. You only need to look at the television audiences built and revenues generated in Indian cricket to understand how the British introduction of the sport took an unanticipated course.
From that introduction, South Africa’s cricket story splits in two.

There is a dominant white memory of the game that is premised on racial superiority and a playing identity that embraces conservatism. It was a style of play—of paranoia about ‘non-white’ participation and losing control of the game or losing face, begrudging batting, negative or violent bowling and a laager mentality. It’s not for nothing that a laager is a defensive encampment of ox-wagons lashed together—the white sport of cricket wanted to keep everyone else out.

The other strand of the game is one that has survived in Black communities, despite attempted erasure by the totalitarian impulses of the apartheid state and the sneers and laziness of influential white cricket journalists and historians. There were amateur unions for each community, segmented by race, but the commonality was that none had the infrastructure to train athletes coming up, or to sustain and support them in their peak athletic years. The ‘WG Grace of African cricket’, for example, batsman Frank Roro, worked as a clerk for the mines of Johannesburg from the nineteen-thirties until the nineteen-fifties. During this period, he also became the first South African of any race to score 100 centuries.

This Black cricket was under-resourced and so it turned to community instead. Adversity, both economic and political, shaped the manner in which the game was played and administered as the twentieth century unfolded—towards a sense of egalitarianism, which was scarce in the white version of the game. In the early nineteen-hundreds, Black cricket’s clubs in South Africa were also initially based on communalism, class and even varying degrees of skin colour. The idea of the cricketing establishment, with its hierarchies—not to mention its behavioural airs based on British public school correctness—was felt during the early days of the sport, but also easily discarded. 

The alarmingly fast-paced removal of civil rights from Black people, together with their diminishing access to land and security of tenure through the passing of legislation in the first half of the twentieth century, led to greater political activity within Black communities. This was coupled with new ideas of equality and human dignity brought by Black participants—in many cases soldiers in everything but name—returning from both World Wars. These ideas of non-racialism and emancipation were infused into the DNA of Black cricket so that, by the nineteen-fifties, the physical and psychic intersections between the South African Cricket Board of Control (Sacboc) and the anti-apartheid movements became more than just incidental.

***

Those intersections can be seen in the life and geography of Yusuf ‘Chubb’ Garda. By his own admission, Garda, a South African of Indian descent who was born in 1939, is a circumspect man. A schoolteacher of English for five years in the nineteen-sixties, and a shopkeeper for the rest of his working life, Garda states plainly what cricket meant to him and those he grew up around. ‘Sometime in 1946, when I was six years old, I discovered cricket, cricketers and commentators. I belonged to a cricketing family in a cricketing street—14th Street—in a cricketing suburb called Fietas,’ he writes in his book Literature, Life and Cricket: Tales of Fietas.

There would be no turning back.

Garda was a precocious batsman. As a fourteen-year-old, he was in the crowd watching a second division match involving Moonlighters, a club that found itself a man short when batting. He was asked to pad up, and he proceeded to score fifty-six runs despite considering himself ‘virtually a toddler batting against grown men’. 

On a weekday afternoon, we are sitting in Garda’s sunlit study in Mayfair West—a 2.5 kilometre walk to his childhood home in Fietas. Outside, Johannesburg’s skyscrapers are absorbing the colours of molten gold—purple, shale blue and persimmon orange—which, at sunrise and sunset on such autumn days, reflects and refracts the city’s stories and secrets.

His shelves are lined with everything that Bertrand Russell, the logician and pacifist, ever published. For a time in the nineteen-sixties, Garda and Russell had a correspondence, although Garda tweaked his name and address, wary as he was that South Africa’s white supremacist government might start monitoring someone exchanging letters with a progressive like Russell.

Russell’s collected works sit alongside a large collection of cricket books, including Peter Oborne’s Basil D’Oliveira—Cricket and Conspiracy: The Untold Story, and several works by the South African academic and former first-class cricketer Dr André Odendaal. His The Story of an African Game: Black Cricketers and the Unmasking of One of Cricket’s Greatest Myths, South Africa, 1850–2003 is seminal for reinserting Black participation into the nation’s cricket history.

Then there are the literary classics, which range from William Shakespeare to Charles Dickens. Garda purchased his copy of A Tale of Two Cities immediately after watching the film adaptation of the novel as a fourteen-year-old at the bioscope in Fordsburg. The well-worn, almost transparent brown pages appear even more fragile for the enthusiastic underlining and note-making: in pencil and in blue, black and red pen. These are acts, not of vandalism, but of immersion—of thought and self—into the stories and ideas on those pages.

To be Black or brown in the country during the span of Garda’s life was to struggle against political repression and the invisibility that accompanies it. The white supremacist National Party came into power in 1948 and set about furthering the denial of civil rights that had begun during colonialism and gained momentum with the formation of the Union of South Africa in 1910. Black excellence was, as a matter of course, denied. To excel at anything meant nothing if you were not white. It was more than a tale of two cities: in Garda’s time, South Africa was a tale of relentless schizophrenia for Black people—of grasping at a dignified normalcy, an affirmation of one’s humanity, and having it constantly being ripped away by violence, legislation, paternalism and censorship.

But in 1947, Sacboc was formed as an umbrella body to bring together the various cricket unions—aside from the white one—to play inter-race tournaments and organise international tours. By coming together, the communities made new, bigger opportunities for the ‘non-white’ cricketers of the country.

The first international tour organised by the Sacboc was a 1956 visit by the Kenyans. It’s notable that the 1956 South African team was captained by the powerful Coloured batsman, Basil D’Oliveira, whose selection for the England team, and their decision to tour South Africa a decade later, would cause a political controversy that ultimately led to the apartheid state being banned from international cricket participation.

A seventeen-year-old Garda was nowhere near being selected for the South African team—but he was in close proximity to the Natalspruit ground when the final selection match, between ‘The Possibles’ and ‘The Probables’, was taking place.

Garda was umpiring a junior match on an outer field when one of the teams found themselves with thirty-five runs on the board and five wickets down. They were also two batsmen short. They were in trouble, having lost their specialist batsmen for a paltry score, and there was a scramble to find a pickup player or two. Suddenly, Garda was standing at the wicket, bat in hand, taking guard against one of the best bowlers in the country.

‘I was mentally prepared. Nothing was really going through my head—that’s my nature. In all the innings I have played, I’ve never spoken to the opposition—I only concentrated on the cricket,’ he tells me on the phone a few weeks after our first meeting.

He remembers getting in quite early on. ‘After batting for about five minutes, the bowler Alec Dell bowled a ball which was a bit of a full toss. I hit a thundering shot back over his head. It moved so quickly that I felt like I was still following it onto my bat by the time it had crossed the boundary for a six,’ Garda says. ‘I’d never owned a bat until that point, and I never hit a shot like that before or again.’

His remarkable performance continued. At the close of play that day, Garda was on eighty-four not out. By the end of his innings, he had scored an unbeaten 126. Garda was asked to play for the South African team against Kenya in Cape Town. But he was in his final year of high school and was forced to decline because the match clashed with his year-end examinations. Though he did, a few days after flaying seasoned bowlers like Dell and George Langa, meet Dr Yusuf Dadoo, the great anti-apartheid activist and leader of the South African Indian Congress and South African Communist Party, at a celebratory cricket function at Shelbourne Hall.

Garda initially brushes off my question about what it was like meeting Dadoo and whether he was aware, as a teenager, about the non-racial impulses that were sweeping through parts of Johannesburg and the country at that point in the late nineteen-fifties.

But later he returns to my question and makes an excruciating point about human potential being denied in a society based on legislated racism. In another country, such a victory presentation would have been with the president of a country—something Dadoo was not, but so easily could have been.

***

When thinking of what could have been, it is helpful to look again at Kholvad House, an unassuming five-storey building on Market Street in Johannesburg’s downtown. It was named after a village outside Surat, from where many of those associated with the building and its administrative trust hailed—migrants began arriving from Kholvad, India, in 1883, after the Johannesburg gold rush had begun. Kholvad House was designed by the left-wing architect and activist Rusty Bernstein, who would be one of those arrested and charged with treason in the Rivonia Trial alongside Mandela, Walter Sisulu and Ahmed Kathrada.

Dadoo became an early chairperson of the building’s board of trustees. Its fifth-floor boardroom was where the joint declaration of cooperation was signed in 1947 by Dadoo of the Transvaal Indian Congress, Dr Monty Naicker of the Natal Indian Congress and Dr AB Xuma of the ANC. Commonly referred to as the Three Doctors’ Pact, it committed the Congress Movement to non-racialism.

Dadoo also had a keen interest in cricket and had been a patron of the Indian Cricket Union. Rashid Varachia, the first Sacboc secretary, lived in flat 14, next door to Kathrada, who had taken over the lease for flat 13 from another political activist, Ismail Meer. The Transvaal Indian Cricket Union and the South African Indian Cricket Union held meetings there before the formation of Sacboc. An interview with Kathrada, by the cricket historian Odendaal, confirms that the Congress Movement and Sacboc even shared printers, Royal Printers. Sacboc brochures and reports were printed there by day and, at night, when the staff had gone home, the Congress Movement kept the presses busy.

Johannesburg’s city centre, as Odendaal, Krish Reddy and Christopher Merrett note in Divided Country: The History of South African Cricket Retold 1914–1950s, was the scene of ‘overlapping milieus’ and the ‘heartbeat’ of political and cricket struggles during a period when the Freedom Charter was signed in Kliptown and players like D’Oliviera were destroying white misconceptions of superiority in the cricket oval.

Flat 13 in Kholvad House was frequented by a range of activists, including ANC president and Nobel peace laureate Albert Luthuli, journalist and political activist Ruth First, Helen Joseph, Lillian Ngoyi, Joe Slovo and others. Many of the activists organising, debating, arguing, drinking and planning political graffiti were of immigrant stock: from India, Latvia and Lithuania, as well as migrants from other parts of South Africa.

Recollecting his days as a law student at the University of Witwatersrand in Long Walk to Freedom, Nelson Mandela writes of Kholvad House: ‘At Wits I met and became friends with Ismail Meer, JN Singh, Ahmed Bhoola and Ramlal Bhoolia. The centre of this tight-knit community was Ismail’s apartment, flat 13 Kholvad House … There we studied, talked … and it became a kind of headquarters for young freedom fighters. I sometimes slept there …’

Indeed, when the law firm of Mandela and Tambo closed in 1960, Mandela preferred to do most of his consulting in Kholvad House: ‘Numerous colleagues readily made their offices, staff and phone facilities available to me,’ Mandela recalled in Long Walk To Freedom, ‘but most of the time I preferred to work from Ahmed Kathrada’s flat, number 13 Kholvad House … Soon the lounge of number 13 and the hallway outside were crammed with clients. Kathy [Kathrada] would return home and discover that the only room in which he could be alone was his kitchen!’

The sport and the movement shared more intangible qualities alongside the building in which their leaders gathered. In Imtiaz Cajee’s biography of his uncle, anti-apartheid activist Ahmed Timol, he noted that Timol was not just an important activist in the anti-apartheid movement, but cared deeply for cricket and was known in particular for his batting.

His uncle’s approach to batting mirrored Timol’s life as a teacher and activist. ‘Ahmed’s cricketing sensibility summed up his revolutionary temperament as well. [He] was always careful of others and not at all interested in colourful heroics in excess of his brief. Ahmed Timol was a reliable batsman, never tempted by showmanship, possessing an austere elegance and a fierce concentration that is evident in photographs of him at the stumps. His style was unobtrusive and yet somehow always suggested captaincy—he was never a maverick. It was these cricketing qualities, this precision, that marked Ahmed Timol out as an educationist.’

Timol was detained, tortured and then killed at Johannesburg’s notorious John Vorster Square police station, just a few blocks away from Kholvad House. The police alleged that he committed suicide by jumping from one of the upper floors of the police station. They would repeat this often: as more and more activists were tortured and then flung to their deaths, government-minded magistrates would inevitably find that there was ‘no one to blame’ for their murders. At least seventy-three activists are estimated to have died in police custody between 1963 and 1990. The inquest into Timol’s death would be reopened in 2017, and Judge Billy Mothle would eventually find that he had, indeed, been murdered by the police.

***

That particular political violence may have been hidden for decades, but in other ways, Fietas—on the western fringe of Johannesburg’s old city centre—wears the brutality it has suffered for all to see.

The Queens Park ground, once the centre of Fietas’ community activity, with its fields yielding overlapping games of cricket and football reminiscent of the maidans of Bombay, is now home to a private bus company. Fourteenth Street, where Garda grew up in an apartment above the family shop, bears no resemblance to the place of his memory. It stands almost empty, stripped of houses and humans.

There is nothing left of 14th Street to resemble Arnold Benjamin’s description in his book, Lost Johannesburg: ‘The small dark shops, most of them selling clothing and soft goods in cut-throat competition, spilled out their wares into display stands and racks on both sides of the colonnaded pavements. Whatever pedestrian space was left would be jammed with a motley, jostling throng of buyers. The clientele covered the entire South African racial spectrum, from mineworkers’ Black to northern suburbs lily-white. Indeed a good half of the buyers were affluent bargain-hunting whites, their Jaguars and Mercedes prominent among the parked cars jamming both sides of the narrow street.’

Instead, there are plots of land emptied of buildings and people, but which still bear proof of their existence: the concrete floors of what used to be a home, or a pile of rubble imitating a cairn for a community that died when the forced removals began in the mid-nineteen-seventies.

Cricket commentator Aslam Khota grew up in Fietas, in Kolaba Mansions on 20th Street. He remembers pick-up games in the streets with other urchins and the inter-suburb and club matches that drew large crowds of people denied an inclusive national team. Like many of the buildings built by Indian immigrants to South Africa from the late eighteen-hundreds onwards, Kolaba Mansions was named after a village in India.

Khota, a second-generation South African, whose family also originally hails from Kholvad, was eighteen years old in 1978, when forced removals changed the landscape of the neighbourhood. He remembers the government first closing down schools for different races in the city before the forced removals began. Children had to start commuting to outlier, racially defined suburbs like Actonville or Lenasia, even while living near the city. Sometimes, the round trips would take up to two hours a day.
Then the bulldozers started moving in and the people started moving out of his street: to Lenasia if you were of Indian descent, to Soweto if you were black African, and to Eldorado Park if you were classified Coloured, mixed-race or Malay. All were barren townships and empty ghettoes.

‘It was a most depressing time,’ Khota remembers, ‘watching your friends and family packing up and leaving. We lived in Kolaba Mansions, a lovely apartment block with nine flats, which kept getting quieter and quieter … but you could hear the bulldozers, all the time, getting louder and louder.’ The Khota family’s relocation to Lenasia was completed in four trips on a Saturday. Aslam himself was too traumatised to bear witness, choosing instead to work overtime.

The neighbourhood emptied out, and the rubble piled up. Garda captured the removal in a poem, ‘And Then the Bulldozers Came’. In it, he recalled, during the height of the removals, seeing the lines ‘Fietas Died Today. R-I-P Goodbye!’ scrawled on a chalkboard outside the Subway Grocers.

The message had been written by a neighbour, Ossie Docrat, who explained the emotion of displacement. ‘I feel as though my teeth are being pulled out. I run my tongue over the spaces and I try to remember the shape of what was there,’ Garda recollects in the poem.

The destruction of Fietas was piecemeal, and Khota had friends still living on 18th Street. Often, when working in the city, he would stay over with them just to be closer to his old home. ‘We had moved to Lenasia, but the flats remained on 20th Street so, often, I would just walk back there and wander around. The government wasn’t allowing people into some flats, but others soon had occupiers in them,’ Khota says. ‘I remember once placing my forehead against the window of what used to be our home and just looking inside … I was a lightie, I was eighteen or nineteen … It distorts your psyche.’

Forced removals were turning Black South Africans into ghosts in their own lives, assuming a liminal state between their past and their present. Kolaba Mansions remains in Khota’s DNA. He talks wistfully of refurbishing it one day and putting in escalators for the people who had lived there but have grown old far away.

People like Khota are more committed to community—wherever that may be—than to nostalgia, however. It is clear the lessons learned playing ‘gully-cricket’ in Fietas were transplanted to what was, forty years previously, a wasteland he was forced to call his new home—Lenasia. Khota is now a stalwart of Lenasia Cricket Club.

Khota tells me about the challenges the cricket club has faced in ensuring municipal upgrades to the grounds and how the unification process has, paradoxically, undermined the strength and quality of the game in this township. In the eyes of sports administrators and politicians, Lenasia remains, as the apartheid state intended, a ghetto, a place on the margins of their imaginations—and yet, he can never leave its people, Khota confides.

***

Meanwhile, a new generation of immigrants has moved into Fietas, Fordsburg and downtown Johannesburg. Recent immigrants from Pakistan are now in the majority in Kholvad House, says Khadija Tilly, the building’s present caretaker. ‘There are a few of the old families here, but the oldest died during the Covid lockdown. But otherwise [middle-class] South Africans don’t think living in the city is safe any more.’

Tilly’s son Yahya Bhabha is a sixteen-year-old cricketer. He has represented Gauteng in provincial tournaments. In some ways, he is a throwback: he says he likes ‘the intensity of Test cricket’ more than the compressed timeline of the twenty-over game, which seduces so many youth because of its relatively instant gratification. But he is also the future, a right-armed all-rounder who can deliver balls at a fast-medium pace. His best figures so far have seen him skittle six wickets for five runs in five overs.

Heading to the roof of Kholvad House at evening time, one’s nose is instantly filled with the smell of North Indian curries—the immigrant aroma of homes that defy boundaries. At the top, Mandela’s pugilist pose is clear to see to the south of the building. To the west stand Fietas and Fordsburg and the domes of the Oriental Plaza.

The Plaza is where shopkeepers from Fietas were relocated after the removals. Many had to travel from Lenasia every day to open their shops. Garda was one such vendor.

Hanging on the balcony outside the Kholvad House’s fifth-floor boardroom, young Bhabha points to the statues of anti-apartheid activists Albertina and Walter Sisulu on Diagonal Street. He plays cricket in the parking lot next to them with friends who, for the most part, are the children of immigrants from India and Pakistan.

They can look up to a different kind of cricketer. Like the Proteas logo they wear on their chests, the South African cricket team has, in recent years, been reborn. As Black and brown players of unparalleled excellence like Hashim Amla, Makhaya Ntini and JP Duminy emerged from the late nineteen-nineties and into the two-thousands to score a string of victories to take South Africa to the pinnacle of Test cricket, the idea of who and what they represented grabbed the imaginations—and support—of many more Black South Africans. Their journeys had emerged from a non-racial dream that had refused to be extinguished by the vicissitudes of both the apartheid and the post-apartheid eras.

However, those toxic, supremacist forces are still present in the sport too. In 2020, when the Black Lives Matter movement gained momentum around the world, the brave black African fast-bowler Lungi Ngidi called for support for the movement and for cricket to confront racism in the sport—and broader society. While many rallied around him, a handful of retired white players took to social media to admonish him.

I see the boys playing on Diagonal Street on June 16. It’s Youth Day in South Africa, commemorating the South African police’s 1976 killing of schoolchildren who were protesting the use of Afrikaans as the medium of instruction. There are yelps of delight in Gujarati and English as a youngster executes a leg glance, which streams away before bobbling to a halt outside Chancellor House, the former law offices of Mandela and Tambo. The building is now a museum.

The effortless inclusivity they demonstrate around a bat, a ball, a rubbish bin for stumps, and the camaraderie from sports is a living refutation of the more insidious aspects of a city—like any other—both cosmopolitan and craven in its makeup.

Rome may not have been built in a day, but, as columnist John Matshikiza has noted, Johannesburg, the ‘instant city’, was. Its brick and mortar rises and falls as if in milliseconds, but the ideas and politics that permeate its rugged, brash personality have been built over centuries—and with more than a little help from immigrants. Migrants who loved and laughed, who were detained and murdered, who daubed political slogans on walls and were committed to their communities; activists and ordinary decent humans who, through their living politics, helped to fashion a new commitment toward a non-racialist future. All this while still, paradoxically, playing a game of colonial expansion.

~~~

• This article was first published in Strangers’ Guide in October 2022. It is also included in Niren Tolsi’s recently published book, Writing Around the Wicket: Race, Class and Politics in South African Cricket. The book can be ordered online at Made in Durban and is available at select bookstores. 
  
  Tolsi is an award-winning writer and freelance journalist whose interests include social justice, citizen mobilisation and state violence, protest, the Constitution and Constitutional Court, football and Test cricket.