MIA > Archive > Tim Hector
Fan the Flame, Outlet, 20 December 1996, online here.
Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
I thought at the end of the year I would take a break, a cruise. Not to Hawaii or Alaska or a “celebrity cruise” as has become the fad. Just cruise and write about one of my favourite subjects – cricket.
I listened, with great pain, to people here berating the West Indies team. How they so shame. How inferior we look. How everybody on the team is a waste – and Lara in particular. Some said they could not understand my support for Lara. But the one that galled me most was the idea that because we were losing, game after game, we were inferior. I rankled at the word. Never mind the thought.
Australia has lost before to the West Indies, some 11 series in a row. They, when losing, never considered themselves inferior. Why should we suddenly become ‘inferior’ because the losing shoe is on the other foot? I was angry beyond measure.
Why should we expect to win all the time? Cricket, after all, is a game. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. When we were beating everybody, the most the losers thought, is that we were the “better” side. In other words, they were “good” and we were better. They never thought of themselves as “inferior”. Were we still so full of the scorn of self, that as soon as things are not going our way we berate ourselves in the terms and expressions which racists hurled at us for centuries? Have we incorporated into ourselves the racist put-downs, and now apply them to ourselves? It seems so.
Conrod Luke offered the suggestion, that it was extreme disappointment expressing itself in extreme. But even that worried me. Why was cricket, of all things, provoking this negative passion, a passionate intensity that lacked all conviction? It bothered me no end.
I went looking into a lot of things. A white South African Ronald Segal, has written a most remarkable book. It is a work that I had hoped to write. But all this is history. This white South African wrote a book entitled The Black Diaspora. It is a very fine book, written with verve, scholarship and passion of a man engaged – one engages and one sees – and not the detachment of the academic.
Ronald Segal made some observations about the Caribbean. I will give you a foretaste as foundation for what I want to say later.
Writing in 1995, Ronald Segal had this to say:
“In the Caribbean states of recent decolonisation, a Christianity that had from time to time been a channel of revolt came to be clogged with the material and moral silt of the new rulers. Only in Guyana were the Catholic and Protestant churches driven, by the increasing repressiveness of the [Burnham] regime, to a notable expression of resistance in the cause of civil liberties. Elsewhere they represented, by their very silence, their accommodation to the dominance of a middle class thriving on the revenues of government and its relation with [foreign] business.”
Segal continued, candidly cogent, this way: “Even in Pentecostalism, the resort of much disaffection, converts were encouraged to concentrate on those ‘moral qualities’ which would ‘permit them to ascend the social scale,’ rather than question the scale itself. No Church set its face against a repudiation of blackness by a society for which whiteness, visible or acquired by sufficient material means, had become virtually a sacred value.”
Few could have said it better. It is a most perceptive observation. Do me a favour, dear reader, read both passages over again. And then there is this from Segal:
“What then is left, when the hold of old gods has gone? If religion was the soul of the societies from which the Black Diaspora derived, it is not now, nor ever was, the soul of the Diaspora itself. Far from being a permeating and cohesive force, it has reflected and promoted divisions: among those adhering to the different forms of the same religion; between those of the same religion and those of none. Yet surely, five centuries of distinctive experience cannot be without some underlying meaning, some redeeming force, a very principle of identity that may be called the soul.
“The soul is freedom. It was in slavery that the Diaspora was born, together with the longing and struggle for freedom. When slavery ended, there were other kinds of racial confinements that stayed or were put in place to generate simultaneously related longings and struggles for freedom. If the Diaspora has expressed the essence of itself in one pre-eminent form, this has been music; and if the music of the Diaspora has had one pre-eminent feature, this has been the impulse to explore and celebrate freedom.”
What a wonderful piece of reasoning. It is dialectical. Segal says that slavery, in and of itself, bred at one and the same time, in the classic unity of opposites which is the dialectic, a longing for freedom. When slavery was abolished, the racial oppression which followed it, stimulated the same struggle for freedom. The soul, after all is said and done, is freedom. In Segal’s view, and he is probably correct in part, if not in whole, it is in Caribbean music in which the impulse to explore and celebrate freedom is strongest. Cricket, however, in the English speaking Caribbean, was a vehicle, a prime vehicle of national expression for freedom, and more importantly, the expansion of freedom. I will return to that.
Segal is conclusively cogent with this. That the essence of the Black Diaspora, in the U.S., in the Caribbean, in Brazil, is freedom is not in question. But says Segal,
“This does not mean that all those in the Black Diaspora have been similarly devoted. Some have failed in devotion even to their own freedom; the contented slave was not altogether a figment of white fantasy. Some were indifferent to the freedom of others; colonialism in the Caribbean had no difficulty in finding recruits to sustain its rule among the ruled. Some today, besieged in the very exclusions of their own supposed freedom, pursue social priorities which confine blacks in lives of deprivation and despair.”
The pursuit of corruption, as a social priority has left a great many enduring lives of deprivation, and open to fundamentalism and despair. Corruption in practice and in policy led to structural adjustment.
Now what does all that have to do with cricket. There is little doubt in my mind that the structural adjustment regimes which have been imposed all over the Caribbean have confined the overwhelming majority of blacks “in lives of deprivation and despair”. The hopes which independence generated were shattered by this unrelenting structural adjustment. Through it all, and in particular, from 1978, cricket was more than a prop in this increasing deprivation and despair. Now that too is falling, it would seem. Everything is so different from what the heart arranged. And it did not end in compassion, but in bitterness. Hence the bitterness directed at first Richie Richardson and Andy Roberts, and now, the still incomparable Lara. For me, at any rate, Lara is such. More on that later.
I want now to go back in time. To the Port of Spain Gazette of June 15, 1933. The great CLR James is writing. This is what he had to say.
“Under modern conditions to win you have got to make up your mind to win. The day West Indies, White, Brown and Black learn to be West Indians, to see nothing in front, to right or left, but West Indian success and the means to it that day they begin to grow up. Along with that it will be necessary to cultivate any number of fine speeches, noble sentiments and unimpeachable principles. But these you must indulge before the struggle, cricket or whatever it maybe, and also after the struggle is over.”
But during the struggle the focus must not bat an eye. It must be unflinching, and unflinching in the task at hand – West Indian success.
I hope you see where James was coming from in 1933. The division of West Indian society, rigid division, into White, Brown and Black, had hampered West Indian cricket. Fine individual players we could and did produce, but weld these socially warring groups of White, Brown and Black into a team, that could win, we could not do it in 1933 or 43, or 53. But did it in 1963.
We did it under the unsurpassed Sir Frank Worrell. Worrell forged a unity of the West Indian cricket side, formerly disparate, divided to the bone by race and class, into a single unit. In that the team no longer “saw anything in front of it, to right or left, but West Indian success.” It was a quantum leap in terms of West Indian freedom. For freedom is the overcoming of internal antagonisms which inhibit forward movement.
The greatness of Frank Worrell is that his leadership produced on the cricket field, what had not been achieved in social, economic and political life – the unity of West Indian people, in a cause West Indian, namely, sustained success on the cricket field. Worrell had led the West Indies to move beyond the accommodations of a middle class thriving on the revenues of government and its relations to [white, foreign] business.
CLR James, longing for it in 1933, Worrell was to make word flesh by 1963, if not 1961, when the West Indies lost by a whisker – some would say, bad umpiring – but had played so well that a quarter of a million Australian thronged the streets to say farewell to Worrell and his team.
Lloyd and Richards built sturdily on the Worrell foundation and produced the “winningest” team, not just in cricket, but in all sports! For all the nearly 20 years from 1977 West Indies was supreme in world cricket. It is unprecedented. I believe it will never be matched, let alone surpassed. Were it not for that, I believe the Haitianisation of the English-speaking Caribbean would have quickened in pace.
Cricket proved that we could overcome the antagonisms of race and class working within the body social and politic, to achieve unusual success. In a manner of speaking, freedom, that is, the realization of our full potential as a people. Certainly the universal triumph of Bob Marley, in particular matches it, but does not surpass it. And Bob Marley was always exploring and celebrating freedom in his music. In cricket the exploration and celebration of freedom was not explicit, but implicit. It is in this context that Vivi Richards at the wicket is best seen and understood. That is, Vivi’s batting in particular was an exploration and celebration of freedom.
But West Indian success on the cricket field could not last forever. The West Indian team, like society, has been restructured downwards. Richardson, to his eternal credit tried to paper over the cracks. But it is a fact that the talent of a Richards, a Greenidge, a Haynes, a Kallicharan, a Rowe, a Lloyd, a Richardson, a Larry Gomes, a Collis King, a Dujon is not with us now, nor is there a Roberts, a Holding, a Garner, a Croft, or a Marshall and Sylvester Clarke. Not that Lara and Ambrose, do not belong in that esteemed company. But only they belong. The talent in the current West Indies team is not what it used to be neither in batting, bowling, fielding, nor wicket-keeping. That is the long and short of the matter.
The current team can play splendidly sometimes, and abominably at others. For instance there was no game in the recent World Cup that excelled the West Indies vs. South Africa match. It was the game of games. The West Indies rose to its highest height after sinking to low depths against Kenya.
It is sinking out in Australia after 7 consecutive defeats in Test and one-dayers against all-comers. The triumph against Pakistan on Monday night is but proof that we can come again. And come good, if not very good.
This brings me to Lara. Lara played back straight, in the classic mould, with his right shoulder high, he makes the drives with a full swing. And no design of slips checks his cuts. Vivi Richards powered through the gaps, with the best foot-work I have ever seen in cricket. I never saw Bradman live, of course, or Headley. Sobers used his height, a long swing from a high back-lift and powerful forearm, and at the same time used his wrists and a hawk-like eye to play as few will ever play. But Lara’s supreme balance, his use of wrists and forearm, when on song produces an immaculate and unerring placement such as I have never seen before.
I know that some there are who will raise Lara’s misbehaviour. The authorities have meted out punishment. It is not for anyone to determine, other than the legal authority, what punishment should be given to those who offend us. Otherwise, justice is determined by the victim. That cannot be just.
Lara is no paragon of virtue. Better if he was. But Lara is the product of a time, a social time, in which everything and anything goes. The unthinkable has become almost commonplace. Hence Lara’s mutiny against Richardson. The West Indies has been economically, politically and socially dislocated. Lara did not produce the time. He was produced by the times. It is up to us to relieve the intolerable social pressures put on an individual of outstanding talent, and not bemoan and belabour his weaknesses. Otherwise, we will ban and prohibit the emergence of outstanding talent and live forever with baleful, if not banal, mediocrity. Or less, as we are doing now. Lara, at any rate, reminds that there is exceptional talent among us, though structurally adjusted downwards. And his very weaknesses call upon us to husband and treasure his genius, by a judicious mix, of punishment and mercy. And more mercy than punishment.
Now back to the cricket.
The word is out that the Australians, clinically efficient, have worked out Lara. Bowl on the leg stump or tuck him up on the body. Then give him one outside off-stump and the flashing blade will be his undoing. So far it has worked.
But it happened before. Surprised eh? The great George Headley had gone to Australia in 1931. He had, by then, scored four centuries in four Tests against England. He had you will note scored 334 not out against Lord Tennyson’s English XI in Jamaica. He too went with a reputation of exceedingly high quality.
In Australia, Headley set about the Australians in the preliminary matches to the Test matches. His 131, in even time, against Victoria was rated one of the best seen on the ground, as was Lara’s 277 at Sydney last tour down-under.
The word went around, keep away from Headley’s off-stump. That meant bowl leg-stump. There was a new type of attack to the great George Headley. He failed miserably. There was a period of crisis and unrelieved failure. His scores were 27 and 16; 0 and 11; 3; 14 and 2; 19 and 17.
Eventually George Headley, great as ever, changed his game and the results were as follows 102 and 28; 77 and 113, 75 and 39; 33 and 11; 70 and 2; 105 and 30. He had become a master of on-side play.
I watched Lara on Monday night against Pakistan. He is on-driving without falling away to the off side. His placement on the leg-side is nearly as good as on his off. His head is steady again, when playing on the on-side again. Look out.
Lara unknown to many here, even more so than the rest of the team has been besieged in Australia. So much so, that he has received so many abusive and threatening phone calls, even before the Healey dressing room incident, that the phone – and Lara loves the phone like most post-sixties moderns – has had to be removed from his room.
There is a rising tide of racism in Australia at this time. Let me give only one example. Bernard Fridman himself a white South African, writing in The Australian said he “was saddened and disturbed by the continuous racist abuses given to the West Indies cricketers.” Continuing he wrote, “Never did I hear such blatant racial abuse at any sporting event in my own country [under apartheid] against which the sporting world correctly imposed sanctions for its racist laws.” It must be terrible. Even Tony Cozier, who normally looks askance at these matters sticking to the cricket in decency, has been shocked.
I feel sure that West Indies cricket will rise above this tide of racism in Australia, for it is in our nature and in the history of our cricket, as vehicle for national expression of freedom. Therefore we will and must do so. If not this time, then next. But I feel, definitely this time. Walsh, Ambrose and Lara have the historic stuff in them to overcome, and Chanderpaul, uniquely and to me unexpectedly, is determined to hit back.
Season’s Greetings & Happy New Year.
Last updated on 9 February 2022