Brief encounter.. the sequel - Croft and South Africa (29 November 1998)

29 November 1998

Brief encounter.. the sequel - Croft and South Africa

By Peter Mitchell

Fifteen years ago, West Indies cricket 'rebel' Colin Croft was thrown off a whites-only train in South Africa. One passenger, a middle-aged white man, came to his aid. Last week, the pair were reunited.

THE marketing men of South African tourism are fond of boasting that their country is a land of contrasts. Colin Croft, the legendary West Indies fast bowler, found out just how true that is when he returned last week to Cape Town for the first time since 1983.

Exactly 15 years ago tomorrow, Croft made front-page news throughout South Africa when, as a member of the 'rebel' West Indies team, he was kicked off a whites-only carriage of a Cape Town train because of the colour of his skin. To add spice to the story, a white fellow-passenger remonstrated with the conductor and accompanied Croft for the rest of their journey in the third-class carriage reserved for 'non-whites'.

The incident caused huge embarrassment to the apartheid government of the time, who were keen to counter the international sports boycott of the country by encouraging rebel tours. Apologies were issued, but Croft's belief that politics and sport should not be mixed had been severely tested.

Back in South Africa to write and commentate on the West Indies' first official tour of the country, Croft took the opportunity to relive the train journey from Cape Town to Newlands to experience a microcosm of the change that has taken place since the dismantling of apartheid. With the help of The Sunday Telegraph, he had even tracked down his white travelling companion of 15 years ago, Raymond Roos.

The reunion of Croft and Roos provided an instant reminder of just how unlikely their original meeting had been - and not just because of their skin colours. The giant Croft, casually athletic and still the epitome of Caribbean cool at 45, dwarfed Roos, now 72 and looking rather stiff in his cricket club blazer and tie. They shook hands. "Mr Croft, I never thought this would happen. After 15 years. . .this is beautiful," said Roos and the two men, worlds apart but thrown together by a quirk of a reviled political system, headed for their train.

Cape Town station provided the first stark contrast. Gone were the sterile surroundings so typical of an authoritarian state. In their place was all the bustle and vibrancy of a developing country - ethnic music, fruit vendors, flower-sellers, sprawling stalls of curios, fabrics, electrical goods.

"I don't recognise this at all. It was nothing like this. It's all very, very positive," said Croft, as he bantered with the vendors and marvelled at how much his US dollars could buy.

Roos, a retired printer had, like so many other Capetonians, warned that the trains were not safe but, while the carriages were shabbier and seedier than they had once been, there seemed little threat as the two took up the seats they had occupied 15 years before. It would, of course, be a brave man who took on the 6ft 5in Croft, though that did not save him from a mugging of a political kind in 1983.

"I just got on the train that day and sat down," said Croft. "I had no idea trains were segregated -it never came into my mind. I felt it was normal."

Roos took up the story: "Colin sat down opposite me. I didn't know him at all. To me he was just a person. We started talking about where he came from and about West Indian cricket when, a kilometre outside of Cape Town station, here came this little conductor. He was white, with scruffy hair, brown uniform, cap on his head. . . . He told Colin to move because he was black.

"I thought: 'No, wait a minute, as a Christian one can't allow these things'. I felt like punching him. In those days it wasn't normal for black people to be thrown out of a whites-only carriage; by then things had started to change. You had to negotiate with a person, ask him if he didn't mind. But this conductor was a straight chuck-out.

"It was ignorance on his part more than anything else. The system was there but you could get around it - that's where human dignity comes into it. So I elected to stay with Colin and we both got off at the next station, Woodstock, and got into a third-class carriage, where there weren't any comfortable seats, just benches.

"Now the poor conductor didn't know what to do with me and there was a bit of apprehension from the other people in the carriage, but it was fine and they left us alone."

Croft says he felt neither angry nor humiliated by the incident. "I think the conductor was just doing his job," he said. "Perhaps he could have been a little bit flexible, but he didn't have to be. In his eyes I was just a black man. He did what he was supposed to do. It could have been my fault, too. I should have been reading the 'Whites Only' signs, but not being accustomed to that sort of stuff I didn't worry about it."

At least the 'Whites Only' signs at Newlands Cricket Ground had disappeared by then. "But, you never heard about that," said Croft, who was banned for life by the West Indies for going on the tour. "A lot of black people came to see our games, but the press never reported that. After the tour, I just went to Florida, went to university, did my own thing, because I can't deal with hypocrisy.

"I never considered myself a rebel. I was prepared to go against the boycott because of one man, Ali Bacher. He said he was trying to get normal sport in an abnormal society and that was good enough for me. I'm not into politics - I don't even vote in my own country - but that was naivety on my part. But I will say this: in retrospect, coming out here in 1983 did some good because, if nothing else, it showed that it's very difficult to have normal sport in an abnormal society."

Two years later Croft, who was paid about US$30,000 for the tour, wrote to the United Nations and apologised, saying that his belief that sport and politics should not be mixed had been "somewhat blind". In 1986 his name was removed from the blacklist of people with sporting contacts with South Africa.

All of that is water under the bridge for him now. "Fifteen years is a long time and things have changed in South Africa - and they've changed beautifully," said Croft. "I know people talk about the violence and the crime, but there's no developing country that doesn't have crime. The incident with Pat Rousseau [the president of the West Indies Cricket Board] being hijacked in Soweto was unfortunate, but it could easily have happened in Jamaica."

In South Africa things are seldom entirely as they appear. There was even an extraordinary twist to the reunion with Raymond Roos. Croft remained diplomatically silent, but was noticeably uneasy when he discovered that in the intervening years Roos had joined the National Party, the party that invented apartheid and governed the country for 46 years, and is now an active campaigner against Nelson Mandela's ANC.

"We are fighting their absolute incompetence and corruption," said Roos. "They say themselves that they were taken out of the bush and asked to govern a country. And it's very difficult for them. There is so much corruption now. Nothing is healthier now than it was in the past. They've made racism illegal but now there's affirmative action [positive discrimination]. That is entrenched in the law, just as apartheid was. The biggest mistake the previous government ever made was to entrench apartheid in law. We are deeply sorry for that."

Fifteen years ago it was members of the same party apologising to Croft for his experience on the railways. This time his journey was incident-free, but as the train pulled in at Newlands station there was one more reminder that this was not the South Africa of 1983.

The white conductor, an Afrikaner called Willie van Zyl who admitted he ejected blacks from whites-only carriages in the apartheid years, approached Croft, shook him by the hand and said: "It's a pleasure to meet you. And I hope your team win all their Tests." A land of contrasts indeed.

Source :: Electronic Telegraph (https://www.telegraph.co.uk)