Paper presented at the symposium in honour of Vishnu Padayachee : Scholarship, The Intellectual and Fundamental Social Change’

By
Suresh Naidoo
Chief Executive Officer
April 17, 2023
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The first memory of meeting my cousin Vishnu goes back to 1967.

My Uncle Nad, referred to by my mother by his full name Nadaraj, brought Vishnu to our house to attend a test match between South Africa and Australia. We lived a walk away from Kingsmead Stadium cricket grounds in what was called the Grey Street casbah.

I suspect that my mother ferried him to the game in her blue Vauxhall Velox. If I recall correctly, he stayed overnight and arrived with his cricket cap and bat.  

Children played on the outfield during breaks. Vishnu, who was 15 at the time, must have played a few shots in the break. I knew little about cricket at 6 years old. In that test match that happened between Jan 20 to 25, 1967, SA beat Australia by 8 wickets.  

SA had the Pollock brothers, Goddard, and Barlow. I don’t have such a perfect memory, but I googled all the test matches from 1967 to 1969 in Durban to get a precise date.

Umkomaas was a long way from Durban in 1967.I remember my mother’s delight upon seeing her brother and nephew after quite some time. In the Grey Street casbah area, we played cricket on the pavements. When one had grown older, the streets were used on a Sunday when there was no traffic.  

My love for the game grew as we visited Umkomaas more often. We would spend many holidays at my maternal grandmother home in Umkomaas. That home included the homes of my 3 uncles: Nadaraj, as my Amah (mother) would call him, Satchi aka mayor and Vasu. These three uncles lived on the same property as my grandparents.

In between my grandparent’s home and The Divine Life Society ashram built by my grandfather was a patch of land that provided, a narrow, but lovely cricket ground aptly named Lords. The alternative venue was names 'The Oval'. Vishnu would get all his cousins, uncles, neighbours, and friends to come and play cricket. The game was non-sexist, and the girls were invited too.

It was test match cricket because it lasted days. Players may have changed but during the holidays, it was a test match. No short version T20 like today. Vishnu was the catalyst for this. Each one of us had a name of a famous cricketer as a nickname.

It must be remembered that cricket was hardly played in Umkomaas. There was no cricket ground - even at the school. Vishnu was the first to initiate playing the game, even casually in Umkomaas. All of us developed a love for the game from Vishnu. It must also be noted that SA was banned from test cricket in 1974, yet we spent hours with Vishnu selecting a national team and debating who should and shouldn’t be in this team that never played. Quite a pointless but highly entertaining pass time.  

Sadly, I still do it alone, to this day.  

I would always beg Vishnu to take us to the cricket matches because sitting next to him at a game gave me insight and a deeper understanding of the game. Today, the broadcasts on TV give you the most amazing stats graphically. We never knew the speed of a ball the number of good, short or yorker length bowled.  

We still loved the game and had our very own analyst, Vishnu, who would give us the background.  

He could speak for hours on the game and would have us all in awe.

I have stayed involved in cricket up to today. I serve as Chairman of the Finance Committee and a member of the Management Committee of KZNCU and was member of the CSA remuneration committee.

To discuss cricket only will be a travesty.

Vishnu introduced us to other lesser-known sports to our community in the 70’s.  

The late Professor Vishnu Padayachee (photo credit - University of Witswatersrand)

He introduced me to rugby, a game, I still watch every Saturday. When the All Blacks visited in 1977, Vishnu had magazines and newspaper clippings of the tour and drummed up excitement in all of us.  

I thanked Vishnu a few years ago for introducing me to rugby, and we had a chat on the status of the game. It was, before 1990, a game known as a game of the white man, yet Vishnu was au fait with the game and its very complex rules. He also introduced us to Formula 1 racing. Another sport unknown to people of colour.  

Vishnu was ahead of his time.

Both cricket and rugby have a lot of space for analysing, and Vishnu loved this especially about cricket. Vishnu taught his younger cousins all the fielding positions, silly mid-on, short leg, cover, extra cover, 3man and so on.

... All very amusing to us youngsters.

His love for the game and his social conscious was welded together. In the book, Blacks in White: A Century of Cricket Struggles, which he co-authored with Goolam Vahed, Krish Reddy and Ashwin Desai, takes an in depth look at the history and development of non-racial cricket in KwaZulu-Natal and chronicles the courage, trials and tribulations of truly non-racial sports personalities determined to knock the bales out of apartheid sport. Vishnu also wrote a number of essays and articles on topic of transformation in cricket.

With so many years since re-admittances, we would expect that transformation of cricket is not as thorny an issue as it remains. The fact that we still need to have a social-justice and nation-building project, or enquiry reflects the lack of change in the game. The fact that we have arguments about taking the knee for “Black Lives Matter” movement speaks volumes for the lack of transformation in the game.  

If you asked me about readmission of cricket or rugby would transform quicker or with less pain, I would have emphatically answered cricket.  

Today, I will easily say that rugby is ahead.  

Rassie Erasmus won the 2019 with no less than 6 black players, including the captain, in his starting line-up. You cannot win a World Cup with 6 “quota‘’ players. The documentary “Chasing the Sun” on the 2019 win shows very clearly that team management had full confidence in the black players in the team – this isn’t necessarily the case in cricket.

Some fundamental errors were made at the outset in cricket administration after re-admission. The appointment of apartheid administrators, like Ali Bacher, who was the architect of the Rebel Tours, to the position as the first CEO still reflects in the current conflicts. The fact that it was a huge problem to implement the Nicolson recommendations on an objective Board with more non-cricket people speaks volumes for the lack of transformational thinking at cricket.  

The West Indian cricketers, who toured South Africa as rebels, are still ostracised by the people of their countries to this day - yet , we opened our arms to the architect of the rebel tours Ali Bacher and asked him to guide the transition to “normal” cricket. If you haven’t watched the documentary on the rebel tour, please watch ‘’ Fire in Babylon” that provides some perspective.

It would be remiss of me not to say a few personal things about Vishnu and particularly his relationship with my late mother in her twilight years.  

There were many years in which he hardly met with my mother. In the last few years of her life, he would be a regular visitor at my home to see my mother. Surprisingly, we discovered that both he and my mother enjoyed Swedish crime fiction. He would bring books for her to read every few weeks. My mother appreciated her nephews’ visits, and they grew closer.  

There is so much to be said about Vishnu not just about cricket. There are many things I discovered about him from the many eulogies published. Things that he and I sadly never got round to talking about.  

Many of his achievements and work only came to light to some of us in his family after he passed. His memory will be cherished by his family.