Diplomatic Games: Sport, Statecraft, and International Relations since 1945

4. Forging Africa-Caribbean Solidarity within the Commonwealth?

4 Forging Africa-Caribbean Solidarity within the Commonwealth? sport and Diplomacy during the anti-apartheid campaign Aviston D. Downes The impact of the international anti-apartheid sports campaign on west indies cricket is a theme that has attracted some attention within a celebratory nationalist framework.1 The subject has also attracted modest attention by other historians and political scientists interested in the wider international political and diplomatic dimensions of this subject.2 marc Keech and barrie Houlihan have identified sport as a potential bridgebuilder between erstwhile estranged nations or, alternatively, a vehicle through which to register disapproval against a state and its governing ideology.3 They have labeled this latter expression of sport “negative sport diplomacy.” Houlihan has also argued that “international sporting contact has provided [governments] with a low-cost, but high-profile resource for publicizing their policy on international issues or towards specific states.”4 Keech and Houlihan contend that for the major world powers, sport usually represents a relatively minor element in “a wide repertoire of mili117 118 aviston D. Downes tary, economic and diplomatic resources to choose from.”5 as such, then, sport diplomacy is a “soft option,” a tool that can be mobilized with minimal socioeconomic costs or dangerous political or diplomatic fallout. yet they also noted that “for poorer countries negative sports diplomacy is much more likely to indicate a paucity of resources for the conduct of international relations than the careful selection of an appropriately measured response.”6 Undoubtedly developed countries possess a wider panoply of resources with which they can bring diplomatic pressure upon adversaries. but any suggestion that sport is some low-cost disposable resource left to Third world nations for “negative” political deployment is seriously flawed reasoning. such a hypothesis undervalues the economic as well as the politically symbolic weight of the partnerships forged among sport, music, film, and the modern media. it could be argued, for example, that the game of cricket had emerged as the richest cultural resource of the commonwealth caribbean by the 1960s. although short in terms of the natural resources normally utilized to generate wealth in the industrialized north, the caribbean’s contribution and impact in the world in terms of music, culture, and sport cannot be underrated. by 1970 the region could claim the world’s greatest cricket all-rounder in the person of its captain, Garfield (later sir Garfield) sobers. The west indies were winners of the first two prudential world cup competitions in the 1970s, and the team proceeded to world dominance in the sport. The names and faces of the region’s professional cricketers were and remain more recognizable than any of its captains of commerce or any of its prime ministers. The game of cricket had for some time been a cultural arena within which social power expressed in class and racial discrimination was both perpetuated and contested. cricket, one of the english games shorn of its pre-Victorian “impurities” by the middle of the nineteenth century, emerged as the quintessential metaphor for british civilization and its engagement with the rest of the world. indeed, in the caribbean context, the game became the main cultural vehicle by which colonial whites and their progeny sought to assert the retention of their identity as english gentlemen in the tropics. while such an ideology was imbibed firsthand by the sons of that mostly white, privileged middle class through a handful of elite schools consciously reorganized along the english public school model, some colonialists argued for exposing a representative minority of forging africa-caribbean solidarity within the commonwealth? 119 the struggling nonwhites to this training, with a view that the consequent creation of a black middle class would serve as a buffer and broker against social revolution. The dominant white planter-merchant class was reluctant to embrace the “civilizing mission” to the emancipated black population by enthusiastic reformist clergymen, educators, and promoters of liberal sport. instead, exclusion, except in the most menial aspects of the game, was the lot of black working-class west indians. The exclusionary agenda ultimately failed, however, to prevent the rise of a truly inclusive national sport by the mid-twentieth century. indeed, the middle-class british claims that sport was the most effective instrument of imperialism seemed particularly true of the anglophone caribbean. forms of popular protests punctuated the caribbean in response to poor colonial conditions such as dilapidated housing, poor sanitation, disease , skyrocketing infant mortality, and...