Legacy of CLR James

The South African cricket team probably don't know what a stir their visit to Port-of-Spain for the second Test caused.

On the day the cricketers' plane landed from Guyana, the Trinidad Guardian published as its Thought For Today a line from Steve Biko about black consciousness.

Three days later, the racier Newsday ran a colour piece on what fun it was to be in the happy Test match crowd.

The article included a startling line about boundaries being hit by South Africans for whom we still hold plenty bitterness in our hearts.

The writer, Attillah Springer, didn't specify, but we must assume the bitterness related to white South Africans. The main boundary hitter on the first day of the Test was Jacques Kallis who was 14 years old when Nelson Mandela was released from prison. Springer really must believe in the sins of the fathers being visited on the sons.

Reading the article set me wondering about what the man who defined the discourse on race, nationalism and cricket would have thought about the South African visit. I think CLR James would have offered a very different perspective.

Trinidad is proud that its dock workers were the first to refuse to unload ships carrying South African cargo and with an island population who suffered slavery and colonial oppression, the affinity with South Africa is clear.

However, Human Rights Day and the 2nd Test match also provoked a lengthy, revisionist article in Newsday. Marion O'Callaghan questioned just how committed Trinidad and Tobago had been to the cause.

She asked readers to forgive my cynicism as I watch the to-ing and fro-ing to South Africa ... from the same people and the same groups, who were at best silent as South Africans suffered..

It was James who most clearly linked the Caribbean and Africa. In The Black Jacobins, a study of a successful slave revolt in San Domingo in the late 18th century, James wrote: The road to West Indian national identity lay through Africa.

James organised trade unions in Trinidad, was thrown out of the United States during the McCarthy era and earned fame as a Marxist historian, but he also wrote a cricket book that changed the way the game is seen. It played a role in changing me too.

In Beyond A Boundary James connected cricket to society in a way no writer had done before.

For this white South African, the book was a revelation. I've read and re-read Beyond A Boundary several times over.

What he wrote of the racial and social castes in the Caribbean, and particularly cricket in the Caribbean, had many similarities with the post-colonial, apartheid South Africa in which I grew up. His writing struck a chord.

I was baffled in Port-of-Spain to discover that there is hardly a trace of the great man. There's an avenue named after a cricketer who scored a lot of runs in a Test match but there's no tribute to a man who wrote, taught and fought on behalf of his fellow man for the better part of the 20th century.

CLR's nephew kindly spoke to me, as did Andy Ganteaume, and Lloyd Best graciously showed me around Tunapuna, James' birthplace.

To find anything named after CLR James, I would have to have travelled to San Fernando where the Oil Field Workers' Trade Union has an education centre named after James. For a visitor, this was puzzling.

I was fortunate to have lunch with Joel Garner during the South Africa vs West Indies Board XI match.

I have always greatly respected Garner's bowling but now I'm also envious of him. Not of his bowling (for I know my limitations), but of the fact that he met CLR James more than once.

Modern South African and African historians are determined to present Africans as agents of change rather than simply as victims.

James led the way with his book about the slave uprising. He was tired of reading and hearing about Africans being persecuted and oppressed.

He wrote of people of African descent who would themselves be taking action on a grand scale and shaping other people to their own needs. James wrote with Africa in mind and believed that West Indians had to clear from their minds the stigma that anything African was inherently inferior and degraded.

Only then could they begin to see themselves as a free and independent people.

The unbeatable West Indies cricket teams of the 1980s expressed that spirit.

As the South Africa cricket party's plane touched down for the first time on West Indian soil, I spotted two things in my newspapers that related to two of James' themes: federal co-operation and the link between cricket and politics.

One news item reported on a new Caribbean Court of Justice that replaces the British Privy Council. The second told of talks between the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean states with a monopolistic telecommunications provider.

In those talks, the communications minister of St Lucia was said to be negotiating like Viv Richards.

So it seems to this outsider that Caribbean states are trying to work together again, and it's obvious that the link between political action and cricket is still strong.

The man who detailed and explained that link so clearly in Beyond A Boundary died on May 31, 1989.

CLR James missed Nelson Mandela's release by eight months and two days, but his other great book had an influence on South African thinking.

James met a group of South African students in Ghana in 1957 who told him that The Black Jacobins had been of great value to them.

A white professor had told them where to find it and they'd learnt about revolutionary inter-race relationships.

James recalled: That relation they found very important for understanding the relation between the Black South Africans and the Coloureds.

They typed out copies, mimeographed them and circulated the passages from The Black Jacobins dealing with the relations between the Blacks and the mixed in Haiti. I could not help thinking that revolution moves in a mysterious way its wonders to perform.

James didn't live to see a multi-racial team representing a democratic South Africa visit Trinidad, but I think he would have been pleased. The welcome I received from the men who knew him well tells me so.