Township Cricket Development in South Africa

On 27 October 1995 a first-class match was played in Soweto. The ground was Elkah Stadium, built in 1973 with room for around eight thousand people, and the fixture put a South African side containing Hansie Cronje and Jonty Rhodes against the touring England team. A left-hander named Geoffrey Toyana made his first-class debut in it. That match remains the only first-class game the ground has staged.

It is a useful place to start, because it contains both halves of the township cricket story at once. The ground existed. The talent existed. The fixture happened once and then the first-class calendar went back to Johannesburg, Cape Town, Durban and Centurion, where it has stayed.

Township cricket in South Africa is not a development programme that began at unification in 1991. It is a competitive tradition with clubs, leagues, provincial fixtures and touring sides that predate readmission by decades, and which spent those decades entirely outside the structure the world was watching. Understanding what came after 1991 requires knowing what was already there.

Clubs, boards and the competition nobody reported

Cricket among black, coloured and Indian South Africans was organised long before anyone used the word transformation. Separate boards ran separate competitions, and in 1947 the non-white boards combined into the South African Cricket Board of Control. SACBOC ran national inter-provincial cricket across those lines, and by 1960 it had constituted itself as a genuinely non-racial national body. It governed a substantial part of South African cricket until 1976.

Its flagship inter-provincial competition was the Dadabhay Trophy. Matches were played on matting and on bare earth as often as on turf, at grounds in places such as Lenasia, south of Johannesburg, which hosted Dadabhay Trophy fixtures and representative North versus South games. SACBOC also toured. In 1958 it sent a side to Kenya under the captaincy of Basil D'Oliveira, a tour that gave several players the only representative cricket their careers would ever contain. Ben Malamba of Langa was among them.

None of this appeared in the record that mattered internationally. Wisden was recording Currie Cup matches. The men playing Dadabhay Trophy cricket were the same age, in the same country, in the same summer. The isolation and readmission of South African cricket is usually told as a story about the national side losing its fixtures. From inside SACBOC it was a story about a parallel game that had never had any.

The late 1970s brought negotiations between SACBOC and the white South African Cricket Association, producing the South African Cricket Union. The merged body absorbed the non-racial structures rather than joining them, and the strongest period of independent non-racial organisation ended. Some of the players who had run those clubs never accepted the terms, and the argument about whether that merger was a step forward or a capture has never entirely closed.

Langa: four sides, one club

Langa is Cape Town's oldest township, and it has an unusual cricketing density for a South African township — enough clubs, historically, to argue with each other. In 1976 four of those sides merged to form the Langa Cricket Club that still exists, and the club competed against the better-resourced sides of the southern suburbs through the segregated years.

That access mattered. Playing in a league that included clubs with turf wickets, nets and coaching gave Langa cricketers exposure most township clubs could not get, and the club's first team now plays in the province's top league. The wider Cape Town game, including the clubs Langa played against, is set out in the guide to cricket in Cape Town.

Langa's best-known product grew up on Rubusana Avenue. Temba Bavuma was born there in May 1990, into a family where his uncles Mongezi and Tengo Sokhanyile took him to the Langa club as a small boy and put a bat in his hands almost before he could walk. He was playing street cricket in the township and club cricket at Langa Stadium before he was eight, which is when the trajectory changed.

Elkah, Soweto, and the club that toured

Soweto's cricket sits around the ground now known as the Soweto Cricket Oval. It opened as Elkah Cricket Stadium in 1973, seats roughly eight thousand, and has staged two List A matches alongside that single first-class fixture. It was also used as a venue for the Under-19 World Cup held in South Africa in 1998, which put junior international cricket in Soweto at a point when senior international cricket was not going there.

The clubs matter more than the stadium. Soweto Cricket Club is the historic side, and Dobsonville Cricket Club grew alongside it; both have functioned as feeders, and the merged Soweto Pioneers now field several senior teams. Geoffrey Toyana came out of that structure, and in 1995 a Soweto Oval side became the first black township team from South Africa to tour England and Wales. Toyana later became the first black African to coach a South African franchise, at the Lions.

The Gauteng club scene those sides feed into, and the relationship between township clubs and the Wanderers, is covered in the guide to cricket in Gauteng.

The development officer with a car and a bag of kit

The single most consequential job in South African township and rural cricket after 1991 was not coach or selector. It was development officer: one person, a vehicle, a bag of soft balls and a list of schools.

The most famous result of that job happened in the Border region. Raymond Booi, a Border development officer setting up mini-cricket in villages around King William's Town, found a barefoot cattle-herder at Mdingi who could bowl. He lent him a pair of plimsolls, arranged a net session in King William's Town, and passed the case up to Greg Hayes, who ran the programme. Hayes bought the boy his first pair of boots and had to tell him not to wear them while herding cattle.

That boy was Makhaya Ntini, born in July 1977, who became the first black African to play Test cricket for South Africa and finished as one of the most heavily used fast bowlers the country has produced. Makhaya Ntini's career record is the single strongest argument that ever existed for funding development officers, and it is worth being blunt about the mechanism: nothing about his talent was created by the programme. The programme is the reason anyone found it.

Border's structures remain central to this. The Eastern Cape has produced a disproportionate share of South Africa's black African cricketers relative to its resources, and the reason is a longer institutional history of school and club cricket in the region rather than any recent investment.

Khaya Majola, and the week that carries his name

Khaya Majola played his cricket in the apartheid era, when there was no national side he could be picked for. He was central to the unification process that began in 1991, and he became Director of Development and then Director of Amateur Cricket at the United Cricket Board.

His method was specific. He pushed players from the development programme into the national schools week — then the Coca-Cola Week — where provincial teams were selected, and he took on the job of getting boys who had never played in that environment through its unwritten conventions as well as its cricket. Majola died in 2000. The following year the tournament was renamed the Khaya Majola Week, and it remains the country's principal Under-19 inter-provincial festival and the main shop window for schoolboy selection. How that week fits the wider school game is set out in the guide to the South African school cricket system.

Mini-cricket, hubs and RPCs: the current ladder

What exists today is a three-stage structure, and it is worth naming the stages because the terms recur constantly in South African cricket discussion.

Stage	What it is	Who it reaches
KFC Mini-Cricket	Soft-ball introductory cricket run through primary schools, sponsored by KFC since 2010	Well over a hundred thousand children a year, across all nine provinces and every affiliate union
Hubs	Hard-ball cricket for children identified at mini-cricket festivals, playing in an inter-hub league	Around seventy hubs, sited in townships and rural areas, with several thousand registered cricketers
Regional Performance Centres	The provincial performance layer that hub cricketers feed into	Selected players from the hub leagues

The scale of the first stage is genuine. Mini-cricket has put a bat in the hands of millions of South African children since the sponsorship began, and it is the largest single thing Cricket South Africa does. The hubs, by contrast, are a modest network with a small full-time coaching staff spread across the whole country, which is the pinch point everyone in the system recognises. Turning mass participation into hard-ball competence requires coaches, pitches and fixtures, and that is where the funding thins.

The governance of all of it, including how affiliate unions relate to the national body, is explained in the guide to Cricket South Africa's structure.

The scholarship, and what it does to a township club

Here is the pattern that complicates every optimistic account of township development. A boy is identified young, plays well at a hub or a club, and is offered a bursary to a traditional cricketing school. Bavuma took a scholarship to the South African College Schools at eight, and after a family move to Johannesburg he finished at St David's Marist Inanda. He is the first black African batter South Africa picked in a Test squad, and he did not learn to bat in a township after the age of eight.

The scholarship route works. It is also, functionally, a talent extraction system. The strongest young cricketer in a township club leaves it at ten or eleven, which means the club never gets a senior side built around him, never gets the coaching that follows a good player, and never becomes the thing that produces the next one. The private schools acquire the cricketers; the townships acquire an anecdote.

Nobody in South African cricket has a clean answer to this. Arguing against bursaries means arguing that a talented child should stay in a worse facility. Arguing for them accepts that township clubs remain permanently junior partners.

Fast bowlers, and the missing batters

The output has a shape, and it is not accidental. Township and rural development has produced fast bowlers in quantity — Ntini first, and later Kagiso Rabada and Lungi Ngidi among others — and specialist batters barely at all. Bavuma remains the exception rather than the start of a sequence.

The explanations offered are mostly about facilities. Bowling fast can be learned on a bad surface; it can even be encouraged by one. Batting cannot. A batter needs a true pitch, a net, throwdowns, volume of time in the middle and a coach watching the front foot, and those are precisely the things a hub with one full-time coach and a shared field cannot supply. The country's fast bowling tradition has absorbed township talent readily because the entry cost is low. Batting has not.

This is the substance behind a debate usually conducted in the language of targets rather than facilities, and the policy side of it is set out separately in the guide to South African cricket's transformation policy. The players who came through the segregated structures before any of it existed are covered in the guide to the country's black cricket pioneers.

Where it stands

Township cricket is neither the success story its sponsors describe nor the failure its critics describe. Participation is large and rising. Elite conversion is narrow and slow, and it depends heavily on children leaving the townships early. The clubs that carry the tradition — Langa, Soweto, the Border sides — survive on volunteers, and their best young players are recruited away from them by design.

What has changed since 1991 is that the ladder exists at all. What has not changed is that the top of it is still reached, in most cases, by leaving. The rest of the South African game, from the domestic season to the national teams, sits on the cricket in South Africa hub.

Sources and method

This guide rests on Cricket South Africa's published material on its mini-cricket, hub and Regional Performance Centre programmes and its reporting to parliament on transformation and development, on histories of the South African Cricket Board of Control and the non-racial competitions it ran, on club and ground records for Langa and the Soweto Cricket Oval, and on published accounts of the Border development programme that identified Makhaya Ntini. Participation figures and hub counts move year to year and are given in general terms rather than as fixed totals. Where sources disagree about the internal history of the 1970s merger between SACBOC and the white association, the disagreement is noted rather than resolved. This page is descriptive; no statistics here are computed from our own datasets.