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Zimbabwe is not a normal country, and that is why we should not tour there
Alex Parker, Sunday Times (SA)
August 22, 2007

http://www.suntimes.co.za/News/Article.aspx?id=544846

Cricket South Africa must be feeling terribly proud of themselves.

The South African A side has just pounded a Zimbabwean XI into the Mashonaland dust.

A South African team containing Morne van Wyk, Charl Langeveldt, Andre Nel, Andrew Hall and Boeta Dippenaar, nogal.

How pleased they must be at their side's victory - by the margin of an innings and 219 runs.

What a magnificent performance by some of our country's best cricketers.

How marvellous to have such fine relations with our goodly neighbour.

It was the Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe who, many years ago, said that cricket was a great sport because it civilised people.

Evidently Mugabe hasn't played much cricket.

His people starve, they are beaten and cowed and in desperation they are flooding into this country, hundreds by the day; anything to escape the hunger and the humiliation and the despair.

The great anti-apartheid war cry was that there should be no normal sport in an abnormal society.

Clearly anti-apartheid struggle veterans didn't quite mean what they said at the time.

Perhaps, if they'd been honest, they would have said that there can be "no normal sport in abnormal colonial society but there can be normal sport in brutally abnormal post-colonial society".

Ag ja, but it doesn't quite roll off the tongue, does it?

Perhaps that's why they simplified it. So the white cricketing nations would get the point.

Well, they did.

Australia and England and New Zealand got the point. They supported the South African isolation fully.

They understood when they saw the protests at Trafalgar Square outside South Africa House. They got it.

And they still do. It's just that they seem to be on their own these days.

The ICC's shameful silence about a painfully abnormal society is evidently not driven by logic, but at least in part by some playground- level post-colonial chippiness on the part of the South Africans.

Following the inviolable logic of the "no normal sport in abnormal society" maxim, South Africa A should not have been wasting their time playing the second-rate cricketing representative of a nation being starved to death by the self- importance of a few megalo- maniacs.

But logic goes out the window when matters of race crop up.

The ICC and CSA are making it very clear how they feel about all this.

They, in Times New Roman bold print, are saying that black dictators starving black people is okay.

Black people don't mind being disenfranchised and robbed by other black people.

A black man ruining a black nation is fine by us.

How appallingly shaming it is that it's only old England and her cronies that continue, quietly, to apply the very mantra that helped free us here in South Africa.

Oh, how quickly we forget.

How duplicitous of our cricketing leaders to sell our friends and neighbours in Zimbabwe down the Limpopo because of something as ephemeral as a chip on our post- colonial shoulders and as banal as TV contracts.

Such expedience was unacceptable in the fight against apartheid, and it's unacceptable today.

Those with vested interests will accuse people of racism and they will accuse people of double standards and they will muddy the water with inane chuntering about contractual obligations.

But those of us capable of independent thought know one thing to be absolutely true: next time Zimbabwe A must come to us.

We are free - in part because when we said "no normal sport in abnormal society", we meant it.

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