Within and beyond the cricket, racial and political boundaries was the interesting theme of Guyanese born Professor Clem Seecharan’s Walter Rodney Memorial lecture at Warwick University last week. Addressing a packed house of students, staff and outsiders, Seecharan took on the question of ‘Cricket and Empire; the shaping of the West Indian Identity’.
He started and finished with his own identity from his days as a young boy growing up in the Corentyne listening at night to Port Mourant’s Rohan Kanhai’s exploits in Australia on a “radio hooked up to a battery taken from our Ferguson 29 tractor. Men felt like boys and boys felt like men as they listened”. Kanhai took his place up there on the walls of Indian homes in British Guiana with Lord Shiva, worshipped as a West Indian cricketer. Seecharan’s racial identity was subsumed under sporting loyalty, “I listened on the radio and as a person of Indian descent I identified totally with that West Indian team” was his view.
But, Seecharan also recalled his academic identity–coming to England and Warwick 20 years before. His was the first successful PhD at the very Centre for Caribbean Studies he was now addressing. He described the experience as “coming home”. He had been introduced by Professor David Dabydeen, a fellow member of the ‘Guyanese mafia’ in the UK. Dabydeen described his friend as “an inspiration”.
Seecharan took as his guide the prosaic words of CLR James in Beyond the Boundary. “What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?” In the quest to find an answer, Seecharan, the Head of the Centre for Caribbean Studies at London Metropolitan University and a leading historiographer in and of the Caribbean, led his audience through the rollercoaster ride that it took for cricket in the West Indies to become truly a game of all the people rather than of a white elite.
He began in the 1760s when the game was brought to the West Indies by the white masters and slaves outside the boundary were only allowed to retrieve the masters’ balls for them as they were hit into the cane fields. Outside the Boundary. Firmly. In time, black and later brown West Indians moved, slowly, inside the boundary. First as bowlers not batsmen .”Bowl-ing was seen as a menial task.”Some freed slaves were allowed to do so do to visiting teams in practice but not in matches,” he recalled. This stereotyping by function took on a political and racial dimension. “Fast bowling was seen as instrument of liberation, democracy by other means,” was how Seecharan elegantly expressed it. The struggle continued. By the 1930s, black West Indians were seen by their white cricketing masters to have grasped the art of batting. Serious cricketers and serious political animals able to think of governing themselves in the Caribbean. He quoted the great cricket writer Neville Cardus on Learie (later Lord) Constantine: “His cricket was racial. Cricket was his element. Learie was incredible.”
Pictures of West Indian teams through the years illustrated the lecture and showed the changing hue as the tide of history swept through God’s own game; right through to the 1950s and the great days of the ‘Three Ws’: Weekes, Worrell and Walcott. At long last, a black West Indian was allowed to captain a West Indian team; breakthrough inside the boundary after nearly two centuries of struggle.
The reasons were historical and racial and naturally inter-connected. Cricket was a white man’s game brought to the colonies and dissipated through the elite schools created by the colonial masters – QC in Guyana for example (Seecharan’s alma mater) ,QRC in Trinidad or Harrison’s College in Barbados. “The colonial affirmation was that cricket was central to education and at the heart of the Empire” as Seecharan put it. The game and ethos and skills seeped down first to coloured and then to African West Indian players. As the Caribbean freed itself politically from the clasp of the Empire in the 1950s and 1960s, so too it emerged in triumph on the cricket field all over the world.
The drive to freedom and independence off the field of cricket – beyond the boundary — had its counterpart within the white lines. The parallels were drawn intriguingly. Seecharan, the Guyanese ‘history man’ delivered once again.