Seminar: ‘The Englishman’s Game’. Cricket and Colonial Identity in South Africa, 1880-1910

This seminar has been organized together with the VU University Amsterdam.

At the dawn of the Twentieth Century the Colonies of South Africa were still relatively young and influenced greatly by ideas from the ‘Mother Country’. As elsewhere, sport’s imperialists viewed the spread of English games and culture an indicator of a colony’s cultural and social development. English sportsmen were seen as purveyors of the ‘enlightening’ process in far flung corners of empire and South Africa was no different. Indeed English cricketer Pelham Warner associated South Africa’s evolution with the spread of the game throughout the region: “Step by step we have forced our way up north, and the cricket-pavilions that have sprung up along our track may almost be called the milestones on the road of the nation’s progress” he exclaimed in 1900.

This seminar will explore the development of cricket in South Africa during this period and investigate its link to a white colonial and predominantly English identity throughout the region. Based on primary research conducted in South Africa over the past decade, this paper will reveal how the spread of cricket’s English imperialist ethos was aided throughout South Africa by a number of wealthy colonial benefactors to the game. For example James Logan, who made his home in the Cape Colony in the late 1870s, was instrumental in the organisation of both of Lord Hawke’s England tours to the Continent during the 1890s and along with Abe Bailey, was a member of the Cape Parliament and supporter of Cecil Rhodes. Both Logan and Bailey represented a new age of colonial ‘tycoon’ in Southern Africa who recognised the power of the ‘imperial game’ and its significance to the colonial community. The paper will also examine how international fixtures remained the realm of the gentleman tourist whose breeding and skin-colour were as fundamental as his cricketing ability. Britain’s imperial agenda as well as an emergent Afrikaner nationalism will be explored here as the forces contributing to the racially-driven construction of colonial South African cricket and society.

Here you will find Dean Allen's forthcoming book on this matter.