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ABSTRACT
The issues of race, class and transformation in South African cricket are examined through a life history of Haroon Lorgat, a player and administrator in pre- and post-apartheid cricket. Lorgat’s journey provides seminal insights into the sport as his life spans the dusty playing fields of apartheid cricket, to the top order of the sport as CEO of the International Cricket Council (ICC), and then returning as CEO of Cricket South Africa (CSA). It offers an opportunity to understand the changing relations of power in global cricket while also showing how this impacted on the space for manoeuvre for those batting on home ground, as he tried to negotiate the uncertain corridor of racial transformation while ensuring that the national team continued to win on the field.
Note on the contributor
Goolam Vahed is a Professor in the Department of History at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. He has published widely on identity formation, citizenship, ethnicity, migration, and transnationalism among Indian South Africans as well as the role of sport and culture in South African society in peer-reviewed journals. His most recent (co-authored) work, A History of the Present: A Biography of Indian South Africans, 1994–2019, was published by Oxford University Press in 2019.
Notes
1 See, e.g., M. Allie, More Than a Game. History of the Western Province Cricket Board 1959–1991 (Cape Town: Western Province Cricket Association and Cape Argus, 2001); A. Desai, V. Padayachee, K. Reddy, and G. Vahed, Blacks in Whites: A Century of Sporting Struggles in KwaZulu-Natal, 1880–2002 (Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 2002); A. Khota, Across the Great Divide, Transvaal Cricket’s Joys, Struggles, and Triumphs (Johannesburg: Gauteng Cricket Board, 2003); A. Odendaal, The Story of an African Game: Black Cricketers and the Unmasking of One of Cricket’s Greatest Myths, South Africa, 1850–2003 (Cape Town: David Philip, 2003).
2 M. Erben, ‘Biography and Research Method’, in M. Erben, ed., Biography and Education: A Reader (London: Falmer Press, 1998), 5–19, 16.
3 M. Erben, ‘The Problem of Other Lives: Social Perspectives on Written Biography,’ Sociology, 27, 1 (1993), 15–25, 23.
4 Alice Kessler-Harris, ‘Why Biography?’, The American Historical Review, 114, 3 (2009), 625–630, 626.
5 This article is based largely on a semi-structured interview with Haroon Lorgat, the main protagonist, and follow-up email correspondence with him to clarify issues and plug gaps in the story. Newspapers and cricket websites such as Cricinfo were consulted to corroborate or contest his testimony. Lorgat was interviewed in person by Goolam Vahed in Cape Town on 26 March 2019. Where Lorgat is quoted throughout this article, this is based on this interview and follow-up clarification, and this has not been referenced throughout. A reference is only provided where there the source of information was different.
6 While the concept of race has no basis in human biology, it is a social and political fact in South Africa whose population is officially classified according to one of four racial groups – Black African, White, Coloured, and Indian/Asian. These categories are capitalised in the official census of Stats SA, and thus also capitalised in this article. Lorgat is classified as ‘Indian’, a group that constitutes about 2% of the South African population. Indian, as used here, refers to those considered South Asian in other countries. The category Black is used in the Black Consciousness sense of including Indians, Black Africans, and Coloureds.
7 See G. Vahed and S. Bhana, Crossing Space and Time in the Indian Ocean: Early Indian Traders in Natal – A Biographical Study (Pretoria: UNISA Press, 2015), 21–35.
8 R. du Pre, ed., Preface South End: As We Knew It (Port Elizabeth: Kohler Carton, 1997), iii.
9 Ibid., iv–v.
10 Herald Live, 25 January 2014.
11 D. Booth, The Race Game, Sport and Politics in South Africa (London: Frank Cass, 1998), 183–184.
12 See P. May, The Rebel Tours. Cricket’s Crisis of Conscience (London: Sportsbooks, 2010).
13 See G. Vahed and A. Desai, ‘The Coming of Nelson and the Ending of Apartheid Cricket: Gatting’s Rebels in South Africa’, The International Journal of the History of Sport, 33, 15 (2016), 1785–1803.
14 Ibid., 1790.
15 See M. Keech, ‘At the Centre of the Web: The Role of Sam Ramsamy in South Africa’s Readmission to International Sport’, Culture, Sport, Society, 3, 3 (2000), 41–62, doi:10.1080/14610980008721878
16 For an examination of the historical relationship between Indian and South African cricket, see G. Vahed, ‘India in the Imagination of South African Indian Cricket’, in B. Murray, R. Parry, and J. Winch, eds, Cricket and Society in South Africa: From Union to Isolation (London: Palgrave, 2018), 167–190.
17 A. Desai, Reverse Sweep: A Story of South African Cricket Since Apartheid (Johannesburg: Jacana, 2018), 193.
18 See A. Desai and G. Vahed, ‘Hashim Amla: Beyond Boundaries’, in Desai and Vahed, A History of the Present: A Biography of Indian South Africans 1990–2019 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2019), 99–128.
19 For a discussion of quotas in cricket around this period see J. Gemmell, ‘South African Cricket: The Rainbow Nation Must Have a Rainbow Team’, Sport in Society, 10, 1 (2007), 49–70, doi:10.1080/17430430600989159; D. Farland and I. Jennings, ‘Cricket and Representivity: The Case of Race Quotas in Team Selection’, Sport in Society, 10, 5 (2007), 818–839, doi:10.1080/17430430701442553.
20 See A. Gupta, ‘The IPL and the Indian Domination of Global Cricket’, Sport in Society, 14, 10 (2011), 1316–1325, doi:10.1080/17430437.2011.620373; N. Mehta, ‘Batting for the Flag: Cricket, Television and Globalization in India’, Sport in Society, 12, 4–5 (2009), 579–599, doi:10.1080/17430430802702848.
21 Majola was found guilty of awarding himself a bonus of R1.8 million without the approval of the CSA Board or remuneration committee when South Africa hosted the IPL tournament in 2009 when India was unable to do so because of elections in that country. See G. Vahed and A. Desai, ‘Beyond the Nation? Colour and Class in South African Cricket,’ in A. Desai, ed., The Race to Transform: Sport in Post-Apartheid South Africa (Cape Town: HSRC Press, 2010): 176–221, 187–188.
22 The Indian Express, 10 August 2019, https://indianexpress.com/article/sports/cricket/bcci-has-agreed-to-come-under-nada-ambit-says-sports-secretary-5891769//.
23 L. Woolf, ‘An Independent Governance Review of the International Cricket Council’, Lord Woolf and Pricewaterhouse Coopers LLP, 1 February 2012, http://p.imgci.com/db/DOWNLOAD/0000/0093/woolfe_report.pdf, accessed 26 July 2019, 4.
24 Ibid., 8.
25 The ICC has three categories of members: ‘Full Members’ who are the Test-playing countries; ‘Associates’, countries where cricket is firmly established and organised, such as Ireland; and ‘Affiliates’, where cricket is played in accordance with the laws of the game, such as Bhutan. At the time of the Woolf Report in 2012, the ICC had 105 Members which included 10 Full, 36 Associate and 59 Affiliate members. The number of Full members increased to 12 with the addition of Ireland and Afghanistan in 2017.
26 Email to G. Vahed, 17 August 2019.
27 S. Berry, ‘ICC Condemned After Giving Total Control to “Big Three” of Australia, England and India’, The Telegraph, 8 February 2014, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/cricket/international/10626152/ICC-condemned-after-giving-total-control-to-Big-Three-of-Australia-England-and-India.html, accessed 27 July 2019.
28 The BCCI was to receive US$440 million under the Big Three Model. Under the new model, it would receive US$293m across the eight-year cycle, the English US$143m, Zimbabwe US$94m and the remaining seven Full Members US$132m each. The 95 or so Associate Members were to receive total funding of US$280m: D. Brettig, ‘New ICC Finance Model Breaks Up Big Three’, ESPN Cricinfo, 27 April 2017, https://www.espncricinfo.com/story/_/id/19253630/new-icc-finance-model-breaks-big-three, accessed 20 June 2017.
29 T. Holme, ‘Numbers Man Haroon Lorgat Needs to Crack Cricket World’s Power Equation’, The Indian Express, 5 September 2013, http://archive.indianexpress.com/news/numbers-man-haroon-lorgat-needs-to-crack-cricket-world-s-power-equation/1164819/3, accessed 26 July 2019.
30 ‘Lorgat Opens Up On His Problems with BCCI’, Dawn, 23 July 2013, https://www.dawn.com/news/1031131/lorgat-opens-up-on-his-problems-with-bcci, accessed 24 April 2020.
31 N. Manthorp, ‘Bid for ICC Control “Just Not Cricket”’, Mail & Guardian, 24 January 2014, https://mg.co.za/article/2014-01-23-bid-for-icc-control-just-not-cricket, accessed 1 November 2019.
32 S. Bose, ‘Haroon Lorgat “sacrificed”, BCCI Agrees to Tour South Africa’, NDTV Sports, 22 October 2013, https://sports.ndtv.com/cricket/bcci-pressure-forces-south-africa-to-stump-its-own-ceo-haroon-lorgat-1528399, accessed 26 July 2019.
33 N. Manthorpe, ‘Bid for ICC Control ‘Just Not Cricket’, Mail & Guardian, 23 January 2014. https://mg.co.za/article/2014-01-23-bid-for-icc-control-just-not-cricket/, accessed 30 June 2019.
34 Desai and Vahed, ‘Beyond the Nation?’
35 M. Allie, ‘Black South African Cricket Comes of Age’, BBC News, 2 February 2016, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-35459185, accessed 8 December 2016.
36 F. Moonda, ‘CSA Confirms Guideline On Selection Quota’, ESPN Cricinfo, 18 April 2016, https://www.espncricinfo.com/story/_/id/21176431/csa-confirms-guideline-selection-quota, accessed 1 December 2019.
37 C. Merrett, C. Tatz, and D. Adair, ‘History and Its Racial Legacies: Quotas in South African Rugby and Cricket’, Sport in Society, 14, 6 (2011), 754–777, 754, doi:10.1080/17430437.2011.587291.
38 F. Moonda, ‘Did AB de Villiers Want To Have His Cake and Eat It Too?’, ESPN Cricinfo, 7 June 2019, https://www.espncricinfo.com/story/_/id/26917011/ab-de-villiers-legacy-defined-not-only-excellence-indec, accessed 28 July 2019.
39 L. Alfred, ‘Transformation: Sports Farce in Land of Pantomime’, Mail & Guardian, 29 April 2016, https://mg.co.za/article/2016-04-28-sports-farce-in-land-of-pantomime, accessed 8 December 2019.
40 ‘Turmoil in Cricket South Africa as Haroon Lorgat Quits’, The Citizen, 28 September 2017.
41 N. Manthorpe, ‘Cape Crisis as T20 Global League’s Collapse Hits Home in South Africa’, The Cricket Paper, 19 October 2017, https://thecricketpaper.com/featured/3545/cape-crisis-as-t20-global-leagues-collapse-hits-home-in-south-africa/, accessed 28 July 2019.
42 F. Moonda, ‘CSA Will Not Hold Independent Investigation into 2018 MSL Dispute’, ESPN Cricinfo, 30 October 2019, https://www.espncricinfo.com/story/_/id/27972563/csa-not-hold-independent-investigation-2018-msl-dispute, accessed 12 December 2019.
43 A. MacIntyre, After Virtue, 2nd ed. (London: Duckworth, 1985), 213.