A recent historical biography, Too Black to Wear Whites, tells the story of Krom Hendricks, a talented black bowler thought to be the fastest in South Africa in the 1890s, whose national cricketing career was blocked by the colonial state. The authors demonstrate how Hendricks’ exclusion from his country’s national team on a tour to England, due to his “race,” formed part of the broader history of racialisation and segregation of that period.

Cricket, and the drama that unfolded on the various pitches, in boardrooms, and clubhouses in Hendricks’ time, and over his own career, expressed the contests over racial identity and the construction of a strict racial hierarchy that would culminate in the formation of the apartheid state in the 1940s. Cricket, in other words, is an expression of broader social life and needs to be seen as such.

Today, South African cricket, like South African society, is in disarray. The results on the field have been the worst in a generation—the Proteas find themselves languishing far from the top of the test and ODI rankings (this writer does not take T20 rankings seriously). At the same time, the game’s administration is in a desperate state, rocked by various financial scandals and general mismanagement. A postcolonial state, a government of the black majority, has replaced an apartheid and colonial state. Yet the issues that plagued South African cricket and society in the time of Krom Hendricks—racism, nepotism, corruption—stubbornly persist.

While the South African cricketers struggle to perform on the pitch, Cricket South Africa has launched the Social Justice and Nation-Building (SJN) hearings to address instances of racism in cricket since unification. Many black players have given testimony at the commission. Omar Henry, Ashwell Prince, Paul Adams and others have testified to experiencing various forms of racism while playing and training with the national side.

The commission’s aims are focused mostly on individual instances of racism and discrimination. It also seeks to understand the causes of racism in order to eradicate it from the game. More ambitiously, it has set for itself the principal objective to “realise greater equality in cricket.” The commission may indeed provide a necessary platform for players to speak freely about their experiences. Whether South African cricket will embody a greater sense of equality and fairness, and whether the national team will experience a meaningful shift in its institutional culture, remains to be seen.