Cricket: Colourful past of a whites-only wicket

Cricket is a national obsession in South Africa. Picture / Reuters

It hardly looks out of place in South Africa these days - three black youths intently studying Chris Martin's inswinger at the Willowmoore Park Cricket Stadium.

Yet Cassim Suliman cannot help but gaze wistfully as the trio applaud when a Cape coloured named Justin Ontong dispatches said over-pitched delivery crisply to the cover boundary.

It is not that Suliman dare not believe his eyes - his satisfied demeanour simply acknowledges how emphatically times have changed at this cricketing oasis in a grim, decrepit East Rand satellite town called Benoni.

When Suliman was a kid himself, in the late 1960s, it would have been inconceivable - in fact illegal - for him to perch by the Chalet End sightscreen an arm's length from a doting Afrikaner nana and her fidgety grandson.

Back in the dark ages of apartheid, Willowmoore Park was an exclusively white domain, a fenced off arena jealously guarded by brown-shirted police armed with the shambok, a leather whip with a cutting edge.

Not that state-sanctioned racism and the dire consequences of trespassing could quell Suliman's love of the game - or the desire to test his mettle on a pitch uncontaminated by sand, stones or broken Castle lager bottles.

A seventh generation South African of Indian/Lebanese stock, Suliman and his black and coloured buddies were so taken with cricket that every summer weekend they would risk a beating off the field at Willowmoore - as well as a thrashing on it.

Weather permitting, each Sunday morning, Suliman, his teammates and the opposition, would ghost through the adjacent whites-only high school, step gingerly on to the oval, expertly mark out a pitch, pad up and keep an ear out for approaching sirens.

"We'd sneak in, roll the wicket ... no one knows because they [the whites] are all in church," said Suliman, who now presides over Willowmoore as chief executive of Gauteng's Eastern Cricket Union.

"We'd start at nine and finish up about five - if we were lucky."

Although the Sabbath is a day of rest and serious worship for devotees of the Dutch Reformed Church, policemen still patrolled and a concerted appeal for caught behind could have unhealthy side effects.

"If they caught us we'd be locked up. When the cop van comes in we run like hell," Suliman recalled.

"We'd leave one guy under the grandstand with the equipment. If we had 15 fixtures a season we'd complete about seven," he said, smiling at the absurdity of those bad old days. "Sometimes they'd catch three or four of the guys and charge them with trespass. "We'd collect money, 50 rand ($13) and get them out. It was a lot of money back then but we don't leave them there overnight because the police would finish them up, they'd panel beat them very badly ...

"We lost a lot of players like that."

Sympathetic and benevolent whites often helped out with equipment and encouraged their own children to play - a philosophy then light years ahead of its time in South Africa, and one frowned upon by the police state.

"They [whites] used to love playing with us, but they also got in trouble."

Suliman vividly remembers one lawful intervention.

"The policeman slapped one of the white boys and said in Afrikaans: 'What are you doing with the coolies [Indians] here?'

"He took him home to his parents and we never saw him again."

As a young man Suliman was powerless to change the unnatural order of things in his birthplace, but eventually he found himself at the forefront of the anti-apartheid movement and a successful campaign to desegregate cricket.

And, fittingly, his beloved Willowmoore was a focal point in the eventual dismantling of the colour-based boundary between the white-run South African Cricket Union and the South African Cricket Board.

Willowmoore Park was already a footnote in cricket's history book when the movement for democratic change gathered irresistible momentum ahead of Nelson Mandela's release from prison in February, 1990.

In 1948, England's Dennis Compton plundered a triple century in just 180 minutes. The ground also hosted the first day-night international, between South Africa and Australia in 1962.

However, a clandestine meeting in the old wooden grandstand between heavy-hitting activists vehemently opposed to the Mike Gatting-led English rebel tour in early 1990 is possibly the little known venue's true legacy to international cricket.

When news of the tour broke two months before the scheduled start, Suliman and a host of the African National Congress (ANC) hierarchy mobilised to ensure the krugerand-chasing sportsmen had actually signed up for a tour from hell.

Admittedly, the anti-tour crusade got off to an inauspicious start at Johannesburg's Jan Smuts Airport. "There were 60 of us at the start and the cops just laughed at us," Suliman said. "They even put their dogs and tear gas away. When Mrs [Winnie] Mandela came, she said: 'Is this it?' I explained we were the only ones who played cricket."

A curt phone conversation later and busloads of National Union of Mine Workers' members were headed to the arrivals hall. Chaos ensued. "All of a sudden there were about 4000 people there. "The cops weren't laughing then! They got their guns and the tear gas." Suliman warned white cricket boss Dr Ali Bacher that the situation would only deteriorate unless the tour was abandoned and both their organisations merged.

"We said to Ali: 'You're going to have unification of cricket in this country if you're going to have international cricket.

"You can't have these rebel tours taking blood money from the people."

Bacher apparently took some convincing, but cut short the Gatting gravy train when civil disobedience was promised in Cape Town and Port Elizabeth.

"We bought tickets in PE and Cape Town. We waved them at Ali and said we would send 20 people to sit on the ground with placards.

"The police would give them a hiding and lock them up.

"Five overs later we said we'd send another lot in - the blood would be on Ali's hands."

Suliman today maintains admiration for Bacher, who ultimately had the foresight to facilitate the formation of what is now the United Cricket Board of South Africa.

"He made those changes, there were no more rebel tours and unification came in 1991," Suliman said, lauding unification as a stepping stone towards his country's difficult rebirth.

"Cricket has played a major role in bringing communities together.

"Where we are right now, 10 minutes away is a place called Brakpan.

"They are hardline Afrikaners, the ultra right. Next to them is Boksburg, ultra right; Springs, ultra right.

"This area is mostly Afrikaner but after unification cricket went into the communities and brought people together, black, white, pink, brown and blue."

Still, old habits die hard.

Racial integration is, obviously, a work in progress, particularly as bitterness lingers around the tricky issue of automatic selection for players of colour in representative teams.

"It was difficult in the start," Suliman said.

"You'd get under-13s playing in Brakpan and the black team loses by two or three runs ... the white Afrikaner youngster holds the black boy round the neck and says: 'Ag how it is mate? Bad luck.'

"You could see the camaraderie and the friendship there but the old granny in the stand is shouting: 'Siss. Nee [no] man, don't touch him.'

"We've gone through all that now, it's come and gone. Sure you get a little bit here and there but they've changed. Everybody has changed."

- NZPA