The tail end of 2008 saw the South African cricket team secure an historic series victory over Australia – the first visiting side to take a series in Australia for 16 years. As the last glowing embers of the year died out, so too did the final legacy of an era of institutionalised racism in South Africa. The second, series-clinching test in Melbourne featured an innings of 166 from JP Duminy, three wickets from the bowling of Makhaya Ntini, and the match-winning runs stroked off the bat of devout Muslim Hashim Amla.

These were achievements that not only propelled South Africa to the summit of world cricket, but spoke for generations of Indian and black sportsmen that had languished for decades in a divided and bigoted nation; prohibited by legalised racism from even representing their country. Where the South African rugby side had led so symbolically in the 1995 World Cup, the cricket team had now followed, presenting a successful and truly unified front in the wake of apartheid.

South Africa’s sporting heritage is tarnished by the country’s dark history. For many years the nation, officially believing in a natural supremacy of whites, forbade multiracial sports. For decades South African sports teams were the exclusive preserve of the white man; any sportsman who wasn’t ‘pure’ white was forced to play in the ‘coloured leagues’. Domestic political policy was such that overseas teams, by virtue of their having players of diverse races, were prevented from touring the country.

The 1948 South African elections saw the main Afrikaner National Party (NP) take power under the stewardship of Daniel Francois Malan. Apartheid policies, designed to classify individuals by race and prohibit racial groups from mixing geographically, socially, and professionally, began to be implemented. The ultimate and unashamed goal of the NP from the moment it came to power was to attain a white supremacist nationalist state in South Africa, outlawing miscegenation and enforcing total racial segregation.

Despite the obvious moral insidiousness of successive apartheid regimes, and the increasing international condemnation with which the system met, apartheid maintained its ugly grip on South Africa for over 40 years. In fact international opprobrium was for a long time just empty words; the world’s most influential figures paying lip-service to virtue while turning a blind eye to vice.

It wasn’t until 1990, the lifting of the government ban on anti-apartheid organisations, and the release of Nelson Mandela, the leader of the anti-apartheid Africa National Congress (ANC) imprisoned for 27 years for political activism, that any real end of apartheid could be countenanced. Yet it was through sport – the plight of a handful of individuals and a string of momentous events thrust into the international limelight that a sporting platform affords – that South Africa experienced many of its key, era-defining moments.

South Africa’s gradual ostracism from global sport began in the 1950s. Curiously, it was the International Table Tennis Federation that took the first step, severing its ties with the all-white South African Table Tennis Union, preferring the non-racial South African Table Tennis Board. The apartheid government simply responded by voiding the passports of the Board’s players, ensuring they couldn’t play internationally.

A non-racial administrative body, the South African Sports Association (SASA), was set up in 1959 and, after three years of fruitless attempts at collaboration with white sports organisations, it began to agitate for South Africa’s exclusion from world sport on a much larger scale. In 1962 the SACA approached the International Olympic Committee (IOC) pleading for its own country’s expulsion from the Olympic Games. The nation duly received a caution from the IOC, bringing about changes, although only nominal, and the formation of the South African Non-Racial Olympic Committee. However, it soon became clear that South Africa had no intention of desisting from its policy of segregation in sport and the IOC proceeded to bar the country from the 1964 Games in Tokyo.

Despite pledging to select a multi-racial team for the 1968 Games in Mexico City, South Africa’s invitation was again rescinded after pressure was brought on the IOC from other African nations threatening to boycott the Games. In 1970 the IOC took the step of officially expelling South Africa from the Olympic movement.

The apartheid bureaucracy devised a classification system that split the population into four sectors: Black, White, Indian and Coloured. Crude, demeaning and often arbitrary criteria and tests were employed to enforce the classifications. Peter Oborne recounts in his book, Basil D’Oliveira. Cricket and Conspiracy: The Untold Story, how would-be-cricketers were forced to undergo ‘the pencil test’, a humiliating process whereby a pencil was placed in the player’s hair: if it fell out, the player was deemed to be Coloured, but if it stayed put he was judged to be Black and was therefore denied the right to play in certain leagues.

Apartheid enforcers fatuously pointed to South African sports teams as justifications of racial segregation, rather than as glaring and unjust symptoms of it. Much in the same way as the Nazis believed in the physical superiority of the Aryan race, apartheid authorities maintained a convenient belief in the innate inferiority of the black man. South Africa had been selecting exclusively white Test cricket teams since 1889 and would only play against England, Australia and New Zealand. As Oborne put it: “For years there was a conspiracy of silence about black cricket. It suited the white authorities to believe that the blacks did not play the game. If the evidence was thrust before their eyes, they simply insisted that it was played at an abysmally low level.”
Basil D’Oliveira was a non-white cricketer who would shatter that illusion. His is a story that yokes the worlds of politics and sport together; proof that sport and sportsmen have the power to puncture ideological systems that seem ingrained in the fabric of society.

D’Oliveira was an exceptional South African cricketer. Growing up in the Bo Kaap region of Cape Town in the 1930s and 40s, D’Oliveira’s cricketing talent was reaching its pinnacle at almost exactly the same time as segregation in sport became law rather than simply custom. As Bree Bulbulia, the chairman of selectors of the South African “non-white” team of 1958 puts it: “During that period eight or nine non-white players would have made the South Africa side on merit.”

D’Oliveira was the best of the lot. Doomed to play in the ‘Coloured leagues’ while he plied his trade as a printer, D’Oliveira is said to have scored over 80 centuries in the segregated backwaters of Cape Town cricket, where pitch conditions were rarely anything other than dire, and once scored 200 in an hour.