When Prime Minister John Vorster announced in the Bloemfontein City Hall on September 17, 1968, that Basil D’Oliveira would not be welcome in the MCC team to tour South Africa, I was not present.

But my colleagues at the time informed me that his statement sent many of his National Party members into paroxysms of joy. They cheered and clapped and gave “Jolly John”, as he was sometimes known, a standing ovation.

How dare the Brits choose a Cape Coloured to play cricket for them against South Africa whose own team was as white as the flannels they wore! It was clearly a ploy to undermine the South African way of life, as everyone knew it.

But you could trust Vorster to put the outside world in its place. He even once challenged it to “do your damnedest”.

A month before he had sacked that hardline anachronism Albert Hertzog from his cabinet, worrying some that he had bowed ever so slightly to liberalistic-communistic pressure. Banning Basil in such dramatic fashion put their minds at rest.

A year later I was indeed in the Bloemfontein City Hall, to cover the next annual congress of the Free State Nats. Once again Vorster spoke, and this time he announced that Maori would be allowed to tour South Africa in All Black teams. Once again his audience leapt to its feet in joy and jubilation. We political journalists were baffled.

Why was a fellow South African, a born-and-bred Capetonian, anathema, and a Maori named Sid Going (that was the only one South Africans had heard of) now a Free State darling?

I think the reason was this. Free Staters are not stupid people. They saw what happened when you banned “non-whites” (as they were called) from touring teams. The teams then refused to come. It didn’t matter so much in cricket, which was mainly a rooinek game. But the thought of the All Blacks no longer challenging the Springboks on South African soil was, to coin another Vorsterian phrase, “too ghastly to contemplate”.

Heck, who was going to notice one little Maori, anyway?

This week Jeanne Innes, widow of South African cricketer Gerald, wrote to me to say Innes’s and D’Oliveira’s 80th birthdays were within two days of each other.

I remember interviewing Gerald in their flat just after he had been selected to play for the national team. It was he who organised a fund-raising match to send D’Oliveira overseas.

In digging through my old cuttings on the Vorster episode, I came across stories that today seem unbelievable, even though I wrote them myself.

One of them was of that redoubtable Cape Town city councillor Cissy Gool being kicked out of the council chamber for repeatedly objecting to the erection of a “whites only” noticeboard at Glen Beach, Camps Bay.

Another was of the then Administrator of the Cape, Nico Malan, warning opposition members not to criticise |Dr Verwoerd “because he is the outstanding statesman of the world today”.

A third is of then opposition leader Sir De Villiers Graaff telling UCT students that white leadership was essential because no black African country had maintained democracy for more than five years.

As if South Africa were ever a democracy before 1994. Basil D’Oliveira had the misfortune to peak 30 years too soon.