By Michael Donen
After sanctions were lifted on South Africa, my sadly departed comrade Percy Sonn, who later headed the United Cricket Board of SA, was asked: “Does this mean we will get to see the West Indies play, at last?”
“Yes, after there are cricket facilities at every school in Khayelitsha,” he replied.
As it happened, I got to see Ambrose and Walsh open the bowling for the Windies just a few years later. The lack of facilities that Sonn lamented has still not been addressed.
Former South African all-rounder Ashwell Prince rightly identifies this lack of grass roots development, above all else, as the biggest bar to the necessary transformation of the Proteas.
Speaking last week at Nelson Mandela University, Prince expanded on his unequivocal support for transformation and correct scepticism of measuring transformation by the national side’s races (a policy introduced by Sonn 18 years ago to increase representation of black players).
Most of the press have focused on Prince’s desire “to live in a society where hopefully people are not denied opportunities because they are a certain skin colour, no matter what it is”.
But it is vital to understand that his emphasis on opportunities is not primarily a question of whether Zubayr Hamza or Janneman Malan plays for the Proteas.
Having opportunities also means learning the sport as a child, having facilities to play cricket after school, to become good at the sport, to stand a realistic chance of playing provincial school cricket.
That Kagiso Rabada is a miracle is self-evidently true (and AB de Villiers likewise). But for miracles to occur, we need to meet God halfway.
There are many, many others, with equal God-given talent, who have not been given the opportunity. If we look at the development structures in India, we can see proof of this.
For us to be a great cricketing nation – quite apart from a nation transforming as our nation should be – we cannot rely on a couple of scholarships to St Stithians, Grey College, and Bishops, to solve this problem.
For those of us who love cricket and our country, the demand that we both transform our teams and that those teams not be rubbished in competition.
Certainly not now, a quarter century after the end of apartheid. They only find themselves in competition in an obscene, apartheid-like society in which it is almost universally white boys who are groomed to become the cricket stars of the future.
Assuming basic development at the grass roots, the transformation targets for our national team are mild, if anything, and would not need to be targets; the simple demographics of our country would make them inevitable.
But that grass roots development has not occurred. Still. After 25 years. And this is the root of the problems plaguing the Proteas.
It comes as no great shock that certain of the great Afrikaner cricketers of a generation before are less than wholly onboard with Black Lives Matter. While their lining up, to a man, to oppose Lungi Ngidi’s call for the Proteas to kneel in solidarity with the BLM movement is of course awful, it is tangential to the underlying problem.
Equally tangential is the Kolpak exodus. While many good players have taken advantage of the EU ruling to play in England (Kyle Abbott and Hardus Viljoen, in particular, had great potential, while Simon Harmer has proved an exceptionally strong player in country cricket) we have probably not lost any greats.
More than lamenting their departure (or criticising them for departing) we should be lamenting, firstly, our inability to build a support structure where cricketers do not have to look overseas for their earnings, and secondly, far more pressingly, the many cricketers who have never made it on to the main stage, because they were not nurtured.
This should have changed 25 years ago. Percy Sonn knew this. This needs to change now.
* Michael Donen SC is a legal practitioner and listed counsel of the International Criminal Court.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of IOL.