Amla, Bavuma, politics, justice: Tolsi’s book addresses erased black cricket history

Journalist Niren Tolsi fuses sport, politics, history, socio-economics, justice and injustice like few writers in his new book Writing Around the Wicket: Race, Class and History in South African Cricket.

A long-time Mail and Guardian senior reporter and freelancer, Tolsi has established a reputation as one of South Africa’s best writers and commentators on politics, justice and corruption.

Tolsi, 48, also an arts practitioner and documentary filmmaker and recipient of the Ruth First and Heinrich Böll Journalism fellowships, has been working for a number of years on an in-depth book on the 2012 Marikana massacre, which he covered extensively for the M&G.

Before that can be brought to publication, he has brought out an anthology of his essays on cricket from the last 15 years, which reads like less of a collection, more of a study.

Tolsi’s several awards include the 2018 SAB Sports Writer of the Year. That was for his long-form piece, The Rainbow Beauty of Hashim Amla, which explored the symbolism of the Proteas captain's success.

“This was something I think I just needed to get out to prove to myself that I could. And it wouldn’t have to be that 20 years down the line everyone is still waiting for the book about Marikana,” Tolsi said in conversation with writer Oscar Masinyana at Lit.Culture Books in Brixton, Johannesburg on Friday.

A politics and investigative reporter, Tolsi produced reporting for the M&G in the build-up to the hosting of the 2010 Fifa World Cup on “things like street kids being cleaned off the street, people being evicted to make way for mega-projects, corruption in construction tenders, et cetera”. He covered “18 matches live” at the World Cup.

“Then I started thinking a bit more about it, things like Hashim Amal and his place in South African imagination, which then emerges in this piece for Chimurenga [magazine] that was picked up by Cricket Monthly. That’s when I started to pick up on sports writing again.

“This selection is not a definitive or authoritative work on history of South African cricket. It’s a very thin book, right,” he quipped.

“It extracts from history and then reflects on the present. And what I tried to do was, through the selection and way it was set out, give an overarching view on SA history and cricket. One of the pieces then becomes Johannesburg, looking at various cross-sections of non-racism that happened at a particular point, with a particular point; then looking at more contemporary stuff. So I kind of build a picture of history and a contemporary look at cricket.

“But one of the driving things in my early work and also in thinking about this collection was also to respond to this erasure of black history in sport and cricket specifically.

“Because for a lot of the white media, we never played cricket, we were never good at cricket or rugby. But the truth of it — and this comes from some really important work by [sports history authors] Andre Odendaal and Krish Reddy — is in black African communities cricket was being played at the time it was introduced into the country.

“And the idea black cricket was inferior is also wrong. For example in 1893 an all-black Lovedale College team played an all-white Dale College team and beat them. So this idea of white excellence [only] in cricket, if you go back in history, is completely wrong and attempted erasure needs to be responded to.”

That Tolsi’s essays fuse sport, politics and history is not surprising from a journalist who is not a sports writer but, as he describes himself, writes “mainly about state violence and intergenerational trauma”.

The pieces include No Normal sport in an Abnormal Society (2016), where Tolsi highlight’s Mfuneko Ngam’s injury breakdown that prematurely ended his career as a comment on the lack of normality in post-democracy South Africa.

Taking Guard in Inner-City Johannesburg (2022) builds historic architecture of significance, anti-apartheid luminaries, the struggle of black cricket and for interracial sports and representation, imagery of the city and stories of ordinary sportsmen from the past into a narrative.

The Amla piece details the distrust the “svelte and effete” Proteas captain, succeeding the “burly boytjie” Graeme Smith, had to overcome being “cerebral and measured in speech” and someone who “uses the word ‘ephemeral’”, who the on-air words of Australia’s Dean Jones labelled a “terrorist” and who “remained the Other”. It explores the burden black South African cricketers like Amla and Temba Bavuma “face every time they run up to the wicket or take guard at the crease”.

“They are playing for their team, and their country, but they also are fighting against racial stereotypes and prejudices that linger long after apartheid’s demise.”

Salem: of the Land Itself (2020) explores the history of the Eastern Cape ground that claims to be the country’s oldest, weaving exclusion of black cricketers, stolen land, restitution and the fractious present.

Temba Bavuma, a Cricketer with Principles (2019), examines how the Proteas captain’s “batting DNA is intergenerational, spanning over a century”, and how it took such a lineage, and multiple other factors in his favour to become an international cricketer.

In Zuma’s Zondo Testimony Was like a Five-Day Test (2019), Tolsi writes former president Jacob Zuma’s “appearance at the commission of enquiry into state capture” resembled a “protagonist intent on blocking his way to whatever score he could muster, as long as he remained not out at the end of the innings — and certainly out of prison”.

In his introduction Tolsi describes his upbringing in KwaDukuza (formerly Stanger), outside Durban, an area steeped in sports and struggle history.

“Dawood Asmal of Schools Cricket Club was selected as a replacement for the South African nonracial team captained by Basil D'Oliviera that toured East Africa in 1958. The brothers Jagnadhan 'Jugoo' Govender and Mahalingum 'Child' Govender, who represented Natal in the old South African Cricket Board days, were my uncles by marriage and community.

“An all-rounder of immense talent, Jugoo was selected for a nonracial Rest of South Africa XI against Western Province in 1976. A fearsome fast-bowler, Child was selected for a nonracial South African invitation side to play against an Eastern Province team captained by Basil D'Oliviera.

“Both would have surely developed into national players in any other country, at any other time. Likewise cricketers from later generations like Yunus Moorad, Poovi Pillay, Yashwin Singh and so many others.

“ ... Yet. These stories of my local heroes, my family, friends and ancestors, did not feature in the broader media or a wider national imagination — such as these existed, being tightly controlled by white hegemony.

“Even worse, there were attempts to erase these feats of prowess and perseverance, these acts of resistance — both sporting and political — against apartheid, by white society and its media.

“I felt this even more acutely when I went to Rhodes University to study journalism and white students scoffed at the notion that black people had any sporting history at all. My first year at Rhodes was in 1994 — a time when international sports participation had been parlayed for racial reconciliation and to the detriment of black communities with deep and rich sporting histories.

“Black people did not play sport was the argument used by white people who knew us only as gardeners, domestic workers, shopkeepers, waiters and mineworkers. There was no need to 'undermine' the strength of all-white national teams with affirmative action. No need for sporting redress or reparations. Our traumas were refused recognition. There was no need to level the playing fields, or transform the societies that surrounded the more impoverished ones on which we had played. We were inferior still, as sportspeople and humans.

“As a journalist from 1998-99, I sought to fight this ignorance and this erasure. I had realised long before that so many people I knew and loved were haunted by the ghosts of 'what could have been' as much as by the white insult that they never could have been.”

In his foreword, Colombo ESPNcricinfo Sri Lanka correspondent Andrew Fidel Fernando writes: “This is not a book of pieces to be gorged on at full tilt, but one that demands of its reader patience and understanding, as if the reader themselves is a batsman and Niren has settled into a probing spell on the first morning of a Test match.

“It is a layered work, enriched by all the nuance that any South African sporting story deserves. In parts, it reads like a love letter to resilience and dignity, which merely happens to be about cricket. There are themes and stories here that go far beyond athletic endeavour and speak to what it means to be human.”

Writing Around the Wicket is published by Micromega Publications.

Tolsi will be in discussion on the book with M&G cartoonist and former Sunday Times football writer Carlos Amato at Love Books, 53 Rustenburg Road, Melville on Wednesday from 5.30pm.