Of Fathers, Sons and Timeless Tests: Wicket Tales from Kingsmead by Ashwin Desai

Kingsmead is a colosseum in which warriors have cut their enemies down before a baying crowd for a modest entry fee for a hundred years. It has also seen players cower in despair as unanswered blows rained down, and there was nothing they could do. It has showcased the finest cricketing talent and hosted the most intriguing games, some of which are described in the pages that follow.

How do you write a story of a stadium that has seen a million overs bowled? But Kingsmead is also a stadium that excluded Black people from this Imperium in Imperio for nearly seven decades. As spectators, it forced them to sit in the narrowest of confines, with a view of play occluding more than it revealed. And if they dared to trespass into white areas, Kingsmead saw them frog-marched back to their place. It was said that in Rome, a slave could win his freedom through gladiatorial prestige. Apartheid didnt even allow Black people to try.

How do we write about a place of such joy, a showcase of world-class talent that also excluded many, enforcing apartheid in miniature? How do you decipher mountains of scoresheets and newspaper clippings of Test matches through the twentieth century, revelling in worthy records but knowing that only the lahnees were ever picked?

Under the Group Areas Act, Black people were bundled out of their city homes and put on the move to barren townships in Natal just as swiftly as anywhere else. No communion of cricket was observed here. Clubs that existed for over half a century were destroyed with the stroke of an administrators pen, with a bulldozer often moving in not long after.