Part 2
History isn’t necessarily a subject that piques the interest of many people. In fact, when I was at school, history was a frowned-upon subject. The subject was chosen or forced upon some because they either didn’t like it or were bad at maths.
Speaking of history, there’s one incident that happened in a high school history class that comes to mind. During a lesson, a fellow learner and good friend of mine blurted out a funny statement that interrupted the teacher. The class laughed hysterically, prompting the teacher to call the joker to the front of the class, questioning his behaviour.
Next thing you know, kapow! The teacher slaps the kid across the face and toppling the fez he was wearing from his head while saying: “Tell your father I say: ’salaamu alaykoem!’” My friend’s dad was on the school governing body, so the teacher had some balls doing what he did.
We all giggled in muted laughter. Corporal punishment was common practice and telling on teachers would often only result in another slap or two from your parents.
I cannot recall what happened to the teacher since. I think he was later dismissed for some other infraction he was reported for. My friend though, he’s okay. He went on to overcome far more challenging life events and is a successful Master’s graduate working for a top-five financial services company.
Sorry, I digress. Back to the issue. The perceived inferiority of history as a subject is part of the reason why many youth are not interested in the history of things, people, and places. The fallacy creates a knowledge-gap that, in time, creates structural gaps among the various building blocks that forms our society. One such gaping gap exists in grass-roots golf development and transformation.
How did the gap develop? To understand how we arrived at the disparity we need to visit history. Please bear with me because this segment of the article is less anecdotal and a bit more academic, only because so much of golf’s history predates my existence and involvement in golf.
Golf arrived in South Africa sometime in 1885, even before it was played in America only two years later. South Africa’s first golf was played at Waterloo Green in Wynberg Cape Town, under the name Cape Golf Club. This is an area of land between where you’ll find Wynberg Military Camp and Victoria Hospital along Waterloo Road in Wynberg. The exact location was generously shared with me by Peter Sourman, the author of the book A History of Golf in South Africa.
From there it moved to the Rondebosch Common. How interesting is that! Living in the southern suburbs very close to the Common, my wife and I are regular participants at the popular runner’s/walker’s stomping ground but only recently discovered its connection to golf’s history. Now, when I’m out there running, I often take a moment to imagine what golfing at the Common might have looked like back then.
From the Rondebosch Common, the Cape Golf Club moved to its current home adjacent to the Wynberg Military facility and has since been called Royal Cape Golf Club, the oldest golf club in South Africa.
In 1892, the first National Golf Championship was held in Kimberly in the Northern Cape, and the first South African Open Championship in Port Elizabeth in 1903, after many exhibition tournaments of same was played over the preceding 10 years. The SA Open as it is known today, and which recently took place this past weekend at the Gary Player Country Club at Sun City, with Daniel van Tonder winning the prestigious SA Open Champion Title for 2021, is thus one of the oldest Open Championship tournaments in the world. Yes, in the whole world!
It’s fair to say that South Africa has an impressive chapter in world-golf history. It does however have an equally dark, very dark chapter that I delve into later in this series.
During this period of segregation, the only time non-whites or non-Europeans, as they were referred to back then, were on the golf course, was to caddy (carry the bags of the European golfers). Today, still, we have caddies employed at golf courses who are painful reminders of how far we have to go to offer them a dignified presence and livelihood within the industry. This is another topic I will address in more detail in a subsequent story.
Sometime during 1948, the South African Non-European Golf Union was established to progress the inclusion and development of black golfers in South Africa. Now in the Cape at this time, non-white golfers were mostly caddies and never had their own golf courses. They created makeshift courses on vacant lots of sandy, rough land.
In 1936, Sunningdale Park Golf Club was developed on such land in Wynberg, led by Peter Louw, former vice-president of the SA Non-European Golf Union. After they were forced to vacate that land, they found themselves moving around from one tract of neglected land to another, like golfing pariahs.
As bizarre as this sounds, this is exactly what we do in Mitchells Plain today, more than 80 years later. Between 2019 and last year, Mitchells Plain Golf Club, a registered NPO that introduces youth to golf, used a derelict, unused piece of field adjacent to Montrose Park as a driving range and seven-hole par-3 golf course. It wasn’t long before we were instructed by the City of Cape Town to vacate, making way for the development of housing. We’ve since shifted to a smaller section of the field that’s just about large enough for only a driving range.
Not far from this in Portland Mitchells Plain, you will find a rough-and-ready nine -hole golf course with greens harder to putt on than it is for an unlicensed taxi driver to land a Space-X shuttle on Mars.
It would be disingenuous of me if I didn’t highlight that over the decades of segregated golf in South Africa, there has been a fair amount of goodwill from various stakeholders within the (European) SA Golf Union. An example, in 1960, was that instead of letting the WP Non-European Golf Union host its first Amateur Championship on a piece of land in Wetton that would today be considered ripe for a land-grab, in a landmark precedent, Milnerton Golf Club, thanks to the exemplary efforts of Mr FL Cannon, president of the WPGU, and Mr A Buirski, Captain of Milnerton GC, for the first time, a non-white golf tournament was hosted at a “white’s only” golf course.
This set a precedent that was followed every year since, except for the 1969 iteration of the event when it was hosted at the Athlone Golf Course where Vanguard Mall now stands.
The contentious issue then is not that there wasn’t commendable support from the European golf structures for the advancement of black golf but rather that, with all the goodwill starting decades ago and arguably continuing today, we have no less than 11 South African golfers featured in the top 150 *Official World Golf Rankings. None of them are black.
If you’d like to find out more about Mitchells Plain Golf Club, here’s how to: www.mitchellsplaingolfclub.org.za or @mitchellsplain_golfclub on Instagram, or contact Jehad on +27 723654037 or [email protected]
IOL