Uganda’s Cricket Cranes, its strange past, and a season of harvest 

Until the middle 1990s, there was something cultish about it. It was like a secret society. It was about many things.
In the Idi Amin and Milton Obote II periods, it was the last refuge of an embattled Ugandan middle class and elite. 

Impoverished, beaten down, and with its wealth diminished, cricket was one of the few places where it could express itself without intrusion from the forces of Ugandan Power. Amin’s son, or Brig. Oyite Ojok’s nephew was never going to play cricket. It was incomprehensible and didn’t seem adrenalin-inducing enough with its ritualistic moves. And because their kin wouldn’t play or watch, their fathers and uncles, with their menacing guns and bodyguards, didn’t show up either. The cricket stands were a safe space.

The spectators weren’t loud. And they would wrap themselves in a cosmopolitan world that had been shattered, in their sun hats, dark glasses, and white blouses/shirts and polo shirts. White clothes and hats in Kampala’s dust seemed rather foolish, but no bigger middle finger one would give to the decay and brutality around, and go home with all fingers intact.

Think of it; weekly, lecturers at Makerere University, doctors in Mulago, senior civil servants, business people, playwrights and actors, outspoken priests, college principals and teachers, and relatives of exiles abroad were being seized by security operatives, thrown into the boots of cars, never to be seen again. The lucky families would find the bodies of their loved ones rotting in Namanve forest or floating on Lake Victoria or River Nile, partially eaten by crocodiles. 

The cricket families were drawn from this. To show up playing in all-white in this environment, couldn’t be an innocent act. Yet, as a statement made in contrast to the “darkness” and brutality out there, it was not something done deliberately. It was the product of a “felt sense”. In much the same way poetry is a repudiation of the vile prose of authority and the propaganda of an authoritarian regime.

Cricket has a complicated history. In one respect, it was the British coloniser’s game, and the sport of the Ugandan Asian community, in the period when there was a degree of segregation. Then things changed. On the margins, with the “poorer” Asians, the up-country Mzungus, and Asian communities in the then thriving industrial town of Jinja, and places like Mbale and Fort Portal, it evolved into the sport of urban multicultural society.
That now seems a very long time ago, and the history is thin or hasn’t been written. Ugandan contemporary society and of that era are as different as day and night.
Some of its politics today are from the Amin and Obote playbooks, but it is a whole new country. Its population is four times larger.  Culturally it is far more integrated, and there is greater social mobility.

It is a country reshaped by exile, war, and a vast diaspora that has further driven its globalisation. Ugandan Asians, though still fabulously wealthy, and involved in cricket, are less socially visible. They are a tiny percentage of the over 70,000 who were expelled by Field Marshal Amin in 1972 (some things don’t change though. At that time Asians accounted for 90 percent of Uganda’s revenues. At the last count, despite making up less than one percent of the population, it is reckoned they contribute up to 65 percent of Uganda’s tax revenues).

Cricket, like others, is no longer a statement sport. It is mostly a signal of the social changes above. I would never have imagined that cricket would be played in anything but white. That the helmet would be worn over ponytails or dreadlocked hair. Or, God forbid, that a cricketer would be tattooed.
Yet here we are, and all sorts of wild colours are out there. Bright red, blue, green, name it. The Cricket Cranes are bright yellow, with some cool designs on them. Cricketers’ necks look like graffiti walls. Yet, for some strange reason, I don’t miss the good old days.

Mr Onyango-Obbo is a journalist, writer and curator of the “Wall of Great Africans”. Twitter@cobbo3