South Africa Meets Australia
The Age
Saturday January 29, 1994
What did it mean to be a South African-born resident of Australia this summer, watching their old home side at the Australian crease for the first time since 1964? In MELBOURNE Alan Attwood talked to expatriates about a cricket season they will never forget. In PERTH, Duncan Graham profiles one of our best-known South African communities.
SPORT and politics in South Africa are as indivisible as fast-bowlers and aggression. Sport was the way the rest of the world told South Africa its politics stank. It wouldn't play games with racists. To many white South Africans this was proof the world was out of step and did not understand a complex social situation.
Meanwhile, many black children grew up feeling unable to support their own country competing against international teams, the sort of thing kids everywhere else take for granted. But now the political scene is changing. And sport is the most potent symbol of this change.
The South African cricket team is now playing the final Test in its first official series against Australia in 24 years. It is a series that has generated extraordinary interest, both because of some exciting matches and the role of the team as a representative of a new South Africa.
Many have seen in the players' refusal to buckle in apparently unwinnable positions, demonstrated in the second Test, traits fostered by a generation of international opprobrium and living with impossible political odds.
The series has been closely watched by South Africans now living in Australia. They number just under 60,000, and their reactions to the sport and its symbolism are as various as their former lives in a faraway homeland. Whether jaapie, rooinek or black, these emigres have seen people playing sport in South African uniforms. Emotionally caught between two lands, cricket has made them confront their own feelings about a country to which few can imagine ever permanently returning.
To some, like Ali Shingange _ one of a tiny minority of black South Africans now living in Australia _ the cricket has been a reminder of a system that did not permit him to play such games as a boy.
For lawyer Michael Smith, trying to promote business links between the two countries, one summer of cricket has done more to boost interest in South Africa than years of lobbying. Sport oils the wheels of commerce.
Meanwhile, Terry February, the African National Congress representative in Melbourne, sees cricket played and recalls the ANC's work in changing the way the sport is administered in South Africa.
Others, like accountant Garth Campbell-Cowan, a sports buff, have savored what they long hungered for: South Africa competing in a legitimate international sporting contest.
ALI SHINGANGE first saw cricket played as a young teenager in a township just north of Johannesburg. ``We all played soccer there. But nearby were some Indian families. I saw them play cricket; it seemed a strange game. At school we never played cricket or rugby. They were just not available to us."
Racial integration in boxing, athletics and soccer happened long before cricket administrators made any attempt to promote the game in black communities. `Rebel' tours by foreign cricketers, including Australians, fostered an image of cricket as a PR tool of a minority white government. For these reasons, Shingange says, black South Africans would take more interest in European soccer than cricket played in Australia.
At his Sydenham home, Shingange was watching the cricket on TV and heard a commentator declare that the broadcast was being beamed to South Africa and watched by millions of people. ``I felt angry because there is no way that man can prove his statement." The cricket is showed primarily on a pay-TV network in South Africa, he says, ``and I would say that 95 per cent of blacks cannot afford to watch it."
This partly explains Shingange's ambivalence to South Africa's cricketers: they are still white men playing a white game. Still, he could not help feeling sorry for the team as it crashed to successive defeats in Sydney last week. They were, after all, representing the country where his parents and those of his wife, Rosalie, still live _ in Soweto.
The Shinganges have been in Melbourne since 1986. Their two sons, 19 and 13, have grown up as young Australians. They have played cricket, even _ to Rosalie's mock horror _ Aussie Rules.
Rosalie, 42, a registered nurse, has had Australian citizenship since 1988. It was important to her to have a sense of belonging to a country; something she had not felt before. Ali, 45, a hospital payroll clerk, has retained his South African passport _ for pragmatic rather than emotional reasons. Without one, a return visit to Soweto could be difficult. Dual citizenship is not possible. And Ali Shingange is not yet ready to divorce his homeland.
Many years will pass, he says, before blacks play cricket for South Afica. But he accepts that the team's return to international competition is a sign of political change. ``It's a beginning. From this, something will build up."
It has also increased interest in South Africa. But, he says, ``It's a pity the majority of Australians do not have a clear picture of what it is like to live in South Africa. They must try to picture a city like Melbourne in which only certain people can live in certain places; one city divided into many parts."
These divisions remain among South Africans in Melbourne. There are few friendships between black and whites.
The Shinganges express pessimism about South Africa's immediate future. ``All you hear about is killing and killing and killing," Ali says. Rosalie talks of an explosion before anything settles down. But it is hard to tell. Their information is so imperfect; the word from home so often at odds with what makes the news.
TV tells them almost all they know about cricket and domestic affairs.
In Sydenham, far from South Africa, they are passive observers of both sport and politics.
MICHAEL SMITH remembers the reaction when he came to Melbourne from Johannesburg in 1986 and tried to establish himself as an agent for importers. ``Everywhere I was turned away. Sanctions had been imposed.
People wanted to know if supply could be guaranteed and how goods would be routed. This was the reality. It wasn't a question of whether it was unfair or not."
Because of the obvious problems in importing, Smith, now 42, started work as a lawyer. (He is a law graduate from the University of the Witwatersrand.) He now has a legal practice in St Kilda Road and is the Melbourne representative of the Australia-South Africa Business Council.
More than ever before, people want to talk to him about South Africa and the possibilities of doing business there. And one of the main reasons for this is cricket.
In Melbourne, Smith has seen the way sport and business networks intertwine. Footy stars can open closed doors. Now people want to talk to him about Hansie Cronje and Jonty Rhodes. During the waterlogged Melbourne Test, the council hosted a cocktail party for the visiting team. It was attended by business people, many of whom may now attend a trade seminar next month.
``When a Test is on," he enthuses, ``you have more than six hours of play every day for five days. And every second word is `South Africa'." As a consciousness-raising exercise it can't be beaten.
At the cricket, his emotions have been mixed. Australia is now his home. His two children, 11 and 13, have only dim memories of South Africa. On return visits to Johannesburg, he has been shocked to see so many people _ including members of his own family _ living on the edge with security measures Australians would find extraordinary.
But he is aware that cricket is symbolic of change. And though he has been unable to support the team whole-heartedly, he has been pleased to see it perform well. ``When it won that Test I thought `Hello _ we're back'."
TERRY FEBRUARY, the ANC's man in Melbourne, remembers making an illegal right-hand turn into Elizabeth Street soon after his arrival in 1984. A policeman stopped him. ``The friendliness of his face was astounding. Had this happened in South Africa I would have been hauled out of the car and beaten." There are failings in Australian society, he says, but blacks do not grow up forced to feel inferior. Nor does he see the ``anger and cold look in the eyes of whites."
Sport in South Africa, he says, is as important as football in Melbourne. ``The fact that a South African cricket team can once again make a tour of Australia is a sign that the international community will embrace a new, democratic South Africa."
True, cricket is not followed by the black community in the same way as soccer, though it is popular in the Cape region _ where Nelson Mandela, a cricket buff, comes from. Mandela himself paved the way for an acceptance of a South African side in the 1992 World Cup.
February, now an Australian citizen and father of three children, hopes to return to South Africa for the election. ``I would love to see Nelson Mandela inaugurated as President," he says. ``That would be a great day for me."
The election will be held soon after Allan Border's team has finished a tour _ the first by an official Australian team since 1969-70. Once again, politics will follow in the footsteps of sport.
© 1994 The Age