Editorial

Abstract

As usual, the articles in this issue of JSAS embrace a range of topics, disciplines and time periods. Most of the articles address issues of identity and the shifting alliances on which group identities are founded. The cost of exclusion, seen at its most horrific in Karimakwenda’s study of women who were burned to death in the townships of South Africa during the 1980s emergency, are counterpoised, in part, by the costs of inclusion, for example in the economic costs for Jacob Zuma in finding ministerial posts for all his allies, as outlined in Naidoo’s detailed account of the expansion of the post-apartheid government machinery in South Africa. We start with three papers that look at how political identity has intersected with ‘racial’ identities in the histories of Zimbabwe and Zambia. Firstly, Trishula Patel provides an engaging narrative of how Indian identity in Rhodesia (subsequently Zimbabwe) was transformed in the course of a century, and how the fortunes of a cricket club in Salisbury (later Harare) reveal and map those transformations. Patel has been involved with the Sunrise sports club and its cricket teams since childhood and participated in a project to save and catalogue its archives. In working with these archives, she became aware that they tell a story of national and transnational identities forming, fissuring and reforming in response to changing local and global contexts. As she observes, ‘Zimbabwe’s past fits into a broader Indian Ocean history of migration, cultural transference, and hybridity’. Her focus on an Indian cricket team reveals this broader history and its significance in the ‘negotiations of postcolonial citizenship’, often hidden behind the higher-profile binary between the white minority and the black majority. Patel’s narrative identifies four moments in the construction of Indian identity in the territory that became Zimbabwe. The first generation adopted cricket as a way of signalling accommodations with the imperial power and its definitions of ‘civilisation’. However, as she observes, ‘the country had a dynamic connection with cultural forces and traditions that extended beyond ... the confines of the relationship between the metropole and the colony’. As India, Pakistan and then Sri Lanka began to emerge as independent nations, their successful cricket teams became a source of pride and global identity for a second generation of people from the South Asian sub-continent in Rhodesia. Mirroring the geopolitics of the post-1945 era, the Indian cricket club in Salisbury split along India/ Pakistan lines. After 1980, however, in the new republic of Zimbabwe, a third generation identified primarily as Africans and Zimbabweans, with several players from the Sunrise club finally being accepted by the predominantly white national team. As Patel puts it, ‘Cricket ... became a space for Indians to insert themselves into a national culture that had typically excluded non-white racial minorities from nationalist consciousness’. For the current, fourth, generation, cricket is no longer a key source of identity. The lower league matches have atrophied in the face of white flight and political upheaval, and people of South Asian descent no longer have a route into the national team.