Distribution of Rising Star Academy & Under 19 Players in Domestic Season 2018- 2019

[brmtaylor.com admin]

How do you become a member of Harare Sports Club? Is it a fairly secretive sort of thing?
https://www.newsday.co.zw/2018/10/harar ... e-cricket/ - it says here the president is David Young

Here's a great article about the demise of club life: https://mg.co.za/article/2013-05-03-00- ... ntry-clubs

[Googly]

That’s a good article. The farmers with that colonial attitude (not all of them!) have a lot to answer for. Unfortunately the white supremacists have been replaced by black ones so not much has changed. Mr Hawgood is a good friend of mine, he operates one of the few remaining dairy farms. It’s an exercise in diplomacy to keep going with constant visits by people who want free stuff as if it’s their right. I was out at Imire Game Farm the other day and Mr Travers is the sole remaining farmer from a huge white community. Interestingly he’s managed to retain his entire place, largely on the strength of his rhino breeding endeavors, he’s a living legend and has avoided land seizure by the support of the black community. They keep trying to take sections of his farm and he says if they take so much as a square inch he will walk and they can have the whole place, that makes them back off because he’s done so much over the decades.

Most memberships involve an application and you have to be seconded by a couple of long standing members, then it’s discussed and you get a response. There’s probably membership to the various sections that also probably have different voting rights. I’d hazard a guess that they have a powerful committee with influential members, both black and white, that want it to remain just as it is.

Harare South used to have a beautiful cricket ground and hosted many an international team. It’s completely shot to hell. That cultural divide between Beatrice (Harare South- English) and Chivhu (Afrikaans) was not to be sniffed at. I think there are three white families left in Chivhu- down from about 300.

[Googly]

That Marondera/wedza community is the setting for a great book called Winter Cricket that is a must read for Zimbabwe cricket lovers.

[brmtaylor.com admin]

Thanks for the info Googly. What was the cultural divide between Beatrice and Chivhu like?

[Googly]

Afrikaans vs English. That shit is real! it stems from the Boer War and the English putting the Boer families in concentration camps and wiping them out with Kitchener’s scorched earth policy.
Prejudice gets handed down the generations the world over, pathetic really.

[Googly]

You see it at the schools here to some degree. At junior school most of the kids are friendly with each other, but by the time they hit Form 2 there’s a bit of a divide, and much of that is listening to the shit their parents talk instead of being able to make up their own minds.

[brmtaylor.com admin]

Why do so few (if any?) Afrikaners play cricket in Zim now compared to the last era with the Blignauts et al?
Do Afrikaner kids get discriminated against through selection policy at age level?

[Googly]

There are none left bud. 90% bolted years ago.
The Kadoma/Kwekwe (so nice they named it twice) area was also very Afrikaans. In fact Jameson (Kadoma) was pretty much an Afrikaans school, and a damned fine school it was. Also Eaglesvale in Harare, formerly Bothashoff, was also very Afrikaans. They produced many of our national players in fact, but they were mostly English.

[Googly]

In the old days the second languages offered at O levels were Afrikaans and French. 90% of all white students chose Afrikaans, but it was removed from the syllabus many many years ago.

[brmtaylor.com admin]

These days the smart money would be learning Mandarin.

It's all very interesting. Very sad too though.

https://hararefriendlies.com - there's a few Afrikaner names there; de Wet, de Klerk, de Witt, Rinke's still floating about. So there's some level of involvement just nothing that ZC is touching.