Cricket: Colour back on agenda

South Africa's recent sporting success has reopened old wounds.

IT HAS been quite a week for South Africa's sporting teams but not everyone is rejoicing.

While the cricketers' defeat of the West Indies in the First Test in Johannesburg and the rugby side's achievement in equalling the All Blacks record of 17 consecutive Test victories have prompted the usual euphoria and triumphalism among the white population, the vast majority of South Africans have remained either ambivalent or, in the case of the African National Congress government, furious that both teams should still be as exclusively white as they were in the forgettable days of apartheid.

No one is angrier or more disenchanted than Steve Tshwete, the sports minister, who famously greeted South Africa's first-up victory over Australia at Sydney in cricket's 1992 World Cup with a tearful embrace of the players, then also all white.

Announcing that his government would next April set up a commission to accelerate the process of introducing a more representative racial composition in national teams, Tshwete told a ceremony honouring outstanding past black rugby players last week: "We are going to intervene in a decisive way to ensure that we don't assemble here in five years' time to lament the death of rugby in black areas. You are going to be heard beyond the confines of these walls expressing your outrage," he added. "You must be heard - nou is ons gatvol [now we are fed up]".

Under the divisive apartheid regime of the minority National Party government, cricket and rugby, like all other sports except football and boxing, were the virtual preserves of the white population.

There has been a lot of catching up to do. The cricket and rugby boards have taken on a multi-racial hew and a black lawyer, Silas Nkanunu, now heads the latter in succession to the loathed Louis Luyt. Both have introduced development programmes to spread and popularise their sports in the disadvantaged townships and the composition of national age-group teams indicate increasing success.

But it has not yet been reflected on the vitally conspicuous international stage and Tshwete and others, like Mvuso Mbebe, head of the National Sports Council, who has also raised the issue, are becoming impatient.

Only one black South African, Makhaya Ntini, the 22-year-old fast bowler from the village of Zwelitsha in the eastern Cape, has advanced into the Test team. Three years ago, the teenaged Paul Adams, a coloured (mixed- race) left-arm spinner with a corkscrew action, created a sensation in his debut series against England.

Adams has had 19 Tests, Ntini four but neither was selected for the first Test against the West Indies on the stated grounds that their current form did not merit their inclusion. There are also two coloured players, Breyton Paule of Western Province and Deon Kayser of Eastern Province, and one black, Owen Nkumane of Gauteng, in the rugby squad but neither played a Test on the swing through Britain and Ireland.

Herein lies the nub, whether there should be what is called "positive discrimination" - the inclusion, by law, of those who were previously debarred, by law - in sport as there now is in the government service. The concept is anathema to those who hold that selection should be on merit alone.

Tshwete also places the blame on selectors of club and provincial teams, the nurseries for Test cricket. "Provincial panels allocate to themselves the position of the last bastion of apartheid in sport," he charged on national television last week, adding that government non-interference in selection "should not be used as a ploy to keep black players on the benches as drinks boys".

Dr Ali Bacher, chief executive officer of the United Cricket Board, placed the subject on the agenda of its meeting in Johannesburg yesterday for what he called a "full debate".

The second Test against the West Indies starts in Port Elizabeth on Thursday. South Africa's sporting public and, not least, its politicians eagerly waits to hear what cricket's future selection parameters will be.