Henry Olonga and courage

BUSINESS DAY, 3 APRIL 2003

IT IS EASY to forget, sometimes, that sport stars are people. They inhabit a realm that is, for most of us, a realm of dreams, a theatre of the imagination. They are just the figures – tiny on the pitch or somewhat larger but equally distant on our televisions – that act out the roiling dramas that seem to spring whole from our own hearts. Sport, for most of us, fills a need that goes beyond support for this team or that team. It is more than just a way to pass a couple of hours on a Saturday. The attachment to sport is an attachment to a world within a world, a world of dramas and myths and archetypes that speaks to deeper parts of us than simply the parts that calculate who has won. Sport is as necessary to the soul as dreams or stories are, which is why we sometimes forget that sportsmen are not figures in dreams or characters from fiction.

That is why the public reacts with shock when their sport stars reveal themselves to be human beings – when they fix matches or refuse autographs or when you see them in a mall and they are like everyone else and do not much feel like discussing last weekend’s match. It is an enormous burden that sport stars assume. When they step away from the sport arena and say or do something that has nothing to do with sport, the result is almost inevitably disappointment and disillusion, as though someone has turned on the house lights while the magician is doing his show, and suddenly you can see the hidden wires and trapdoors and false bottoms.

But every so often a sportsman does something to assert that he is a human being as well as a sportsman, and the result is relief and gratitude and admiration. That is how I felt as I watched Henry Olonga being interviewed on Carte Blanche this weekend. The world has been scandalously silent about the courage of Henry Olonga and Andy Flower. What they did – at the beginning of the World Cup – with their black armbands and their dignified statement about the death of Zimbabwean democracy encourages me as a human being.

Unbelievably, there are still the crabbed and inward voices of those who complain, with that desperately tired old argument, that Olonga and Flower were wrong to “bring politics into sport”. What Olonga and Flower did was to remind us all that we are human beings first, before we are sportsmen or sports fans, and that human beings have a responsibility to their own conscience and their sense of what is right.

It has become clear in the past month how much courage Henry Olonga’s action demanded. Unlike Andy Flower, he was not poised to jet off to play county cricket in England and then state cricket in Australia. His principled stand saw him stripped of his place in Zimbabwean cricket, and then stripped of his home. Now he hides in Johannesburg, afraid to return to the place where a madman tramples on a nation.

While the English cricket team disregarded issues of morality and made their decision not to play in Zimbabwe simply a matter of safety, Henry Olonga explicitly disregarded his safety, and made his stand as a moral imperative. Against the unedifying backdrop of administrators and the media complaining that the situation in Zimbabwe might erode World Cup profits or tarnish the lustre of the tournament, men such as Henry Olonga and Andy Flower and Errol Stewart (who refused to tour with the A-team on the grounds of moral conscience) have given me faith that human beings still can cling to beliefs and values that surpass profit and revenue and the narrow description of their jobs.

I am used to being inspired by sportsmen on the field. I am used to being transported by sport into a place of heroes and villains, of courage and determination and action such as you only find in movies or old books. Flower and Olonga and Stewart remind us that these qualities can exist inside all of us. They deserve our gratitude.