Transformation’s new path is deeply unsettling

I’ve been at the announcement of the Gauteng Schools cricket teams more times than I’m prepared to own up to, but I’ve never left the ceremony feeling more disturbed than I did last weekend as I drove out of St Stithians College’s campus.

I’ve been an advocate, over the years, for the non-negotiable transformation of our sport to begin at school level – rather than being implemented from the top down – but last Sunday I got the feeling that those in charge have lost the plot.

Affirmative action – which is what we are talking about here – has been accepted universally as a necessary, justifiable practice, and much study and research has been put into it.

I don’t pretend to be an expert on the subject, but I’ve read a fair bit of what’s been written and, from what I understand, it’s all about identifying potential and developing it.

That means, necessarily, that in making selection decisions, you would opt for the player who comes from a disadvantaged background when the choice was between two players of similar ability, and you would do it on the basis of the potential you had recognised in the disadvantaged player.

In the South African context, there have been accusations (loud ones recently) that this doesn’t happen because those making the selection decisions want to preserve some sort of white supremacy in sport. So, there have been quotas introduced to force their hands.

Affirmative action was never meant to be punitive, and its success should never be measured by counting the number of black faces in team pictures.

Let me describe the quota system in place when provincial school cricket teams are selected these days. In the first instance, at least seven of the 13 in each squad have to be players of colour, and of those, a minimum of four must be what are called “black Africans”.

So, the fact that most of the quota players selected in the past were either so-called coloured individuals or from the Indian community is no longer satisfactory.

And if there’s not enough social engineering in that, from next year, one of the “black African” players has to bat at number one, two or three in the line-up. I don’t know what the rule will be for bowlers, but I assume one of this category of players will have to open the bowling as well.

It seems any pretence of selection and team management along strategic cricketing lines has been abandoned, and transformation is taking precedence. Except that it’s not so much transformation as bending to the will of people high up in the sporting structures who insist that all teams must look, and play, the way they want them to.

It’s clearly wrong for us to be fielding national teams in rugby and cricket that are almost entirely white. And it’s also clear, 21 years into democracy, that whatever has been done to change this situation isn’t working.

I’m less clear on how massive interventions of the type being forced onto cricket are going to help. Sure, there will be many more players of colour among the Khaya Majola Week graduates, and from now on more of them will be “black Africans”.

How many of them will filter through to the professional teams and, eventually, the national sides remains to be seen.

On the other side of the coin are the white (and Indian and coloured) players who are passed over so that the quotas can be met.

We are fortunate in Joburg to have private, and a few state, schools who have been practising aggressive recruitment of previously disadvantaged players and who run top-class coaching and development programmes.

So the players of colour in the Gauteng teams are all good – most, and in some years all, of them would have made the team on merit anyway – but that’s not the case all over the country.

There will be cases where players of colour will be selected ahead of white boys who are clearly better than they are. And in a statistical game like cricket, you can say that with confidence.

That’s just wrong for everyone, except for those making up these regulations.

As I was saying, it’s deeply disturbing.