When Garfield Sobers came to Africa

Black people didn’t dare laugh out loud when they were in the white areas of what was then called Salisbury in 1970. Especially at places as white as Salisbury Sports Club, which has been renamed Harare Sports Club. Unless, of course, they were laughing on demand at a white person’s joke.

Black, brown and white people weren’t legally barred from playing sport with and against each other in Rhodesia — like they were across the Limpopo River in South Africa. But segregation was nonetheless strictly enforced. Especially in sports that whites held to be self-evidently theirs. Like cricket. This was no laughing matter.

Indeed, beyond gallows humour there wasn’t much levity anywhere in the country in 1970. The bush war between the white supremacist regime and black freedom fighters in what we now know as Zimbabwe was six years old in 1970. Hostilities wouldn’t end until December 1979. Independence wouldn’t be won until April 18, 1990. What was there to laugh about?

Then again, Garfield Sobers — who died in Barbados on Friday, 11 days before what would have been his 90th birthday — wasn’t just any black guy. And Ali Bacher — going strong at 84 — isn’t the average white guy. But Bacher, a fine captain, batter and fielder, couldn’t bowl for toffee. His alleged leg spin took two wickets at 43.50 in 120 first-class matches. Those wickets belonged to Sibley McAdam and Vince van der Bijl — who, conversely to Bacher, couldn’t bat for toffee.

In March that year South Africa had played what would be their last Test until April 1992. Because of apartheid they were banished from the international arena until November 1991, when they played three ODIs in India. That happened despite the fact that apartheid wouldn’t end formally until April 1994.

There was no way Sobers could have played against South Africa, but not solely because of the boycott. Under apartheid law it was illegal for him to play a match with or against whites. And South Africa’s teams of the time were solely white.

On top of that, Procter and Sobers became friends on the county circuit. Procter first played for Gloucestershire in May 1965 and Sobers for Nottinghamshire in April 1968. They would represent those counties in 693 matches of all kinds between them. In all, Sobers played first-class cricket with or against 26 South Africans and Rhodesians.

By then, Sobers had noticed another South African in England. He couldn’t fail to do so: Basil D’Oliveira had a higher batting average than Sobers in the 1962 Central Lancashire League. But D’Oliveira was brown, and thus had to leave the South Africa of his birth — where a professional cricket career for anyone who wasn’t white would not have been possible.

The irony of Sobers and white South Africans getting on cannot be allowed to be lost. Despite everything the apartheid government had tried to do to keep different races separate — from the hospitals in which they were born to the schools they attended to where they lived to who they had sexual and other relationships with to which jobs they could hold to where they were buried — put black and white people in the same dressing room and, bloody hell, they might just like each other. Worse, they might discover that they had plenty in common. Worst of all, they might treat each other as equals.

Another irony is at play here, of course. The only South Africans who enjoyed a level of privilege that allowed them to be in someone like Sobers’ company in professional and social settings were white. Imagine how being able to spend time with not the greatest black cricketer of the age but the greatest full stop might have lit a fire in South Africans of other races, and what they might have done with that inspiration.

Nonetheless, a fire was lit. During the English summer of 1970, the indefatigably positive Barlow, who never saw a dark cloud he didn’t consider a silver lining in disguise, hatched a plan to bring Sobers to Africa. Not to South Africa, mind, but to their closest northern neighbours.

On September 12 two years later, Sobers touched down in Salisbury, rested for an hour or three, and proceeded to SSC to play in a double-wicket competition. News of his intention to do so had broken in the English press six days earlier, and caused uproar. A living symbol of black excellence going to a place of black suffering like Rhodesia? Why?

Norman Manley, a former Jamaica prime minister and noted historian of West Indies cricket, described Sobers as “politically unconscious”. Still, did the man not know better than to accept an offer to visit a place where people who looked like him were in the throes of taking up arms simply to be treated as full-fledged citizens of the country in which they were born, unlike the forebears of those who oppressed them?

It seems not. Not only did Sobers play in the reprobate republic of Rhodesia that day, he dined that night with Ian Smith, the country’s prime minister and white-supremacist-in-chief, who Sobers deemed a “tremendous man to talk to”. He was in Rhodesia for less than 48 hours. The fallout from his trip lasted far longer.

“Had I known the furore my visit was to cause, I would not have gone,” Sobers would say later. Furore was an understatement. He was branded a “white black man” in the West Indian press, and on October 10 that year Guyana’s prime minister, Forbes Burnham, said Sobers would not be allowed to play there unless he apologised. Four days later the Jamaican Labour Party demanded his resignation as West Indies captain. Indira Gandhi, then India’s prime minister, let it be known the Windies’ tour to India in 1970/71 could be in danger if Sobers was in the squad. Talk about irony: D’Oliveira was left out of England’s squad to visit South Africa in 1968/69 at the behest of the apartheid government, the spark for isolation.

Something had to give, and it was a written apology by Sobers: “When I was invited to play cricket in Rhodesia, I thought of only two things — my love of cricket and my hope that I would be able to contribute to greater West Indian dignity. I had not realised the deep feelings of the West Indian people in this issue of Rhodesia. I have since learned of the wider international issues involved on the question of Rhodesia. If I had known or thought of these matters before going, I would never have gone to Rhodesia. If another opportunity came my way to go to Rhodesia, I would not now accept it.”

“He saw this lollipop, and I think he tried to hit it into the Zambezi River. It went straight up into the air for miles and took a long time to come down, and somebody caught it. I became the hero.We won the tournament because I got Eddie out. We walked off the field to a guard of honour. The place went hysterical.”

Told other reports said he and Sobers had not won the competition, Bacher said: “Well, look, I don’t know. I never worried about winning the tournament. People just wanted me and Garry, in particular, to beat Eddie and his partner.Did we win?It wasn’t important.”

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