fixing a match or two: cricket, public confession and moral regeneration

Fixing a Match or Two: Cricket, Public Confession and Moral Regeneration

Joan Wardrop Social Sciences, Curtin University of Technology

‘In a moment of stupidity and weakness I allowed Satan and the world to dictate terms to me. The moment I took my eyes off Jesus my whole world turned dark.’ With these words, the former South Afiican cricket captain, Hansie Cronje, publicly confessed that he had been a cheat, attempted to make peace with the United Cricket Board, located his fall from grace within a peculiarly fundamentalist Christian frame of guilt and atonement, and subtly connected himself and his corruption with a set of understandings about the simultaneous rigidity and vulnerability of the moral order that have grown over the past two centuries to inform, underpin and idealise Afrikaner collective notions of self. That moral order and its vulnerabilities, I will suggest here, have h e d a collective identity and a collective sense of both victimhood and entitlement, within which any act becomes acceptable and possible if it can be deemed necessary.

Introduction The sudden and unexpected announcement in April 2000 that Hansie Cronje had been engaged in match fixing at fvst seemed so improbable to South African cricket followers that it was thought by many to be an April Fools Day joke in bad taste. Bruce Fordyce (a much-respected former runner and Comrades Marathon winner) wrote that the scandal was like the death of Princess Diana, so great an effect was it having on South Africans,’ while for one distressed cricket lover it was more probable that the Pope would lie than ‘Holy Hansie’.* The support for Cronje was widespread and extended far beyond his South African fans. In the opening days of the crisis, Dr Ali Bacher (Managing Director of the United Cricket Board (UCB) of South Africa) had said not only that he believed Cronje’s denials but that ‘Hansie Cronje is a man of enormous integrity and honesty’? Perceived as a man of the most complete rectitude, Cronje’s qualities were such that even a long-time sporting opponent such as the Australian captain, Steven Waugh, could say that, if Hansie could be accused, so could anyone.

Yet the deceptions that had been practised had occurred not just once but, as Cronje was later to admit to the King Inquiry (set up by the UCB) systematically over a long period and had been conducted while Cronje had been in the public eye, thus suggesting an

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intensity of guile and capacity for concealment that clearly his public had not suspected. That this was not an isolated moment of temptation, and that Cronje fiuthermore had used his position to induce younger players to follow him into systematic corruption, initially was widely described in the South African media, and by the public through letters and e- mail to the media, and through talkback radio, as a profound betrayal of public trust. A simple and almost manichaean polarity of good and evil seemed to have been established as the explanatory mechanism for the crisis of faith in the simple verities of cricket and in the moral rectitude of the AfXkaner that Cronje’s actions had unleashed.

I want to suggest here though, that we can read ‘Hansiegate’ (as the crisis rapidly came to be called) in other ways too, so that what might have seemed at first sight to be a grubby episode of simple greed, an isolated set of actions on the part of one man (or even three), can be understood as speaking to a much wider framework of complex notions of collective images of what it means to be an Afrikaans-speaker in the new South Africa, of what it means to carry the burden of a collective past formed by a sense of oppression and domination, of what it means to have been ‘the pariahs of the world’ (as many white South Africans understood the international perception of them during the late apartheid era).

The scandal (Africans, skundual) of course speaks also to much larger frames: a series of enquiries at national and international levels have teased out some (though certainly not all) of its dimensions, including the roles of some Indian and Pakistani players and bookmakers, and accusations made against players from almost every other cricketing nation. The ramifications of the cross links and international connections made by players, coaches, sports physiologists, nutritionists and psychologists, and administrators, umpires, and media commentators, are only now beginning to be unravelled and understood. Moving seasonally between northern and southern hemispheres, crossing national borders, yet operating in a bounded, enclosed world, globalised in practice yet required to be localised at least in their public expressions of allegiance and commitment (if not in private), players and their attendant acolytes are modem nomads, living artificial lives in hotel rooms, travelling in airconditioned buses from hotel to cricket ground and back, literally idolised and placed on pedestals.

The world of international cricket and its followers is unique. The sense of special and long-lasting connections between the widely-differing countries (England and a comparative handful of ex-colonies) that play cricket internationally on equal terms, contributes to the perception of uniqueness, as does the complexity of a game in which two teams may well play each day for five days yet not achieve a result. Yet the core of its special quality, in the eyes of its followers at least, is both more obvious and more subtle. No other sport (not even American baseball) retains as its informing and publicly expressed and reiterated precepts such a clear and incontrovertibly powerful set of images of sportsmanlike behaviour, of standards of nineteenth-century gentility and tightly-defined limits not just to what is legal within the game but to what is perceived as appropriate behaviour by its players. The saying ‘it’s just not cricket’, old-fashioned in some usages, nonetheless continues to convey a sense of what is fair, both on the field and in day-to-day life, which crosses international boundaries and which creates a common understanding, across social and cultural gulfs, of a type of fixed and unchanging moral order.4

Yet while these moral precepts derived from cricket have long-standing global implications, clearly the local environment with its particular conditions and demands also is of importance both in our understandings of the moral order within the game and in our capacity to use those understandings to understand a particular society or community for whom the game has significance. Consequently, I do not here deal with the match fixing

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scandal in all its geographical aspects but rather I limit my discussion to South Africa and in particular to Afrikaans-speaking South Africa, and to the questions of moral understanding and moral order that ‘Hansiegate’ has raised. I do not argue that the role of South Africans in the cricket scandal has been in any way unique, but I do suggest that we cannot understand the South African role in the affair without understanding South Africa’s very particular history.

I go further, and suggest that we can discern in the new South Africa what I will call a semiotics of deception which is embedded in a long history of tolerance of state deception and tolerance of corruption, which has its most recent roots in the former apartheid regime’s ‘culture of social injustice, violence and public immorality’ (as a recent report of the government-sponsored ‘Workshops on Moral Regeneration’ pointedly described it)? and more distant foundations in a collective Afrikaner history which has stressed the isolation of the volk.6 I want then to position the skunduul, and the actions of its principal South African protagonist, Hansie Cronje, within a history that extends back far further than the two or three generations for whom the rigorous social engineering of apartheid was the solution to a profound sense of threat, and which speaks to a constellation of notions of vulnerability and insecurity and, to use Mary Douglas’ telling phrase, ‘purity and danger’ (Douglas 1966).

Constructing a history The system of apartheid functioned formally through systematic segregationist legislation. Informally, the white minority population of South Afiica and, in particular, the Afrikaans speakers, were conditioned and socialised in their support of the successive National Party governments through the preaching of the dominees (pastors) of the various arms of the Dutch Reformed Church (DRC), and through Christian National Education, a pedagogical philosophy based on authoritarian rote-learning methods, strict conformity to the needs of both Church and Party, and the promotion and dissemination of rigid constructions of Afrikaner identity, history and language.’

In the face of these all-encompassing demands for conformity to what was essentially a pre-modern notion of collective identity, and in reaction to the social distortions and perversities produced by the systematic application of the internal logic of apartheid and its search for total social control on ‘racial’ lines, South African writers such as Breyten Breytenbach, Andre Brink and J M Coetzee (all Afrikaners themselves) have engaged a genre which is sometimes called surrealism, sometimes magic realism, as a means of exploring and representing the violent contradictions of the Afrikaner condition. Magic realism is redolent of the wildest fantasies of the European surrealists and dadaists, yet is also deeply embedded in the apocalyptic and eschatological books of both the New and Old Testaments of the Christian Bible, reflecting the searing visions of the prophets of the day of judgment and the hallucinatory chaos of the last days that will precede it. For the magic realist writers, as for many others forced to live through them, the experiences of the apartheid years were ultimately surreal, so that much older images of violence and destruction, of guilt and atonement, of being lost in a trackless desext,* images formed by men who had fasted and punished their bodies and their minds to the point where the unreal and the irrational took over, were those that most suited late twentieth-century attempts to describe the apartheid system from within and to represent the varied meanings of being Afrikaans: authority figure, oppressor, pater familius, sinner, pariah.


The critic Samuel Durrant (1999) has called J. M. Coetzee’s body of work, his ‘inconsolable works of mourning’, arguing that mourning after can be read as both a grief for a lost collective innocence, and a longing for a tidily-constructed world in which the relationships between parents and children are tightly-structured, didactic, and longlasting, and are reflected in the relationships between the family and the Church (through the dominee), and between individuals and the state.g Such rigidly-structured relationships provide much space for guilt and its ritualised atonement: any infraction can be read as dangerous and as threatening to the group as a whole (whether group is defined as family, clan or state) and thus needful of intercession by the appropriate authority figure (from father to dominee to policeman to state president), and of confession and repentance.“

Integral too to the Afrikaner collective (and individual) understanding of self, has been a tortured relationship with the material world. The Afrikaner history of the Trek, of settling isolated areas and farms (isolated from each other, although often not from black neighbours), of self-sufficiency and a profound denial of luxury, reflect both the necessities of a pioneering existence and also a self-conscious identification with an interpretation of Christianity which stresses the simplicity (and even poverty) of the life of Jesus and his disciples, and of the early Christians in general. Preserving such ideals has proved difficult as Afrikaners have become a more urban people, moving from the farms into towns and cities to seek work, yet the tension remains and can be seen in the simplicity of church buildings, in styles of domestic architecture, and even in the robust brutalities of much apartheid public architecture (such as the Natal Technikon in Durban or the Voortrekker Monument outside Pretoria).

In finding ways to represent these archetypal structures of Afrikaner collective life, the writers of magic realism also played off received images of the ‘darkness’ of Africa, of the physical terrors that lie ‘out there’, interrogating deep-seated psychological fears of Africa and its vastness and its moral dangers that lurk in the unconsciousness. They link to written literatures, to Joseph Conrad and his Heart of Darkness, to visual images of southern Africa constructed by early European painters (attempting to Europeanise harsher, more dangerous African landscapes). They link to oral narratives passed down and carefully preserved in many ‘old’ European African families, self-conscious narratives of the Afrikaner families about the Trek, about the hangings at Slagter’s Nek in 181 6, about the wars with the Xhosas and Zulus, about the Boer wars: the two wars fought against Britain (and troops from across the British Empire) in 1881 and 1899-1902, about the English concentration camps in which more than 26,000 Boer (Afrikaner) women and children died, about the poverty of the post-war period, and tens of thousands of Afrikaner families being forced to leave the farms they had settled. The stories continue to be told in Afrikaner families, reinforcing an identity which is marginalised and oppressed, and under constant threat. l 1

On the other hand the narratives of the magic realists reflected, and only just refracted, the language of the dominees of the DRC, and of the pastors of the new evangelical churches (such as the Rhema Church to which Cronje now belongs) which have acquired many adherents in the period from about 1985 onwards.” Just as in the past, the preaching of a dominee described the world and its meanings for his congregation in vivid and evocative language, the evangelical pasters too put much store in conveying passionate and profoundly literal interpretations of the contemporary world through fundamentalist teaching and preaching. Where the master writers such Coetzee and Breytenbach take the Afrikaans experience and use such methods reflexively to analyse and understand it, the

FIXING A MATCH OR Two 34 1

dominees and the pastors and their flocks live that experience, and consciously replay it in their daily lives.

It is here, not just in the church of his recent conversion but more widely in the collective Afr-ikaner understandings of their past and its meanings, that I suggest that we can find the starting points for Cronje’s understanding of the participant role of Satan in contemporary life, and for his evident conviction that public confession of the way in which he was tempted by Satan would provide the ‘public’ with a means to understanding his seemingly incredible actions, and expect it to be accepted as both adequate and appropriate to the circumstance.

In this context, it is not accidental that amidst a wave of violent crime during the past ten years, the South African Police Service (SAPS) continued to give prominence (even until very recently on its website) to Satanist accusations and to the continued existence of a very active Occult Related Crime Unit within the SAPS.13 This unit historically has not dealt with episodes of witchhunting amongst the African population, but rather has focused almost totally on the whiteI4 Afrikaans-speaking section of the population, from whose ranks almost all of such accusations of Satanist activity have come. Indeed, from as early as the 1960s, the apartheid propaganda machine deliberately constructed notions of Satan worshippers and witches as dangerous Others, as a means of demonising opponents or dissidents within the Afrikaans communities. In particular, the use of the universal peace sign, came to be demonised as a sure sign of Satani~m.’~

Such gulfs and divisions of understandings and meanings between communities represent the successful maintenance of cultural boundaries: they were (and are) the successful product of hundreds of years of, in turn, colonial, segregationist and apartheid policies, which have linked particular social or intellectual or even spiritual characteristics with ‘race’ and with ‘culture’. It is in the interstices of these boundaries that tensions and difficulties manifest themselves. Indeed, one of the particular subtexts of the Hunsie skundaul is that cricket is an ‘English’ game (whereas rugby was and is played at the upper levels almost exclusively by Afrikaners),16 yet Cronje is an Afiikaans speaker (and, from a cricketing family-his father played for the former Orange Free State and was a cricket administrator there). Despite the crossing of the divide by members of the Cronje family however, cultural division, and tension, between Afrikaans and English speakers historically was massive and continues to be a significant factor in the economic and political life ofthe Those tensions and cultural divides in the past were most clearly manifested in the

complexities of the legislation which structured the apartheid system. Whereas in the new South Africa cross-racial violence, both psychological and physical, has become less acceptable and certainly less visible,I8 in the past the dangers of, at the least, psychological violence, were such that writers like Coetzee used techniques such as magic realism as individuals both seeking ways to describe and examine the collectivist absurdities of the system in all their lunatic intricacies, and even to be able to write and publish within a rigid system of state-imposed censorship, and an equally rigid system of social censorship. Magic realism, and other literary techniques, often remain effective doors to understandings of a time and a society and a place which, despite the best efforts of historians and geographers and political scientists, continue to defy classification and comprehension.

Social censorship, whether self-imposed or directed from the collective, constructed images of white South Africa that enabled whites, whether Afrikaans or English” to live


comfortably and without excessive guilt about a political and economic system which denied basic rights to about 80% of the population. It worked through unspoken understandings about what could and could not be said, about which arenas it was safe to speak which truths and which lies in. It created barriers of denial and deception that stunted the imagination, splitting and compartmentalising the mind, and constructing psychological schism.20 It constructed myths of relatively contented black labouring populations in the township, disturbed only by a few agitators and communists; it ensured that difficult questions were rarely asked; and guaranteed that those who did ask awkward questions were suppressed, banned, imprisoned, exiled, or even killed.”

This operated not only through groups (language, cultural, community, religious), but also individually, so that the breakdown of a man, such as the novelist Andre Brink’s (1 99 1) Afrikaner protagonist Thomas Landmann, can be used to chronicle the destruction of those protective psychological barriers that made it possible for white South Africans to function in the midst of profound injustice. That social censorship was, too, a significant element in a set of understandings about the world which involved the construction of an inward-looking laager deliberately fostered to concretise the social bonds amongst white South Africans and in particular amongst Afi-ikaans-speaking whites, in the face of increasing international opposition in the 1970s and 1980s to the apartheid policies of institutionalised racism and deliberate economic and political inequity.

An integral component of this world view was the marginalisation, the othering and the demonisation of anyone perceived to be a threat to the sociaVpolitica1 system. This included black leaders such as Nelson Mandela and Walter Sisulu, named as ‘terrorists’, the few white activists (who almost invariably were described as ‘communists’ whether or not they were Marxists or whether or not they had any links with any communist and the African, Indian and ‘Coloured’ populations as a whole who were categorised to varying degrees as being of a different ‘race’, as ‘inferiors’ and, using the ever-present Biblical imagery as ‘hewers of wood and drawers of water’. It remained for these boundaries to be policed.

It is here that a conscious articulation of a semiotics of deception can be discerned and perhaps most clearly read through the words and acts of government. There is space here only to hint at the extent to which this became government practice in the National Party years (1 948- 1994), but, for example, the Extension of University Education Act, (1 959), in its title read as though there would be more educational opportunities for black South Africans. In fact, the opposite was not only the consequence but also the intention. Similarly, the Separate Amenities Act, purported to be no more than a simple Act determining which people from which racial classifications could use which types of facilities and under what conditions (which few Western countries would have been able to object to at the time, given their own segregation policies). In practice though, it was an Act which provided not only for ‘separate’ but also for ‘unequal’ facilities on the basis of racial classification.

What the ruling National Party strategists were developing and refining was a capacity to conceal and distort meaning, to mean the opposite of what seemed to be said overtly, enabling white South Africans to engage a culture of denial and facilitating at least the simulacrum of an international image of respectability and appropriate governance. So public and private domains were created, operating as parallel universes, with the most fragmentary of interfaces, through which institutions and individuals slipped, sometimes voluntarily, many times involuntarily. Without doubt the most substantial deceptions, the


biggest lies, were those secrets kept by the enforcers of apartheid-the security police most specifically. The full extent of the deceptions may well never be known but much has been revealed, pulled painfidly from the mouths of the enforcers through the investigations and public hearings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Mysteries that are decades old have been solved, disappearances and murders have been brought to light: we know now how Steve Bike died24 and we know what happened to Griffiths MxengeZ5 and to thousands of others who became embroiled in the paranoid world of the security police. Through the records of the TRC we can uncover something of the extent to which deception, particularly self-deception, became integral to the image of self that was created and sustained through the apartheid years, and the extent to which the collective identity of the Afrikaners (in particular) was founded on a moral order in which any act became acceptable and possible if it were deemed necessary.

The deceptions and the corruptions and the moral vulnerabilities articulated by successive white regimes, extended far beyond politics and the state, corrupting and distorting and inducing denial on a scale that South Africans are only now coming to terms with. Public enquiries such as the TRC and national campaigns such as Musukhune (‘Let’s work together’)26 and the Commission on Moral Regeneration, have been aimed at collective behaviour as much as at individuals, but the moral vulnerabilities consequent on the apartheid system of course often extended to the corruption and manipulation of individuals, whether directly or indirectly. The writer Mark Behr (1995), author of the best-selling semi-autobiographical novel A Smell of Apples, speaking at the ‘Fault Lines: Inquiries around Truth and Reconciliation’ writers’ conference in July 1996 made an act of public confession:

It is with the profoundest regret that I acknowledge that as a student I worked as an agent of the South African security establishment. ... Like my betrayal, the speaking here today publicly, again constitutes a selfish act aimed at some form of self-integration, ending or shattering an autobiography of denial. I can only hope that this is a more warranted and justified form of selfishne~s.~~

In makmg a public act of atonement, Mark Behr specifically recognised that whatever he did was never going to be enough in a public sense, but articulated the hope that in a private sphere he might find some sort of peace. Closely linked to the intense processes of demonisation used by the apartheid regime, South Africa has had a long history of public rehearsals, public evocations and expressions of accusations of common and individual guilt, as well as ritualised degradation in the form of the show trials of the 1950s and 1960s (the long-running Treason Trial, for example, or the Rivonia Trial at which Nelson Mandela was sentenced to life imprisonment, or the Little Rivonia Trial in 1964 in which Mac Maharaj and David Kitson among others were sentenced to long periods of imprisonment). The TRC has been a public enquiry of a different kind:28 using prayers and hymns to frame the proceedings, allowing and enabling intense expressions of emotion, demanding not only public confession, but also ‘full public disclosure’, facilitating repentance and atonement but not necessarily demanding them in the interests of achieving as full a disclosure as possible. For participants to admit and to acknowledge but not necessarily repent has been seen as an enabling measure in the search for information and, while some perpetrators have made full disclosure from the start many, if not most, have persisted in holding their secrets and giving them up only gradually: revealing them only as


it becomes clear to them that the next step of what they had done is already known to the investigators: literally a policy of admit only what is already known.

Cronje continues the ‘moral’ tradition Very often the evidence of the protagonists has had a theatrical, constructed, overproduced quality, emotive in a self-pitymg way that was repeated at times during the King Inquiry into the cricket match-fixing allegations. Where the perpetrators called to the TRC often described torture sessions and killing in banal and affectively-flat detail, but were emotional in describing the later impacts on themselves, often seemingly unable to make emotional connections to the victims or to the families of victims, the King I n q ~ i q ? ~ saw Hansie Cronje seemingly in a state of high emotion throughout the time that he was giving evidence, physically collapsing at one point. Yet here too there was denial until the evidence was overwhelmingly against his po~ition,~’ and an odd sense that perhaps Cronje still had not fully realised the import of what he had done, and the extent of the repentance and atonement that was being demanded of him, making acknowledgment of it in one breath but qualifying it in the next. At one point in his evidence he said ‘I unreservedly accept that I have brought huge shame on the game and the country for which I have great passion, but I also have an unfortunate love for money’.31

A type of cognitive dissonance seems to have been at play, just as it was for many of those who appeared before the TRC: an awareness, even a knowledge, that an act is morally and even legally wrong, but a capacity to convince oneself that it is right, to legitimate it so that it becomes possible, to say to critics, as many South African government ministers and diplomats did internationally during the 1970s and 1980s: ‘you’ve never been here-you can’t know what it’s like for us.’ For Hansie Cronje this dissonance seems to have operated for some days after the first news of the allegations against him became public. To the King Commission he explained that:’ On April 7 this year, I got a huge wake-up call. I did not realise I was playing with such big fire. I then found out it was against the Corruption Act and realised I could be extradited to India’.32 And the dissonance might well have still been functioning as he gave evidence to the King Inquiry, more than two months after the ‘huge wake-up call’. In acknowledging that he had not taken one particular bribe (of $250,000) he then admitted that ‘I was annoyed with myself for not taking it ... there was nothing stopping me. I would have been a richer man.r33

Through those few words, and the regret that they seem to convey, I want to locate the Cronje affair back into that Afrikaner history described briefly above, which has at its core the South African wars and the Trek and the memory of the boer (farmer) alone with his family out on the veld. The subtext running through Afrikaner history is the need to preserve a rigid sense of difference: from black Africans, from engelse, the English. Whereas popular theory has it that history is written by the victors, here the norm is reversed: a complex history has been composed, orally and in written form, by the self- described victims who, in their version, harried from pillar to post, have retreated into the last white laager at the foot of black Africa:4 taking with them a continuing sense of threat born out of an historiography of victimisation. I suggest that that shared Afrikaans past has been used consciously and reflexively by writers such as Brink and Coetzee, but has been used by less reflexive Afrikaners as a means of creating a set of meanings for their lives as whites in Afiica.


Conclusion In the veldt, and in the world that the amnesty applications to the TRC describe, anything is justified in order to survive: a culture of violence, and of self-deception and denial. A deep-rooted sense of entitlement to material security was born out of the depredations of the English during the second Boer War, the scorched earth policy which burnt away hard- earned farmland, the penalties of being the losers in the conflict.35 In legitimating a society in which the few had rights and the many had almost none, apartheid legitimated a culture of entitlement on the part of white South Africans. The goods of the state were appropriated for one small minority of its people, while the almost complete exclusion of others was not only socially validated but politically legislated.

Within the white population, as I have briefly shown above, substantial distinctions also existed: for example, successive Afrikaner governments, from the end of World War I onwards, turned the civil service, the army and the police into a vast sheltered workshop in which Afrikaners dominated and few English-speakers applied. The state became the patiarch of the wider Afrikaans family,36 providing emotional and material sustenance, while depriving most South Africans of all but the most basic requirements for life. Such long-term dissonances both induce internal tensions3’ and necessitate complex mechanisms of denial, so that social censorship mutates into self-censorship and a constant manipulation of the self and its boundaries.

I suggest that it is at the interface of those boundaries between the self and the society that Hansie Cronje faltered: that he as an individual, with his ‘unfortunate love for money,’ and an ingrained and embedded sense of entitlement, came into conflict with the equallyartificial and socially-constructed complex of notions that make up cricket and the responsibilities it lays on those who play it. A hint perhaps of what Cronje was already engaged in was given on a day almost a year before he was finally exposed when in May 1999 he was accused of ‘going against the spirit of the game’ by using an earpiece that kept him in contact with team mates and the coach (Bob Woolmer) in the dressing room during the opening match against India in the World Cup.38

This small deception seemed at the time no more than a piece of gamesmanship pushing the boundaries, yet perhaps what it demonstrated was a connection into a wider moral vulnerability, a vulnerability of a community that has self-consciously constructed itself as a victim culture over a long period of time.

Notes Quoted in ‘Cronje scandal divides fans,’ News24.co.za, published at http://www.news24.com Julia Kupka, ‘SA cricket public left shocked and bewildered,’ News24.co.za 12 April 2000, published at http://www.news24.com ‘South African captain on record as turning down bribe offer,’ Cricinfo 7 April 2000, published at http//www.rsa.cricket.org/li~~to~database/ARCHIVE/C~C~T~NEWS/2000/ APW02892 5AFP-07APR2000. html The former cricketer, Ashley Mallet, in a piece titled ‘Cronje’s fall just the opening battle,’ May 2000) reminded his readers of the meaning of cricket, quoting from a 19th century cricket lover, Lord Harris, who wrote: ‘You do well to love cricket, for it is more free from anything sordid, anything dishonourable, than any game in the world. To play it keenly, honourably, self-sacrificingly, is a moral lesson in itself.’ Published at http://www.thepavilion.com.au. For a more sustained narrative of the ‘Victorian’ values of cricket see Sandford (1994), or Stoddart and Sandford (1998).


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‘Freedom and Obligation: A Report on the Moral Regeneration Workshops I & 11,’ July 2000, published at http:/lw.polity.org.zalgovdocslreports/morals.html, in which South Africa is described as ‘sitting on a moral time bomb,’(p.3). Afrikaans, a term much used as in Land, volk, tad, country, people, language, as a definer of shared identity. There is an extensive literature, but see Pose1 (1991). Recalling images on the one hand of the temptation of Jesus during his forty days and nights of struggle in the desert, and on the other of the Great Trek of the Afr-ikaner people, away fiom the lush lands of the Cape of Good Hope of which they had been the first European settlers, and away from the imposition of authority by the British conquerors to reconstruct an older notion of society and community in the huge expanses of the open veldt and the mountains. Michael Herzfeld’s (1 997: 1 1 1) definition of structural nostalgia in which he defines two crucial features, replicability generation by generation, and a lost mutuality, is helpful here. See, for example, Joha Louw-Potgieter (1988). Numerous websites now exist too, telling and retelling these stories. See, for example, ‘Slagtersnek’s message for today’s Afrifaners’, published at http:llwww.radiopretoria.co.zal kommentaar/ engeld2000/1003.htm See Vincent Crapanzano’s (1985:296-322) chapter ‘ Renewal’ on just such a church. The SAPS underwent a major shakeup of its unit structure early in 2001 and this unit finally was absorbed into other areas. In South African colloquial speech, members of the so-called ‘Coloured’ population, are often referred to as the bruin Afiikuners (brown Afrikaners). Accusations of witchcraft and Satanism are almost unknown amongst these communities. During the election campaign in 1994, when many peace monitors were acting as observers in South African townships, the peace sign was occasionally scrawled on walls or chalked on roads. I was told by a group of young policemen in Tsiawelo, Soweto, that such a sign on a road there was ‘a sign of Satan worshippers.’ When I repeated the story to several more experienced policemen they at first laughed, and then took the event more seriously and explained that that area of Soweto was well known for occult occurrences. As I write (June 2001), the current Springbok team has only three engelse (English) names, and no Zulu, Indian or others except Afrikaans. Something of the public role of rugby as a component of a collective identity can be seen in John Nauright (1997:182-97.), Lynette Steenveld and Larry Strelitz (1998:609-29); or Jacqueline Maingard (19975-28). Afrikaans ownership of much of the commercial media, both print and electronic (including Internet) and English control of manufacturing industries are both sources of tension in the new South Africa. Though still manifesting itself, as the current case against nine members of a local rugby club who participated in the murder of a local young man and the assault of two of his friends because they were perceived to be trespassers on white-owned farmland shows. See ‘Vicious killing gets rugby players 18 years’. Zndependent Online, 2 May 2002. Published at http://www.iol.w.didex. php?s~l3&click~id=l3&art~id=qwl020334860528B263&set~id=1 There were of course other recognisable ‘white’ communities such as the Portuguese, Greek and Jewish communities in South Africa, but in general these aligned themselves (either as individuals or collectively) with either Afrikaans or English speakers, both politically and linguistically. Chabani Manganyi (1991) reflects on the politics of experience and draws on both Fanon and Sartre to explore the truncated notions of body, self, and society in apartheid South Africa. The Afrikaner social worker Angela du Plessis (1991:78) described this experience as: ‘It is difficult for many whites here to realise just how damaged they are by apartheid. Inside there’s damage to our minds, to our hearts, to our souls’, and the critic Elleke Boehmer wrote tellingly of the ‘suspension of vision’ of late-apartheid fiction, reflecting the wider social environment.


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Given that the practice of anthropology in South Africa was much truncated during the apartheid era, there remains fertile temtory for the historical anthropologist to explore. The detailed records of the amnesty hearings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) 1995-2001, published at http://www.truth.org.za (accessed May 2001), reveal just how often and in what variations these various forms of sanction were imposed. Deliberately recalling the Great Trek and the circling of the ox wagons into defensive perimeters against ail enemies, but particularly against Black South Africans. Vincent Crapanzano (1 985) has a chapter called ‘The Future’ in which some Afrikaner attitudes about the events of the 1970s and 1980s are explored and in which the bonding of white South African communities is manifest. Writing about an earlier time, but one which continued to have real force in the minds of many white South Africans, Allister Sparks (1991 : 183) has quoted D. F. Malan’s ‘exultant’ speech when the National Party won government in 1948: ‘Today South Africa belongs to us once more’, and read it as that ‘moment when South Africa parted company with the world’. Such characterisations of the other were extended during troubled times to include many other English-speaking whites, particularly students at the four liberal’ English-language universities Rhodes University, University of Natal, University of the Witwatersrand, and University of Cape Town (UCT). The novelist Menan du Plessis (1989:20), writing about events in 1985 as the Liberation Struggle moved into top gear, has one of her Afrikaans characters describe students at UCT : ‘In the army too, these guys believe anyone from varsity is a Commie. A Kommunis. And you know what they call UCT ‘Moscow-on-the-Hill’. There are many documents relating to the death of Steve Bike on the TRC site, but the amnesty decision itself (16 February 1999) in which the security policemen involved were refused amnesty is published at: http://www.trutt.org.zdpr/l999/p990216a.htm ‘Coetzee, two others, guilty of Mxenge’s murder,’ 15 May 1997. Published at http://www.truth. org.za/media/l997/9705/~9705 15c.htm A campaign promoted by the AErican National Congress (ANC) and instituted by the then- Government of National Unity in 1995 to overcome what was perceived as a widespread ‘culture of entitlement’ amongst township residents in the aftermath of the Liberation Struggle. ‘The Behr truth, in his own words’. Weekly Mail and Guardian 12 July, 1996. Published at http://www.mg.co.za See, for example, Belinda Bozzoli (1998). Judge E L King. Commission of Inquiry into Cricket Match Fixing and Related Matters. 11 August 2000. Published at http://www-rsa.cricket.org/link-to-database/NATIONALRSA/ and at: http://www.polity.org.za/govdocs/commissions/ Marianne Merten, ‘Cronje drops another bombshell’. Weekly Mail and Guardian 23 June 2000. Published at http://www.mg.co.za. When Cronje was asked whether he would have ‘come clean’ about cheating during a one-day international at Nagpur if one of his co-accused, Herschelle Gibbs had not already admitted it, he acknowledged that ‘I can’t give an answer. Probably not. I don’t think so’. Judge King had already publicly expressed concern that the affidavit Cronje had handed to the commission seemed in places ‘merely to seek to comply with the commission’s terms of reference’. ‘For the love of money ...’ News24.co.za 21 June 2000. Published at http://www.news24.com ‘Cronje refuses to squeal on fellow players,’ News24.co.za 22 June 2000. Published at http://livenews.24.com/News24/Hansiegate/O, 1 1 13,2-29 1-875 124,OO.html Marianne Merten, ‘Cronje drops another bombshell,’ Weekly Mail & Guardian 23 June 2000. Published at http://www.sn.apc.org/wmaiVissues/OOO623/NEWS74.html National Party Cabinet Minister of the 1980s and 1990s, Gemt Viljoen (1979), wrote in this vein. The idea that the land was empty of earlier inhabitants when their ancestors trekked to it continues to be an article of belief for working-class and rural Afrikaners.

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For the strong genealogical awareness and sense of connection of Afrikaner families see for example Marq de Villiers (199O:xiii-xiv). The notion of broedertwis or conflict between brothers is integral to Afiikaner history, as is the persistence of individual Afrikaner critics of the decisions of the majority. Bonny Schoonakker, ‘SA captain told to remove hearing device that’s “against the spirit of the game,”’ Sunday Times 16 May 1999. Published at http://www.aus2.cricket.orgflink~to~ databaseWS/ 1999 /MAY/Hearing-Device-I 6May 1999.html

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Africa: Literature, Apartheid, and Democracy, 1970-1995, pp.43-56. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Bozzoli, B. 1998. Public ritual and private transition: the Truth Commission in Alexandra Township, South Africa, 1996. Apican Studies 57(2): 167-95.

Brink, A. 199 1. An Act of Terror: A Novel. London: Minerva. Crapanzano, V. 1985. Waiting: The Whites ofsouth Africa. London: Granada. Douglas, M. 1966. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London:

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Otherwhites: Voices for Change, pp. 75-82. London: Macmillan. du Plessis, M. 1989. Longlive! Cape Town: David Philip. Durrant, S. 1999. Bearing witness to apartheid J.M.Coetzee’s inconsolable works of mourning.

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fixing a match or two: cricket, public confession and moral regeneration

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