Ntini walking the tightrope of positive discrimination (15 Mar 1998)

15 March 1998

Ntini walking the tightrope of positive discrimination

By Christopher Munnion

FIVE years ago, Makhaya Ntini had never even seen, let alone handled, a cricket ball. Like other boys in his little Xhosa village in the Eastern Cape in South Africa, he spent his childhood kicking makeshift balls through the dust and dreaming of soccer stardom.

This Thursday, Ntini, 20, will step proudly on to the Newlands ground in Cape Town as the first black man to be selected for a South African Test side (other non-whites, such as Paul Adams and Herschelle Gibbs, have played Test cricket, but they are of mixed race), joining Allan Donald and Shaun Pollock in the pace attack against Sri Lanka.

It will doubtless be hailed as another historic, heart-warming, sporting moment for the 'Rainbow Nation' but the reality is somewhat different. Those rainbow hues are fading fast in the long shadows of racism reaching out from the dark days of apartheid.

These days, of course, the racism is in reverse. In sport, as in most other spheres of South African life, the euphemism is "affirmative action" and there are fears that in the rush to right past wrongs, the high standards set for the country's sportsmen will be compromised.

It was left to United Cricket Board chief Ali Bacher to articulate what most white cricket fans have feared. "At the moment, particularly for matches in South Africa, we simply cannot afford to field a national team without representation from black communities," he said.

Had the South African Test side in the third Test against Pakistan in Port Elizabeth not included a non-white face, there would have been crowd trouble, if not riots, said Bacher, explaining the pressure he and the selectors are under these days.

That such pressure exists will be highlighted dramatically this week - coincidentally on Thursday - when President Nelson Mandela is obliged to appear personally in the Pretoria High Court to give evidence in an action brought by the South African Rugby Football Union.

Sarfu are seeking to thwart a judicial investigation into their affairs ordered by Sports Minister Steve Tshwete. Mandela has said he is only too keen to give evidence but his legal advisers believe he will establish a dangerous constitutional precedent by doing so.

Behind this courtroom drama lies a bitter personal conflict between Tshwete and rugby's all-powerful Afrikaner boss, the controversial but effective Louis Luyt. And underlying that clash is a deep-seated conviction within the ANC hierarchy that rugby has made only half-hearted efforts to encourage black participation. The country's black rulers believe, rightly or wrongly, that South Africa's rugby administrators are intent on keeping it an all-white, Afrikaner-dominated sport.

In contrast, the national football side will be going to the World Cup in France later this year without the white captain or the white coach who led the team through the harrowing World Cup qualifiers.

Clive Barker, the coach, 'resigned' after a few defeats against far superior sides, notwithstanding his successes, not only in assisting South Africa to qualify for the World Cup for the first time but in winning the 1996 African Nations Cup. At the same time, Neil Tovey was demoted from his long-standing captaincy.

Black football commentators claimed Barker was "losing his touch" and muttered that Tovey, 36, was "showing his age" but none dared utter the dread "racism" word. Letters to black newspapers from black fans were less coy. They were all on the "white-man-can't-jump" theme, asserting that football was the "natural sport of the black man".

It is against this uneasy backdrop that Ntini will make his Test debut this week and it is difficult not to sympathise with him for the heavy mental baggage he will have to bear.

He is the first genuine graduate of the cricket development programme, launched by the United Cricket Board long before South Africa's political transformation to promote the sport among the "previously underprivileged" (black) communities, and no member of the South African squad doubts his ability.

But lurking at the back of Ntini's mind this week will be the suspicion that his selection has more than an element of "affirmative action" about it. Under such pressure, the consequences of failure on the field will be formidable.

Source :: Electronic Telegraph (https://www.telegraph.co.uk)