Must Read: Dolly, the Man who Helped Change Apartheid

By Trevor Chesterfield

If he were alive today, John Arlott would have smiled at the irony of it all. So would have the parents of Basil Lewis D'Oliveira.

basil doliviera trophy eng v sa smith and vaughan

You could place major wager on it as well that if he were also alive, John Vorster, and those of his white minority racist ilk, would not appreciate such a slap in the face either.

These days South Africa and England play for the D'Oliveira Trophy. It comes fourteen years after the resumption of their Test series that ended a 29 year hiatus caused by South Africa's unacceptable legislative race policies that led to a deserved international isolation.

Added to the irony is how this year, South Africa won the trophy with a 2-1 series victory with Graeme Smith, who was not born when the politics interrupted tours between the two nations.

How all this is seen, and forty years on from the time D'Oliveira was banned from touring South Africa as part of the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) side selected for the ill-fated 1968-69 tour, is a genuine paradox. But it is a welcome one.

Of course no one was into crystal ball gazing that night of September 17, 1968, when Vorster, a Nazi sympathiser, yet someone who strangely enjoyed watching the occasional game of cricket, acted as executioner of not only that tour on race grounds over Basil's belated inclusion. He also began what became the international drive towards what became the highway of isolation.

Of all the sports in South Africa, cricket has been the one, because of its demographics where the race card played a major role. The sport was played and enjoyed by many across the land. The problem was that incarcerated as they were by the draconian legislation of apartheid, the Africans were always marginalised by the system.

Herded into their ghettos, labouring under a poor education system and denied any form of voting franchise, all they knew about cricket was when the servants washed the flannels of the white sons and fathers who played, or the male ground staff prepared the pitches and maintained the pavilion.

There is a true story of how a South African Test all-rounder, Herbert (Tiger) Lance, found among the ground staff at Berea Park in Pretoria, a tall loose-limbed South Sotho speaking net bowler by the name of Maxim. Such were his skills, he could have come from the West Indies, but here was a genuine in-swing bowler with impressive ability, good enough to have played at least first-class level but for laws of apartheid.

It had been Arlott, revered for his scholarly and conversational style of commentary on the BBC programme Test Match Special, and his writings as well as liberal views, who on receiving a letter of enquiry from Cape Town set the D'Oliveira story in motion.

Encouragement by Arlott and introduction to the famed Lancashire League club Middleton are only part of the early trek of a modest man. Basil was not a man of politics. But he was drawn into the dirty game by the connivance of others; it is where the suspicion lingers today of a conspiracy by the Old Boys tie establishment led by those who should have upheld the democratic rights of others that had Basil initially excluded from the touring party.

If the word of Lord Cobham, former President of the MCC and Governor General of New Zealand, and that of a former South African politician Ben Schoeman, are taken at face value, a decision had been taken at a cabinet meeting in February 1968 that should Basil be selected, the tour would be banned.

How it would be done has become part of the intrigue that has long surrounded the initial selection of the team on August 28, 1968.

Background to the cabinet decision is that Vorster knew all too well there were strong anti-apartheid elements in the country, especially in the Western Cape, and this included Cape Town, who would create massive disturbances. These could lead to major riots and other types of insurrection with the racist white minority government being held responsible for a far worse massacre than Sharpeville if it came to such a confrontation.

While the nation's black leaders were either jailed on Robben Island or spread around other parts of Africa, Europe, or the Americas, there were agents willing to embarrass Vorster in a bid to end the laws and bring normality and hope to an enslaved disenfranchised community.

In response to an article written in September 1980, Schoeman had his secretary call me and invited me to a morning coffee, or what the Afrikaners called koffie en melktert en buskuit (coffee with a milk tart and rusks).

After polite conversation for about half an hour during which he admitted he would have loved to have been able to fish at New Zealand's famed Lake Taupo for rainbow trout, there was the impression that Schoeman and Vorster did not agree on certain matters. By September 1980 – 12 years after the banning of D'Oliveira and the MCC tour, Schoeman hinted he was of the opinion that it would be "only a matter of time before all apartheid laws" would be removed from the statute books.

"What I am going to show you is not to be repeated in my lifetime," Schoeman carefully explained, sipping his morning coffee.

It was an English translation from notes written in Afrikaans that he had made of the cabinet meeting. It was confirmation that the tour would be banned if Basil was selected.

Forgotten by many, including it seems South African politicians and the white South African cricket establishment is that the Cape Town born Basil was a British citizen. It had been while on a tour organised in 1963/64 by former England fast bowler Alf Gover, and included among other countries Pakistan, which led to major changes in his and his family's life.

Arriving from Nairobi in what was then Bombay, there was no way that the Indian immigration staff at passport control would allow him to spend a night in a city hotel on his South African passport. What an ironic slap in the face for the earnest all-rounder. And all he wanted was a bed for the night.

Officialdom though found a way around the impasse. He had to sign a form declaring he was a South African of Indian parentage and put up £200 and that he would leave for Karachi the next day.

On his return to England after the tour, he applied for and was granted British citizenship within weeks, smoothing the way for Test selection two years later.

Forty years ago, on September 17, 1968, and switching from Afrikaans to a thickly accented guttural slurring English, Vorster rejected the credentials of the MCC touring party with Basil now a member.

"It's not the MCC team," Vorster told the audience. "It is the team of the anti-apartheid movement. We are not prepared to accept a team thrust upon us . . . It is a team of the political opponents of South Africa. It is a team of people who don't care about sports relations at all."

Forgotten amid this political grandstanding rhetoric is how Vorster, as a white racist politician, was addressing an audience with similar views in the heart of Afrikanerdom. It was designed to send a chilling message to the nation's so-called liberal minded sports administrators.

Arlott died on December 14, 1991 – a month after South Africa's historic first tour of India. Vorster had died earlier – September 10, 1983, seven days short of what was the fifteen anniversary of that Bloemfontein banning edict.

Apart from unwittingly at the time of digging South Africa's sporting grave 40 years ago when issuing what amounted to a banning order, Vorster was forced to resign in disgrace in 1979 as president after an enquiry into unauthorised government spending millions of dollars in what became the Muldergate, a euphemism for what was a damaging information scandal.

On March 17, 1992 while the South African side under Kepler Wessels waited in Adelaide, the nation's whites went to the polls for a last time in a plebiscite to either accept or reject the planned reforms outlined in the Convention for Democratic Change (Codesa), initially begun on February 2, 1990 when the white minority government unbanned Nelson Mandela, the ANC and other anti-apartheid groups.

The turn out was a high 85.1 percent: the yes vote was 68.73 percent and the book on legislated apartheid, of which Basil had been a victim because of his colour, had been closed.

Basil is still alive: an old man maybe, but one who knows that in his own small way he helped changed the landscape that was South African sport.

On the bright, if bracing winter morning of June 29, 1991, as the United Cricket Board of South Africa was formed, no one really gave a thought about the one man who should have been on the invitation list to attend what was an historic unification meeting.

As the new order of South African cricket was taking place in the spacious oak and walnut panel walled dining room at the Wanderers Club, Johannesburg, missing from the guest list was Basil D'Oliveira. Yet that night, at the fancy celebration banquet to mark the event, there was a toast by some of us to absent friends and Basil was suddenly remembered.