South Africa's Cricket Isolation and Return

On 10 March 1970 at St George's Park in Port Elizabeth, South Africa beat Australia by 323 runs to complete a 4-0 series win. Graeme Pollock had made 274 in the Durban Test, Mike Procter had taken 26 wickets in the series, and a 24-year-old opener named Barry Richards had scored his first Test century in that last match. It is one of the strongest sides ever assembled by any country.

None of them played another official Test. Richards played four in his life. Procter played seven. Pollock, who had begun at 19 and averaged over 60, was 26 and finished. South Africa played no recognised international cricket for twenty-two years, and when the country returned in November 1991 not one member of that team was young enough to be considered.

The reason was not cricket. The board of the day fielded only white players because the law and the political settlement of the country required it, and by the late 1960s the rest of the cricket world had begun to decide that this was not something it could keep accommodating.

The player who could not be selected

The immediate trigger was a batter from Cape Town who had left the country to have a career at all.

Basil D'Oliveira was born in Cape Town in 1931, classified Cape Coloured, and captained South Africa's non-white side as a young man. Under the sporting arrangements of the time there was no route from that team into the national side, so in 1960, with help from the cricket writer John Arlott, he moved to England. He joined Worcestershire in 1964, took British citizenship, and by 1966 was playing Test cricket for England.

In the final Ashes Test of 1968 at The Oval, D'Oliveira made 158. England were due to tour South Africa that winter. He was left out of the touring party, with the selectors offering the explanation that his bowling would not be effective there — an argument nobody believed then or since, because South African officials had already made clear that his selection would create a problem.

When Tom Cartwright withdrew from the party with an injury, D'Oliveira was added. The South African prime minister, B.J. Vorster, had already stated publicly that his inclusion would be unacceptable, and after that there was nothing to negotiate. The tour was cancelled.

Two cancelled tours, and a boycott with a structure

The 1968-69 cancellation was followed by the collapse of South Africa's 1970 tour of England. Sustained public campaigning against the tour — the Stop the Seventy Tour movement, chaired by the young anti-apartheid activist Peter Hain — made the fixture politically impossible, and the tour was called off and replaced by a series against a Rest of the World side, which several South Africans played in. Ali Bacher, who had captained the 1970 team, had also been named to lead tours to England in 1970 and Australia in 1971-72. Neither happened.

The ad hoc arrangements then hardened into a system. The International Cricket Conference imposed a moratorium on tours involving South Africa in 1970. The Commonwealth's Gleneagles Agreement of 1977 committed member governments to discouraging sporting contact with South Africa, though in cricket it proved hard to enforce. From 1980 the United Nations maintained a register of sportspeople who had competed in South Africa, which functioned as public pressure rather than as law.

The effect was that official cricket stopped and unofficial cricket became a business.

Three boards for one country

It is worth being clear about what the boycott was aimed at, because "South Africa was banned" understates the situation. There was no single South African cricket authority to ban.

Cricket was administered along racial lines. The white game was run by the South African Cricket Association and later the South African Cricket Union. Non-white cricket was administered separately, principally through the South African Cricket Board of Control and the South African African Cricket Board, bodies with no access to the major grounds, the sponsorship or the international fixture list. Players in those structures had records that counted for nothing outside them.

That division is the whole point of the isolation era, and it explains why readmission could not simply be a matter of the ICC changing a vote. The story of the players who came out of the separate structures is told in the guide to South Africa's black cricket pioneers, and the modern governing arrangements are set out in the guide to Cricket South Africa's structure.

The rebel tours

Between 1982 and 1990, seven unofficial international teams toured South Africa, recruited and paid by the white board under Bacher's direction. They were played in front of full houses, broadcast domestically, and treated as international cricket by everybody inside the country and nobody outside it.

Season	Team	Led by	Consequence for the players
1981-82	England XI	Graham Gooch	Three-year international ban
1982-83	Arosa Sri Lanka	Bandula Warnapura	Lengthy bans, lifted in 1991
1982-83	West Indian XI	Lawrence Rowe	Life bans, lifted in 1989
1983-84	West Indian XI	Lawrence Rowe	Life bans, lifted in 1989
1985-86	Australian XI	Kim Hughes	Bans, with some players back by 1989
1986-87	Australian XI	Kim Hughes	Bans, with some players back by 1989
1989-90	England XI	Mike Gatting	Three-year international ban

The penalties were not applied evenly, and the pattern of that unevenness is itself revealing. The English and Australian players got three-year bans and mostly resumed their careers. The West Indians got life bans; several never played for the West Indies again and returned to communities in which the tours were regarded as a betrayal. The Sri Lankans were banned for a period so long it amounted to the end of their international careers.

For the South African public the tours were the only high-level cricket available, and for the white board they were a way of demonstrating that isolation could be worked around. The second of those arguments stopped being true in 1990.

Gatting's tour, and the point at which it stopped working

Mike Gatting's England XI arrived in the 1989-90 season, and the tour ran directly into the unbanning of the African National Congress and the release of Nelson Mandela.

Previous rebel tours had drawn organised opposition but not mass opposition. This one met demonstrations at the grounds on a scale the organisers had not anticipated, and Bacher later said as much. The tour was shortened, it lost money, and a second English tour planned for 1990-91 was abandoned. The commercial model that had sustained unofficial cricket for eight years collapsed inside a few weeks.

What replaced it was a negotiation. Bacher, who had spent the 1980s recruiting rebel tourists while also funding development cricket in the townships, began working with Steve Tshwete, the ANC's sports spokesman, on the terms under which a single South African cricket body might exist.

June and July 1991

The negotiation produced two things in the space of a month.

In June 1991 the separate boards merged into the United Cricket Board of South Africa, with Krish Mackerdhuj, who had come from the non-racial cricket structures, as its first president and Bacher as managing director. In July 1991 the ICC readmitted South Africa as a full member.

The sequence matters. Readmission followed unification rather than preceding it; the international game required a single non-racial governing body as the condition, not as an aspiration. It is also why the transformation debate that has run through South African cricket ever since begins at this point rather than in the 2000s — the policy questions covered in the guide to transformation policy are the unresolved remainder of the 1991 settlement.

Eden Gardens, and Bridgetown

The return was fast and slightly chaotic. Within four months of readmission, South Africa played a one-day international against India at Eden Gardens in Kolkata on 10 November 1991 — a fixture arranged at short notice, in front of a vast crowd, against a country whose government had been among apartheid's loudest opponents. South Africa lost by three wickets. That match and everything that followed from it are covered in the guide to the South Africa-India rivalry.

Test cricket resumed in April 1992 at Bridgetown against the West Indies, which South Africa lost by 52 runs. In between came the 1992 World Cup in Australia and New Zealand, where a side assembled from a domestic competition nobody had seen reached the semi-final and lost it to a rain regulation, a story told in full in the account of the 1992 World Cup return.

The England fixture, the one that had triggered the whole affair in 1968, resumed in the 1994 English summer. Its longer history is in the guide to the South Africa-England rivalry.

What the period cost, and what is still argued

The obvious cost is the careers. Richards, Procter, Pollock, Vintcent van der Bijl, Clive Rice, Peter Kirsten and a long list of others played the bulk of their cricket in the Currie Cup and in English county cricket, and their Test records are either tiny or non-existent. Judging them requires reading first-class figures and the testimony of the players who faced them, which is why arguments about where Richards or Pollock rank are unresolvable in the usual way.

A third cost was emigration. Players who wanted international careers took them elsewhere: Allan Lamb and Robin Smith, both South African-born, played their Test cricket for England, and a long list of others built careers in the county championship without ever being available to a national side. The Currie Cup remained a strong competition throughout the period — strong enough that county cricket recruited from it constantly — but a domestic championship played only against itself has no external calibration, which is why nobody could say with any confidence in 1991 how good the new South African side would be.

The less obvious cost is structural, and it is the one that still shapes the game. Twenty-two years of separate development meant that when unification came, one set of clubs, schools and grounds had the money, the facilities and the coaching, and the others did not. Nothing about a merger in June 1991 changed that overnight, and the country has been dealing with the consequences ever since — in selection policy, in the development pathway, and in the periodic public reckonings about who the game reaches.

There is also a live argument about the rebel tours themselves. One reading is that they prolonged apartheid's respectability by giving white South Africa the appearance of international sport. Another, which Bacher has made, is that the money and the attention they generated funded the first serious cricket development work in black communities and that the same administrators went on to deliver unity. Both things can be true, and the fact that they are is a reasonable summary of South African cricket's relationship with its own history. The wider chronology sits in the history of South African cricket and the rest of the game is on the cricket in South Africa hub.

Sources and method

This page draws on the documented record of the 1968 D'Oliveira affair, ICC decisions on South Africa's membership, the published record of the seven rebel tours and the sanctions applied to the players who took part, contemporary accounts of the 1989-90 tour, and the constitutional history of the South African boards through to the 1991 unification. Series and match results — the 1969-70 whitewash, the 1991 one-day international at Eden Gardens, the 1992 Test at Bridgetown — come from official match records. Where the historical judgement is contested, as with the rebel tours, the competing positions are given rather than resolved. Nothing on this page is computed from data held by us.