Played Out on the Edges of the Cricket Boundary: The History of an Indian Cricket Team in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe, 1934–1995

Abstract

Cricket was a colonial export that permeated throughout most of the British Empire, including Zimbabwe. One of the colonised groups to take up cricket was the Indian migrant community in Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe. This article examines the history of the community’s sports club and its cricket players, exploring the evolution of the team from its espousal of settler-colonial values in the self-governing colony of Southern Rhodesia, to the claiming of an Indian identity during the years of the Central African Federation, and finally towards an integration with independent Zimbabwe’s national sporting culture. It also argues that Indian representation in first-class cricket meant that international matches could become a space for Indian-Zimbabwean cricketing fans to express either national or transnational identities in the teams they chose to support, transgressing the limits of a single national identity. But just as Indians entered the country’s consciousness as citizens of the post-colonial state, the brief moment that had allowed them space in a multiracial civic society was cut off. In the conflict between black and white, Indians were once again rendered invisible.