With Makhaya Ntini
Change does not happen overnight. There is no magic wand. No quick fix or back route to equality. I wish there was. Change happens over generations. And I think we have shown that in this story so far. Black athletes now get the recognition they deserve. In the past, they didn’t get the opportunities needed to show what they were capable of.
But the question no athlete – Black or white – wants to be asked is whether they have succeeded because of an unnatural attempt to speed up the process of equality. That they have been picked for the team because of the colour of their skin, rather than the mental, physical and technical ability they possess in their chosen sport.
Meet Makhaya Ntini. He knows what I’m talking about. Makhaya played 101 Test matches, the pinnacle of cricket, for South Africa. He took 390 wickets. Like me, he was a fast bowler. He is retired now and I have had the pleasure of getting to know him in the commentary box. Only two other South Africans have taken more wickets than Makhaya for South Africa. He is a legend, a true great of the game and the personification of Black talent. He was also the first Black person to represent South Africa in cricket.
So get out of the way, and I say that nicely, if you suggest that Makhaya was only picked to tick boxes about what a post-apartheid South Africa team should look like. ‘It should be on merit,’ he bristles as he sits talking to me from his kitchen at his home in East London on the Eastern Cape. ‘Don’t tell me that I am a quota player after fifty or sixty matches. Or that I started because of the quota system.’
Let’s come back to that and take a second to explain what the quota system is. After apartheid, the South African government drew up what was called a ‘transformational’ charter that demanded national sports teams pick a certain number of ‘people of colour’. In cricket it has been broken down to two Black African players and four players of Asian or mixed-race heritage. In rugby, the target for the most recent World Cup – which South Africa won – was 50 per cent of the starting team. Cricket and rugby are front and centre for this rule because, traditionally, these are sports that have been dominated by white people because of the powerful South African public school system.
It comes from a good place, no doubt. But Makhaya disagrees with it in cricket and the rugby World Cup-winning captain Siya Kolisi also disagrees with it. Kolisi said that he believed the great Nelson Mandela would have been against it too. He is probably right. To paraphrase that other great man, Martin Luther King, he said Black people deserve not to be judged on the colour of their skin but the content of their character. As Black people, we have to be true to that. We can’t have it both ways – complain about inequality but then accept it if it suits.
Maybe you’re thinking, Surely you want this visibility for Black people? To inspire others? These are role models. Believe me, I understand that argument. Throughout this book I harp on about that theme, but discrimination – positive or negative – to my mind does not work. What if that Black person who gets picked purely because of the colour of his or her skin, rather than his or her ability, is shown up to be hopelessly out of their depth? And this goes for any industry – not just sport. It is counterproductive. If you start filling positions in sport, business, industry or whatever because you need to tick a box based on ethnicity, gender or age, instead of employing the best person for the job, you don’t solve a problem, you create one. In fact, you create lots of problems. For a start that person might not be capable of doing the job and, in a high-profile area like sport, that person is embarrassed. How is that good for inspiring someone or being a role model? It will also embolden the racists who can stoke resentment, arguing, ‘Told you they shouldn’t be there’ or shouting, ‘Look, they’re taking our jobs and they can’t do them.’
Makhaya told me that he had to deal with this sort of negative fallout from quota systems during his career. Despite his undoubted natural ability, there were those who would always question him or use it as a stick to beat him with. Luckily, Makhaya is a confident man and was always secure in his sporting prowess, but what he described to me also runs the risk of chipping away at a person who is capable and turning them into something less capable.
‘I think it was at a time when I already had 200 wickets to my name,’ he says. ‘And I was still being called a quota player. Excuse me? I don’t think so. In any other team in the world I would have been a senior player, a decision-maker. A guy who was there at all the meetings, having a say, being a leader.’
In cricket – and most sports – there are meetings held between senior players to discuss things like strategy and discipline, much like businesses hold board meetings. Makhaya was the equivalent of a chief executive with all of his experience. Yet he was treated like an associate and not invited to the meetings. But the guy who has played only a handful of games and is white?
‘He becomes a senior player because he’s not Black. Straightaway he gets called to the senior meetings. That meeting has to be white people only. So those are the things that we had to go through even though this system was supposed to help. And if we say something? All of a sudden, we are ungrateful.’
And just like what has been said on so many other occasions or about other scenarios, if a Black man tries to ‘forcefully’ object to an unfair situation, that man immediately is the latest ‘angry Black man’.
So you see, change takes time. Only white players at the senior meeting? Those are deep-seated views. Hardly surprising considering South Africa’s history. And it feels unfair to criticise South Africa, because they are trying their best to ensure their nation is fairly represented, but, as we’ve seen, unconscious bias dies hard. I suppose the powers that be consider it important to try to legislate equality and perhaps they hope that eventually the legislation won’t be needed and can be done away with. It is a Black-dominated country (a 2011 census showed that 76 per cent of the population was Black African) and it has, shall we say, a difficult history to overcome.
Apartheid only ended in 1994. It was a system of racial segregation straight out of the colonial playbook. South Africa had been colonised by the Dutch and the British. And the indigenous people were, as you won’t be surprised to read by now, treated like sub-humans. When the all-white National Party won elections in 1948, apartheid was two years away. It was a party comprised mostly of politicians descended from those colonialists. Laws were brought in to separate white from Black and ensure white supremacy. There were ‘mandated’ residential and business zones for each racial group and other races could not live in or own land in those areas.
How was it decided where you were allowed to live and work? The National Party divided South Africans into one of four groups based on appearance, socio-economic status and culture. White, Black, Coloured and Indian. Between 1960 and 1983, 3.5 million Black people were thrown out of their homes and off their farming land. It was one of the largest mass evictions in history, creating widespread poverty among the community and simultaneously enriching white people. In less than ten years, 80 per cent of the land was owned by whites (because the National Party made it law), and non-whites had to carry documents allowing them to go into restricted areas.
By 1960 Black protestors were being mass-murdered by police. In Sharpeville, a Black township, police opened fire on a group of unarmed Black people who were protesting against the government. At least 69 were killed and more than 180 were wounded. I fleetingly remember hearing about Sharpeville when I was six years old, before any thought of what took place was overtaken by more important things like running out to play with my friends for the entire day. As I got a bit older and noticed the grown-up members of my family, and in particular my mother, paying attention to events in South Africa, I began to take notice of the images emerging from there. Police officers with dogs and shooting unarmed Black folk made an impact. Looking back, I guess that must have been one of the first moments in my life when I had an inkling – and I say an inkling because, at that young age, I would have soon become engrossed in play and making mischief – that something wasn’t right with the world.
Something else happened in my early days that I did not wholly understand until I got older. I do not remember how old I was but I remember us having a dog called Biko that got killed by a car and my mother weeping. I had never seen my mother cry and it wasn’t the first dog that we had lost in that way, as the yard did not have a front gate and the dogs would at times just go wandering off. She showed grief before but not tears. It wasn’t until many years later that I worked it out. That dog was named after Stephen Biko, the South African anti-apartheid activist who died in police custody, and that was her connection to the struggle in South Africa.
Mr Mandela, whose party, the African National Congress, was a political rival to the National Party, was imprisoned three years after the Sharpeville massacre. And that’s where he would remain until 1990. Imprisoned purely because he wanted equality for people of all colours and creeds in South Africa and was seen as a threat to white supremacy. Today, we can recognise that the National Party’s decision to lock him up was one of their biggest mistakes because it enraged fair-minded folk all over the world. And Mr Mandela’s mainly South African movement was globalised. But in my opinion that seemingly didn’t trouble certain powerful nations enough to try to do something about the injustices. Was that unconscious or conscious bias because the oppressor was white and the oppressed non-white?
Importantly, sport played a huge role in raising awareness. Sporting organisations took up the mantle and acted while governments sat on their hands. Football’s world-governing body, FIFA, suspended the South African football federation in 1963, the country was banned by the International Olympic Committee in 1970 for refusing to pick multiracial teams and the International Cricket Council followed suit. Rugby was a little slower to act; South Africa were barred from the first two World Cups in 1987 and 1991 but remained as a member of the International Rugby Board. Sports saying, ‘We’re not playing against you because you are racist’ made people sit up and take notice. And it made governments sit up and take notice. The American and British governments, under Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, had been largely supportive of apartheid. They had considered Mandela a communist and terrorist. But when people began to understand apartheid through a sporting perspective, it’s my belief that it helped to really pressurise the powers that be to do something. Remember that the next time you hear someone say that taking a knee is virtue signalling or ‘woke’. Give me a break. It raises awareness, it keeps the conversation going and reminds people that things have got to change. And what is wrong with being ‘woke’? It seems people don’t quite understand what woke means. The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as being ‘alert to injustice in society, especially racism’. Please call me woke for ever.
Cricket had a particularly interesting role to play. The South African government tried to legitimise their racist endeavours by inviting what were known as ‘rebel’ tours to the country, and also to satisfy a sports-mad white public’s thirst for high-level competition. Most of these tours were organised in secret and the public only found out about them when the players arrived at the airport. An England team was the first to tour in 1981/82, followed by another tour in 1989/90. Two Australian teams went, in 1985/86 and 1986/87. The first England team was led by Graham Gooch. Geoffrey Boycott, the leading batsman at the time and only until recently a commentator for the BBC, was also on that tour. There was, unsurprisingly, a huge row about it. The English players had been paid big money to go and effectively sanction the apartheid regime. A player who agreed to go on such a tour had to be either ignorant or uninterested in the plight of people of colour in South Africa. The phrase ‘selling your soul’ comes to mind.
One would have thought that taking ‘blood money’ would have damaged their reputations. Despite the players being banned from international cricket for three years, Gooch would go on to captain England and retired as a legend. Boycott was a sought-after media personality. Bob Woolmer would go on to get the coaching job of South Africa. Mike Gatting, a former England captain, led the second tour. Gatting became president of the Marylebone Cricket Club, better known as the MCC. It is considered the moral authority of the sport. David Graveney, who was a player-manager on the tour, was made a chief selector of the England team. He is now national performance manager. It is probably a sign of progress that you can look back at those tours, remember that people were paid money to help keep the Black man down and reckon that it wouldn’t happen today.
Still, it was not the most shocking moment of that period of cricket’s history. Two West Indies teams took the ‘blood money’, too. And they included people who were friends and team-mates. You can see why a white English player would not bother to do his research or just purely be thinking how much money could be made, but a West Indian? It beggars belief that Black people, whose ancestors had suffered in the same way that the South African people were suffering, took that money. And some of them did it twice. There were tours in 1982/83 and 1983/84.
I was angry and felt betrayed. I made my feelings known to those players I knew who decided to put greed ahead of their culture and people. I also gave an interview to a journalist in Australia and that experience taught me to never again speak to a journalist while angry. I said some things then that were very harsh. They were true but not everything that is true needs necessarily to be exposed in public. But we learn.
Apparently, the tour organisers had asked Sir Viv Richards to name his price. Let me tell you, they didn’t know Viv very well. He wouldn’t have gone there for anything, but I suppose they figured they had to try. Getting such a huge name in West Indies cricket would have been a massive coup for them.
These tours were all done in a very hush-hush way. I remember before the first tour I was playing a match for Jamaica against Barbados in Barbados. I had left the hotel with Big Bird (Joel Garner) for some reason or another. When I came back there were a lot of players on the balcony. And as soon as I approached all the conversation stopped and there was an uncomfortable atmosphere. When that tour was announced my mind flashed back to that moment in Barbados and I’m pretty sure they must have been talking about it.
Was I asked to go? Yes. I was in Australia playing domestic cricket before the second tour and Lawrence Rowe, who was a good friend of mine, called me to ask if I would be interested. He probably thought he was helping me. I had a knee injury; he may have thought my career didn’t have many years left and that I could do with the money. I tried to explain to him why I wouldn’t do it, that the apartheid regime was wrong and I couldn’t support a government that dehumanised Black people in that way. In my opinion, going there was supporting the regime, telling them you saw nothing wrong with what was happening there. I mean, the players on those West Indies tours were given ‘honorary whites’ status. I kid you not. Lawrence told me he didn’t think South Africa was as bad as had been made out because he saw a Black guy driving a Mercedes-Benz! I give him the benefit of the doubt and am 100 per cent sure Lawrence, in his mind, was trying to help me. But he obviously didn’t see the big picture.
The contrast between what happened to the England players who went and the West Indies players couldn’t be more stark. And that tells a story. The West Indies players returned to their homelands in the Caribbean to find out they had become pariahs and their lives, mostly, went to hell. People at home thought, How could they?, but I say ‘mostly’ because the players from Barbados generally didn’t suffer to the same degree socially as the Jamaicans, for instance. Most of the Jamaicans, if not all, lost their jobs and whatever social standing they had on the island. Some left the country and those who stayed fell on very hard times. One, Richard Austin, died of a drug overdose; another, Herbert Chang, suffered a nervous breakdown. I am sure those guys regretted their decisions in the end and it is a shame they couldn’t see beyond making a fast buck. And I am happy to forgive anyone who makes a mistake in life, we all do. But not everyone shows remorse and they will be remembered differently.
It’s a terribly sad story. And there is certainly something depressing about the English reaction, as I can’t remember hearing too many apologies being issued, but maybe they see no need to apologise. All manner of cushy jobs handed out. The arrogance, the hypocrisy, the, let me think… there must be a phrase for it? Oh yes. White privilege.
But what did Makhaya remember of those rebel tours? He was born in 1977 so would have been a young boy through that period.
‘No, no,’ he said. ‘We had no television. I knew nothing.’
Of course. Why would Makhaya have known? The rebel tours were not staged for his benefit and apartheid ensured that people like him led completely different, separate lives from white people. The end of apartheid, however, would change Makhaya’s life.
He was born in a small village called Mdingi in Cape Province. He was a cowherd and he spoke fondly about the community spirit of people in the village, sharing food, helping one another with their smallholdings and animals. ‘We were all together, it was the greatest time ever.’ It is particularly poignant and moving to hear Makhaya say that because, at the age of fifteen, he was spotted by cricket talent scouts. Nothing would be the same again; his life changed – and in many ways for the better – but there is no doubt in my mind when hearing him talk all these years later that throughout his professional career he would pine for that feeling of belonging and community.
He was packed off to Dale College in King William’s Town, which had a renowned cricket programme. He couldn’t speak English. ‘I just had a plastic bag with my clothes in,’ he said. ‘Nothing else.’
Apartheid may have been over but he was still an outsider. At school, because he couldn’t speak English or understand what was being said, his classmates thought they could be racist without him knowing. But he knew. And he had his way of getting his own back.
‘Being the only Black guy was always gonna be a big issue,’ he says. ‘But I had one good friend. And he would tell me what was said. So, at the next training session I would say to the coach, “Give me the ball when that guy comes in to bat – I bowl at him.” And I bowled fast, at his body and head. He understood after that. Word got around.’
During his international career with South Africa, Makhaya was always revered for his skill and dedication to his fitness. Or at least what they thought was his dedication to his fitness because of one particular story. Every morning before the match, he would run to the ground instead of taking the bus with other members of the team. People were wowed by that. What a professional. And Makhaya was like that, don’t misunderstand me.
The truth, however, was sad. Makhaya didn’t want to take the team bus because he was an outsider and he knew the white players would not sit with him, talk with him. It was the same in the hotel dining room.
‘You get to the breakfast and you’re the first there. Two guys walk in, they sit someplace else. And then the next person walks in, he goes and sits with them. And so on. You try to turn a blind eye, say to yourself, “They have things they need to talk about.” But in the end, you find out that this is normal, this is how they do things. They forget that you exist until we are on the field. And this became life.
‘It is easy to see, actually, when you look at someone’s face, that the person doesn’t want to look you in the eyes – might be your coach, your captain. It tells you straightaway that they don’t really appreciate you being there.
‘They are thinking I was not being selected on merit. Every game for me felt, it’s almost like there was a trial of some sort. And you will hear remarks from your own colleagues, that you don’t belong here, you don’t deserve to be part of our team.’
Is this racism or the quota system? Probably a bit of both. And although I understand why positive discrimination exists, and the South African government introduced it because they were so keen to demonstrate to the world that they were going to bring about change, Makhaya’s experience shows that it’s not necessarily the right way to go about things.
‘You’ve got to do it at grassroots level,’ he says, ‘at a provincial level. That’s good. Give those people the opportunities. But when it comes to the top level, international, it has to be all on ability.’
In sport there should be an infrastructure introduced all over the country so kids aren’t picked up and moved to another place where they feel like aliens, reinforcing the ‘outsider’ mentality. And Makhaya agrees with me that this should be the case in every industry. If you want to bridge the gap between the haves and have-nots, look at apprenticeship schemes, mentoring, training and education. That’s where it should start, not at the very top of the ladder.
In South Africa they have also introduced a rule whereby companies have got to have a certain number of Blacks on their board. But what that can lead to is companies having Black people on their board, drawing a salary, but not actually being involved in the decision-making. It satisfies the law but doesn’t really lead to eventual empowerment of the masses in the country.
But don’t get me wrong – I think South Africa is showing the way forward. It has come an extremely long way in a short space of time. And there are always going to be things that don’t work out, bumps in the road and challenges. But having spent a lot of time in South Africa post-apartheid I am hopeful. I don’t want to say the country is a blueprint for the way to do things, but with Black leaders making decisions, making the laws and educating the young as to what has gone on in the world and what is going on, the country – and the people – have a chance.
‘That’s my wish,’ Makhaya says. ‘If it does not start from our schools, it will never work. Treat people equally, it will change right through to the sport, schools and everything. My son, he has white friends and they come over to the house. That is progress, you know? We are seeing each other’s ways and cultures. Embrace it because before we were not able to expose our children to that. Our kids are united, they are able to wrap their arms around each other. That for me will be the turning point.’
Makhaya just enforced my thoughts on the problem. Each sport or industry can try to put their house in order, but the message has to reach the society at large or no real meaningful change can take place. Fingers crossed. South Africa is a young country. And in ten or twenty years’ time it will have leaders who were not even alive during apartheid. That’s some thought. It will take time and it cannot happen overnight. And, as they say, the children are the future.