Cricket, Black Cats and Black Lackeys

The Caribbean Is One Nation.

                                                             The Black Cats Verses the Black Lackeys


By Pachamama

We watch a boring cricket test match as the cultural dead-endedness of Caribbean societies is demonstrated through cricket. Cricket as a cultural expression of the British was never going to be susceptible to the radical transformation, in the Caribbean, it faced after the cultural revolution in North American, giving them baseball. For the Blacks with White masks at the WICBC and amongst the elites in the Caribbean are even more protective of this traditional British game than even the very British themselves.  

Former players, administrators and newly minted Black lackeys get to trot out their knighthoods when cricket is playing. For them it is in the service of Queen and Empire that a nonsense of a rule could prevent Sunil Narine, the world's top spinner, from playing for the West Indies but there is no problem for Corey Anderson, who was at the same IPL semi-finals, to be playing for the Black Cats. So a Black Cat can play while a West Indian player is to be sanctioned by the over-zealous plantation overseers of cricket in the West Indies. The WICB(C) will allow an Englishman to be a third empire. A man who has a personal interest in promoting English cricket. So West Indies bowlers could be outing people and all the marginal decisions go against us. All this for the love of pound and crown by Black and Indian Caribbean lackeys from Jamaica to Georgetown!  

Nowhere in the world are people particularly interested in test cricket. And it must be allowed to meet its long awaited death. Nobody goes to watch it. TV audiences are never very impressive. It cannot attract pay-per-view revenues. The marketers at the WICB(C) must be infantile to allow such a strategy to take root. So much so that even when test cricket is aired free of cost only the diehards show any sustained interest. And this is the strategic vision a backward Board can now come up with. The brains cannot be on the Board! What would it take for Caribbean peoples to run these nutters out of town, absent their heads? 

When the West Indies were ruling the roost and given that they used to like to call us calypso cricketers we should have driven the dagger into its very heart by elevating the shorter form of the game and making the Caribbean the centre of world cricket but we lacked the 'balls', the creativity. Instead, we are now to be left in amazement that the WICB(C) has issued a directive that test cricket is to be their central or strategic focus. In response we want to tell them that within 20 years this game will be dead and may it rest in peace. This is the kind of underdevelopment you get when donkeys are left to lead lions. 

It is alright to pelt in baseball but in cricket we are to be forever mindful of the feeling of massa. Humans are more disposed to pelting than bowling. The bureaucratic fools at the WICB(C) will proceed to pick a team of bowlers two of whom have a checkered past, allegedly, for not straightening their arms on delivery of the much touted doosra. But everybody else in cricket bends the arm more pronouncedly on its delivery. So why target our wicket-takers? This is just the latest set of abuse Caribbean people have suffered at the hands of the international masters of this colonial game. Remember the front foot rule. What ever the new demands are from the ICC ( International Cricket Conference) this group of Black lackeys on the WICB(C) will supinely comply. In fact, they will seek to outdo all others in their obeisance to massa. Only the structure of a slave society, without physical chains, can properly explain this engrained behavior. 

But the cricket culture in the Caribbean is more complex. It is only in recent times that the sons and daughters of former slaves populated the highest positions on the Board and the captaincy. Before this the colonial masters had handed down the reigns to people like Peter Short, John (George) Challenor, Camacho, Jeffrey Stoymeyer and a wider cadre of English, Portugese and Indian elites well vested in the patronage derived from empire's continuation. These were and are an interconnected clique of left-behind, cultural, warriors in all the (former) British colonies of the Caribbean. So when a Lloyd, a Richards or a Worrell would grind the English into the ground Black lackeys in high places would be begging for mercy for the White people, their friends, the gentlemanly types, who would tolerate them long enough for a cup of tea (toy). It is as if their friendship with Englishmen and other White people is more important that regional unity, self-determination and so on. Maybe it is! 

Tony Cozier is maybe the sole survivor of these moral managers of the Black lackeys. Cozier himself, nearly up to the turn of the 21st century, was running a cricket club in Barbados which was dominated by Whites – Wanderers. In a 98% Black population. And yet this bastard gets a pass to continue as some authority on West Indies cricket without even an investigation into these involvements. This is the man the West Indies present to the world. A man who pretends to speak for us.  

Now that White people from New Zealand are in the Caribbean proudly calling themselves Black Cats we hope that this is a good time, it never is, to talk about race, racism, colourism, crypto-racism, classism, imperialism and the legacy of Anglo-American cultural domination which still acts to bestow privilege on some and maintains a hideous legacy for most. These are the truths that people here do not want us to speak about. They must know, for certainty, that as long as this here writer has breath the echoing of the truism that our region still suffers from White colonial exploitation, shall never cease. Take that!

Pachamama  is a social commentator.