by Arunabha Sengupta
On his first-class debut, he walked in with the score reading 36 for 2. The bowling of Leicestershire was not bad, with Jon Agnew, Les Taylor and Nick Cook all going on to become Test cricketers down the line. Our man weathered the storm and scored a neat 61 before being caught by David Gower off Brian Davison.
Less than a month later, he made his debut in List-A cricket for Combined Universities against Warwickshire in the Benson and Hedges Cup. From No 3, he scored 74 against Bob Willis, Gladstone Small and Dilip Doshi. The effort saw him winning the Man of the Match award.
Those, unfortunately, remained his only fifties in top-level cricket. He played 12 times for Cambridge University, not really setting the pitches on fire. In the winters, he went back to his homeland and played for Boland without really making a mark.
But deeds on the cricket ground were not really his forte. He contributed by writing about the deeds in the game that no one else wrote about. The same was true about other sports.
Nevertheless, he did something unique on the cricket field as well.
Back in South Africa after completing his PhD in history from St John’s College he started teaching in the Western Cape University. In 1984-85, he played for Transvaal in the Howa Bowl tournament of the South African Cricket Board of Control (SACBOC) —thus becoming the only white first-class cricketer to play in the non-white competition during the apartheid era. He turned out in the tournament in 1985-86 as well.
In 1976, at the age of 22, he had already edited God’s Forgotten Cricketers: Profiles of Leading South African Players. The following year, at 23, he edited the excellent Cricket in Isolation: The Politics of Race in South African Cricket. The views of some of the cricketing personalities documented there speak eloquently of their mindset and the zeitgeist.
He remained an anti-apartheid activist in the UDF, NECC, NSC and ANC, and chaired the UCBSA’s Transformation Monitoring Committee from 1998 to 2002.
Down the years, he became the founding director of both the Mayibuye Centre of History and Culture in South Africa, and the Robben Island Museum, the first heritage institution of the new South African democracy. For ten years, he was the CEO at the Newlands Cricket Ground and also the Cape Cobras team of Western Province.
His books have unearthed, bit by bit, that cricket and rugby in South Africa were not really a white sport as many claimed and many more continue to believe. The Story of an African Game (2003) started unmasking South African cricket’s greatest myth, Beyond the Tryline (1995) had done the same with rugby. They told of the sports as played by the subjugated, maginalised, non-white people of the country, even while they struggled for the very basic recognition merited by —no, not sportsmen, but— human beings.
With time he wrote The Blue Book on Western Province Cricket. And simultaneously he kept writing about social and political movements, protests, and all that characterised the curious nation in the past: Vukani Bantu!, Beyond the Barricades, Liberation Chabalala, The Founders: Origins of the African National Congress and the Struggle for Democracy.
And now he is halfway through the four volumes of the most incredible history of a country’s sport written along with Jonty Winch and Krish Reddy. These are so unlike anything penned about cricket that they run the risk of passing the cricketing ivory towers without too many people stuffy sentinels of cricket writing noticing much.
A four volume history of South African cricket, as played by everyone in the weird country, not just the 20% who were allowed by the laws to represent white South Africa in Test cricket. The stories of their struggles, their triumphs and their frustrations, all immaculately documented with incredibly researched facts and statistics.
Cricket and Conquest and Divided Country are already published and there has never been such an effort to retrieve and archive all the feats of the African, coloured and Indian cricketers in South Africa during the days of apartheid. The volumes are fascinating.
We wait for the third and fourth volumes, that will for the first time carry detailed coverage of many unknown chapters, such as the tour of the non-white cricketers to Kenya and East Africa in 1956-57. Meanwhile our man has already combined with Peter Hain to pen another classic on the struggles of the non-white sportsmen and people for their basic rights called Pitch Battles.
Andre Odendaal has been showing us the other side of the story for many decades. He was born on 4 May 1954.