Khaya Majola

Khaya Majola (17 May 1953 – 28 August 2000) was a South African cricket player and administrator.

A black African, Majola played cricket during the apartheid-era in South Africa.

Early in his playing career, he was given opportunities by the South African African Cricket Board (SAACB) to play alongside white players in exhibition matches, and to play overseas in England.

He soon rejected further offers from the SAACB, feeling that the matches were token gestures, and that they were using black players as tools to overturn the sporting boycott of apartheid South Africa, and enable the national team, consisting solely of white players, to be re-admitted into international cricket.

Khaya Majola was born on 17 May 1953 in the New Brighton township in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, the eldest of five children of Eric and Milase Majola.

His family were black Africans in apartheid South Africa; his father was of Zulu descent, while his mother had mixed heritage; Scottish and Sotho.

Both his parents worked as teachers, and were heavily involved in sports; Eric played for the national African team in rugby and cricket, and they were strong believers in the community and character-forming benefits of sport for their children.

Milase recalled Khaya playing cricket with his father as a toddler; "Khaya would walk out the front door with this bat that was bigger than him."

Although Khaya's brothers played a variety of sports, particularly association football, Khaya's father kept him focused on cricket.

He was viewed as the most talented of the Majola children, and the family would sometimes rise at 5am to bowl at Khaya.

As a pre-teen, Khaya occasionally played for his father's New Brighton Cricket Club when they were short of players.

Majola first attended Jarvis Gqamlana Lower, and then Johnson Marwanqa Higher primary schools; neither had significant sport schemes, and Majola continued to primarily develop his cricketing ability at home with his family.

By the age of 11, he was already described by the Evening Post as "a star in Port Elizabeth"; by his teenage years his performances were noteworthy more weeks than not.

He attended Cowan High School, where they played an inter-school cricket schedule against five other schools.

Khaya recalled that during his time at Cowan, most weeks he was "scoring a fifty or taking wickets," playing for both school and club.

Despite his talent and success, Khaya developed a dislike for the game, partly due to the strictness of his father with regards to his development.

Despite his antipathy towards cricket, Majola continued to thrive and took part in the John Passmore schools week, for black Africans, in 1971.

Majola represented Eastern Province, who won the tournament, but he reflected on the competition as being of a poor standard, saying that "some of the guys couldn't even play the game."

This view was mirrored by Passmore, who admitted that some of the players "had no idea about cricket."

Majola was subsequently selected for the South African Schools XI.

He was once again part of the victorious team at the Passmore tournament in 1972, and was the only batsman to score two centuries.

This decision meant that Majola played almost all of his cricket in the Howa Bowl between 1973 and 1991, a non-racial tournament organised by the South African Cricket Board of Control (SACBOC), who supported the boycott.

Matches were typically played on matting wickets in poor conditions; they were not considered to be of first-class status at the time, but were subsequently added to the records.

Majola was one of the leading players in the Howa Bowl; he played in more matches than any other player, scored the second-most runs, and took the fifth-most wickets.

Although he described himself as a cricketer, not a politician, he continued to campaign against the tokenism of black cricketers, and lobbied against the rebel tours of South Africa.

In late 1973, Majola was chosen to play for the South Africa African XI against Derrick Robins touring side, which included England Test players.

The match was an exhibition, and part of the South African government's policy of multinationalism, in which black and white sportspeople could compete against each other, representing their own 'nation'.

Although the match was given "big-billing in the media", it resulted in an easy victory for the touring side, in a single-innings match.

Majola took two wickets, and scored seven runs in the match, in which he was selected as his side's primary all-rounder.

In later life, Majola described the game as "clearly a show for the government and the white cricket board."

Nevertheless, Majola was praised in the press, and was invited by Robins to return to England with him to appear for his side during the English summer.

Before he left for England, Majola made two appearances in what became known as the Howa Bowl.

These matches have retrospectively been granted first-class cricket status, and so officially, he made his first-class debut for Eastern Province against Natal in February 1974.

He scored three runs in the first innings and none in the second, and took two wickets in the second innings, after not bowling in the first.

He left for England in mid-1974, his departure heralded by the South African African Cricket Board (SAACB) as "the first African to play overseas."

Majola spent three weeks in England, and played matches against a variety of sides, including the English counties' second elevens and both Cambridge and Oxford University cricket clubs.

When he returned from England, Majola rejected further opportunities offered to him by the SAACB, including playing in the "Double-Wicket Competition", a gimmick which featured both black and white players, and was marketed as the return of "international cricket".

Both apartheid and the sporting boycott formally ended in 1991, and the same year, Majola joined the United Cricket Board upon its foundation.

As the director of amateur cricket, he was responsible for setting up a national development programme, and sought to create pathways for black Africans to be able to play cricket at every level of the game.

He died of colon cancer, aged 47, in 2000.