Cricket, carnival and street culture in the Caribbean

Abstract

Taking its inspiration from C.L.R.James’s classic Beyond a Boundary, serious discussion of the relationship between cricket and society in the Caribbean has focused on three closely connected issues.1 First, and most straightforwardly, it has dwelt on the way in which the changing racial and class composition of West Indian teams since 1900 (the year of the first West Indian tour to England) has mirrored with almost preternatural precision the evolution of West Indian society over the same period, as non-white cricketers came first to challenge and eventually to overthrow the almost complete domination of West Indian cricket by members of the white plantocracy that had obtained before 1914 and which, in a modified but still perceptible form, continued into the 1950s; in this perspective, the crucial event is the appointment, in 1960, of Frank Worrell as the first non-white captain of the West Indian Test team, thus consecrating the black cricketing supremacy that had existed de facto since the mid-1940s at exactly the same time that the West Indies were painfully and with much uncertainty, attaining to political independence. Secondly, much attention has been devoted to the manner in which the West Indies’ growing prowess in international cricket has not merely reflected but may actively have stimulated the rise of nationalist (and, to some extent, racial) selfconsciousness in the British Caribbean. It was, some have argued, only when they saw their cricket team locked in combat with that of their English colonial masters that Jamaicans, Barbadians, Trinidadians and Guyanese came to see themselves as West Indians possessing a common historical, cultural and political identity transcending the insularity, isolation and inter-territorial competitiveness that many West Indians see as among the most baleful legacies of British colonialism in the Caribbean. In this view, the key date is without question 1950, the year that, to the accompaniment of steel bands, calypsos and mass enthusiasm among the newly installed West Indian migrant population, the West Indies defeated England in England for the first time, thanks to the formidable batting of the ‘three Ws’, Worrell, Weekes and Walcott, and to the scarcely credible bowling feats of ‘those two little pals of mine, Ramadhim and Valentine’,2 thereby emerging as a world cricketing power on a par with England, Australia and South Africa. It was as though-to use an image that a number of West Indian writers have applied to the colonial context3-Prospero had taught Caliban the use of bat and ball only to find himself comprehensively ‘out-magicked’ by his upstart colonial pupil, thus betraying on the cricket field the vulnerability and fallibility that were becoming more and more evident in his governance of the West Indies as a whole: after 1950, it is argued, the ‘mother country’ would never be quite the same again in West Indian eyes.