We are certain all West Indians are still basking in the afterglow of the amazing wins by the Men and Women’s teams in the ICC T-20 World Cup tournaments last Sunday. How sweet it is! The scintillating performances and the ultimate success our cricket teams remind us of the possibilities that lie within us as a people even though we might simply be specks on the globe.
This is not coincidental.
We were literally there at the beginning of the process now dubbed “globalisation” and have consequently had the longest experience in dealing with its demands and consequences. While through deliberate policies of “underdevelopment” in the economic domain, we were unable to shake off its stultifying effects, in matters of the mind and society, we could not be held back.
We have produced two Nobel Prize winners in the field of literature because we were forced to deal with the reality of lives twisted through chains of the mind that insisted we were “Caliban”. We produced a Nobel Prize winner in the field of Economics, who laid the foundation of development economics because of the experience in his native land.
But those are esoteric fields, not very accessible to the average West Indian which do not really resonate in their everyday lives. And this is the void that cricket filled. As the great scholar CLR James explained in his groundbreaking “Beyond the Boundary”, cricket gave expression to the aspirations of our people, who had survived slavery and indentureship, to be treated as equals.
When we stepped on the cricket field with the English at the beginning of the 20th century, we might have still been “colonials” but we were equal with the bat and ball.
That after “Independence” in the 1960s we went on to be champions of the world first in Test Cricket and then One Day Cricket, made that independence real in altering the way the rest of the world evaluated us. Our decline from that pinnacle by the 1990s had a significant debilitating effect on our national morale and not surprisingly precipitated much soul searching as to the causes.
In the new millennium there have been three panels established to inquire into and make recommendations for the revitalisation of West Indies Cricket. Two were by the West Indies Cricket Board – headed respectively by PJ Patterson (2007) and then Charles Wilkins head of WICB’s Governance Board (2012), and finally one by Caricom’s Cricket Governance Committee, Dr Keith Mitchell, Prime Minister of Grenada (2015). Remarkably, each of them recommended, in effect, the dissolution and reformation of the WICB as a prerequisite to any lasting improvement in our cricketing prospects.
And it is against this background that Captain Darren Sammy’s post-game comments, in which he took the WICB to task on several issues, must be considered. The WICB cannot bury its head in the sand and refuse to take action to reform itself. If three reports over the course of a decade, compiled by disparate, eminently qualified individuals possessing intimate knowledge of cricket combined with a great love of the game and the West Indies, can insist that such reform of the WICB is a sine qua non for any hope of changing the structural conditions that hobble us, we cannot dismiss them out of hand, as that body has done.
It is obvious that self-interest has overtaken national interest in the WICB. The impetus for change can only come from Caricom which consists of the elected, representative leaders of all the Caribbean people. The report presented by Dr Mitchell, has taken into consideration the prior two reports and as such is about as comprehensive on the desiderata of changes that must be undertaken to save our cricket, as we can have.
With the present T-20 teams carrying the albatross of the WICB on their necks, their victories are even more amazing. Congratulations again!
