By Rodney Ulyate and Richard Parry
Johannesburg — Last Saturday marked the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Frank Roro, our greatest African cricketer, and the benchmark for all African batsmen. Contemporaries are consentient: He could have walked into any national team. One much-cited history casts him as the “WG Grace of African cricket.” For those who prefer the antipodean touchstone, he was “The Dusty Bradman.”
Perhaps this sounds like hyperbole? Let us survey the record. Roro was the first South African, of any extraction, to register 100 centuries. He did this at an average north of 100. In provincial cricket between 1934 and 1951, he accumulated no fewer than twenty centuries (top score 228), which accounts for most of his 3,000-run aggregate. (His average at this level, in other words, was also probably around 100, but in the absence of complete records, a function of wilful neglect by mainstream news and white historians, it is impossible to be certain.) Of the nine inter-provincial championships in which he participated, Transvaal took all but three.
All this he accomplished on “rush matting,” or what passed for turf in the under-resourced African game. At 5 ft 8 in., he was almost as low-set as Bradman, but what he wanted in reach he covered (like Bradman) with keen eyes and volant feet. Fast bowling held no terrors for him; even on bumpy wickets he would dance out to meet the seamers, but it was his majesty off the back foot — his dauntless hooks, his carpal pulls — that endured longest in the memories of those who saw them. His concentration was inerrant, his appetite quenchless. No matter the conditions, he was “fluent and graceful at all times.”
Times like 1934, in Port Elizabeth, on a pitch “made up of pure fresh anthill with a liberal sprinkling of stones,” and when “the goddess of luck alone apparently prevented any serious injuries.” Here Roro stretched up towards the outer limits of his talent, scoring 134 and 95 to bring Transvaal its first national title. He had a stroke for every ball, and the gift of placement; and for all his classicism, he made his runs quickly. A born entertainer, he could not resist smashing a quick full-length ball straight back over the sightscreen to win a match. His batting was a major stimulant to black interest in the game.
At times he seemed a host in himself — a one-man team. In this he was less Bradman than Bradman’s black contemporary George Headley, christened “Atlas” for carrying the West Indies on his shoulders. Roro often accounted for more than two thirds of Transvaal’s innings. The most striking instance is his 95 out of 127 against Border in the 1934 final, or perhaps his unbeaten 102 out of 137 against Western Province in 1950, when he was well into his fifth decade. His 93 against Border in Durban in 1939 abstracted victory from a nailed-on defeat, and was arrested only by an unplayable leg-break.
Unplayable leg-breaks were often the only fair means available to his opponents, which is why their means were occasionally foul: In 1948, Eastern Province successfully appealed against him for picking up an idle ball and returning it to the bowler. Aged forty-three, in 1951, he played for the inaugural Bantu team in the inaugural inter-race tournament, and scored its inaugural century.
Nor was he merely a great batsman. As a leg-spinner he could outfox anyone; as a fielder he was “in the champion class.” He was gifted, too, at tennis, “considered among the first eight players in the country,” and a promising career as a loose forward in rugby was stifled by injury. Gerald Siwani, sports editor of City Press, and in his youth a Roro protégé, ranked him among the greatest all-round athletes he had ever known.
For all his greatness, however, Roro was soft-spoken and self-effacing. If he stood above the mortals, he was not above helping them. Lawrence Mvumbu, the Sowetan cricketer and administrator, remembers how “watching Frank play cricket and the way he helped introverted and shy teenagers like myself made me realise that cricket was going to be my game.” As captain Roro was firm but restrained, a savvy strategist and a sensitive man-manager. He had, too, that dignity with which humility goes so well (because it goes so rarely). Always upright behind the proprieties, “graceful and unique whether ... batting or bowling,” he was, in Krish Reddy’s telling, “not only a leader but an idol as well.” No-one did more to carry non-white cricket to its probable peak in the 1950s.
He ought to be a household name. A 2015 essay in The Cricket Monthly assures us that a Google search for “Frank Roro cricket” yields “about 43,000 results.” If only. Google it correctly, with inverted commas around “Frank Roro” (which eliminates hits like “Frank Baeyens - Roro supervisor”), and you’ll get barely seventy. When he died, in a West Rand mental asylum on December 5, 1971, only a small band assembled for his funeral. The fiftieth anniversary of his passing might itself have passed unheralded—it appears nowhere on the web, and in no book — but for our having spotted it, quite by accident, in the course of unrelated research.
Frank Roro is the starkest example of black cricket’s expurgation from South African history. Of legends like “Oom Piet” Gwele we know next to nothing; their records may now be irretrievable. Much of Roro’s career is likewise condemned. One cannot avoid the contrast with his Caucasian peers, whose achievements are so painstakingly canonised. His total exclusion from the advantages they enjoyed precludes any meaningful comparison. Herein lies the tragedy: not just that we will never know how good he was, but that we can never know how good he might have become.
There have been efforts, slight and halting, to supply the deficit. The turn of the millennium brought with it the high point of Roro’s fame: his unanimous inclusion in South Africa’s “Ten Cricketers of the Century.” His son accepted a medallion on his behalf, and Nelson Mandela (in his youth a boxer at Bantu Sports Club, whose foremost member was our subject) smiled wistfully: “Roro! Yes, he was legendary...” In 1996, some 200 matches from the inter-provincial Dadabhay Trophy and Howa Bowl (non-racial equivalents of the Currie Cup) were upgraded to first-class—all of them post-1971. It seems curious that an epoch of decline in black cricket should enjoy precedence over its golden age, and that that age’s most gilded ornament should be denied a first-class cap.
The reason, at first look a good one, is that Roro’s representative matches were two-day affairs, and as such do not meet ICC criteria, which stipulate at least three. But this regulation, promulgated in 1947, was “not [to] have retrospective effect” (which explains why the 1919 County Championship, whose fixtures were all of two days, retains its gravitas). We have taken up the matter with the Association of Cricket Statisticians and Historians, and hope to make a compelling case at its AGM.
Nor would such a step be purely symbolic. It would right a grievous and enduring wrong. It would vindicate thousands of talented cricketers. And in line with the ongoing transformation project, it would inspire historians and statisticians to resurrect a buried heritage.
Rodney Ulyate is a cricket statistician for SABC Sport.
Richard Parry is a cricket historian whose books include Too Black to Wear Whites: The Remarkable Story of Krom Hendricks, a Cricket Hero who was Rejected by Cecil John Rhodes’s Empire.