The grieving family of Cape-Town sports legend Basil D’Oliveira, who died yesterday, aged 80, have declared they will “celebrate a great life, rather than mourn a death”.
D’Oliveira was widely known as an England international cricketer, but is considered to have led South Africa’s most representative cricket team in the pre-isolation period.
An all-rounder, he was to become an international figure in 1968 when his inclusion in the England team to tour South Africa was rejected by then prime minister BJ Vorster. The tour was cancelled by England, and sports isolation intensified.
But a decade before “theD’Oliveira affair”, the Signal Hill-born player led a non-racial South African Cricket Board of Control (Sacboc) national team on a tour of East Africa. The national team did not include any white players because none played in Sacboc cricket.
Yesterday tributes poured in from playing colleagues, administrators and the media, after D’Oliveira died in his home town of Worcester, England. He had suffered from Parkinson’s Disease for years.
The Western Province Cricket Association said via chief executive Professor Andre Odendaal that “this province has a cricket heritage spanning over two centuries, and Basil’s name is one of the first that comes up when reviewing the significant figures of the past”.
Left-arm spinner Owen Williams, a teammate from the 1958 Sacboc tour, said he and D’Oliveira had been good friends in the days before the latter left South Africa in 1960 to seek his fortune in England.
“He was a great guy. He had great discipline and he gave you great advice. As a young sportsman trying to excel in the game… you followed Basil.”
Paying tribute, Cricket South Africa chief executive Gerald Majola said: “(D’Oliveira) was a man of true dignity and a wonderful role model, somebody who overcame the most extreme prejudices and circumstances to take his rightful place on the world stage.” - Weekend Argus