Most of the news I hear from South Africa is bad. AIDS. AIDS denial. Crime. And black politicians blaming everything on white racism and trying to impose equal outcomes by the force of law, as opposed to equality before the law with the outcomes coming out as they will. As a sports fan, I particularly noticed what sounded like a truly vile quota rule, insisting that there had to be at least one black player in the national cricket team. They also, I learned today when digging deeper, had a rule that provincial cricket sides had to have at least four “players of colour” in them.
The good news is that they are now scrapping these quotas. South Africa’s Sports Minister is having “talks” with South Africa’s United Cricket Board. But assuming that talk is all that ensues, that the Minister is reassured rather than determined to over-ride and over-rule, and that the quotas will indeed be got rid of, this is the best news I’ve heard from South Africa for quite some time.
Positive discrimination rules of this kind perpetuate the process of judging people according to skin colour and collective racial membership rather than on individual merit. The South Africa cricket quota rules were bound to give rise to the suspicion that individual players, even players who in fact fully deserved international recognition, had in fact only got into the national team because of “politics”.
Quota rules are especially depressing in sport, because sport has traditionally been an arena where, because results matter so much and because individual merit is so hard to ignore, hitherto disadvantaged racial groups have time and again been able to make their first big strides towards social and legal equality, lead by their greatest individual sportsmen. From a TV documentary screened in connection with the recent soccer World Cup about the great Pele, for example, I learned for the first time what a big part the unavoidably brilliant talent of that great sportsman played in breaking down the racism so powerful in Brazil in the nineteen fifties. (Brazil won the recent World Cup, with a team containing, of course, numerous coloured players.)
Assuming that the South Africans really have now dumped their cricket quota rules, I am even willing to say, retrospectively, and despite their obvious ghastliness, that I can see why they had these rules, temporarily, and that I can see what they may have achieved with them. By flagging up the issue of non-white participation in cricket in this aggressively interventionist manner, the South African cricket authorities at least made it clear that they were serious about involving all South Africans in cricket and not just white South Africans. The quotas may now have ended, but the UCB has made it very clear that all the other efforts South African cricket has been making to achieve greater equality of cricketing opportunity (and thereby in due course lots of non-white international representation on merit), such as new pitches and new coaching schemes in non-white areas, will continue.
