Michael Holding has said that he is willing to give Quinton de Kock the benefit of the doubt after the South Africa wicketkeeper initially refused to take a knee alongside his team-mates, but Holding believes that with the country’s history the message sent by kneeling together as a diverse team is more important than ever.
Cricket’s response to tackling racism came under scrutiny again last week when De Kock refused to take a knee before South Africa’s T20 World Cup match against West Indies.
De Kock, 28, later issued an apology and joined his team-mates in making the antiracism gesture before their subsequent match, against Sri Lanka, but the row revealed a game still divided over supporting the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement.
“I am hoping that Quinton de Kock just made a dumb mistake and that it doesn’t reflect on what he actually thinks,” Holding, the former West Indies fast bowler, told The Times.
“This is a country that has had a history of apartheid. When [Nelson] Mandela came into power, he basically said, ‘Listen, we know a lot of bad things have happened but we just want our South Africa to move forward as one. We are not looking for any retribution, we just want to move forward.’
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“With that happening in that country, it is difficult for me to understand, if you believe in that philosophy, that you would not want to take the knee and show your support. So I hope he made a silly mistake and realised the folly of his position.
“This is not anything about politics, I heard so many people in South Africa saying that Black Lives Matter is a Marxist thing and that kind of rubbish. This is about humanity, and if you can’t do that [take a knee] to show that you believe we are all equal human beings, and this just signifies your support, then I don’t know what to believe.”
Cricket is still a long way from achieving equality and there is still a lot to do to demonstrate that the sport really is a “game for all”. However, Holding, 67, believes it is not a cricket problem but a societal one, and that teaching about the past, even the uncomfortable bits, is the key to moving forward.
“There is a lot still to do,” he said. “Education is key. People need to know where racism started and why it started. Cricket needs to be more open with their thought processes and the way they run the game, but I don’t like to focus too much on a particular sport.
“I like to focus on society, if we can change society we don’t need to focus on any sport.”
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It is that belief that prompted him to write the book Why We Kneel, How We Rise, which looks at the history of the BLM movement, including powerful testimonies from other leading black sportsmen and women. The book has now been shortlisted for the William Hill sports book of the year.
“People need to accept and recognise the past,” Holding said. “This is not my opinion. The facts are there, racism started because one set of people needed to subjugate another set of people to make themselves rich and better off. So they went as far as scientists coming up with the idea of a superior race using nonsense such as size of skulls, which today people know is quack.
“We need to recognise that was rubbish and if we can recognise where it came from [we can] move on from that. But in order to perpetuate that rubbish, all the great things that people of colour had done had to be hidden. This is what I try to explain in my book.
“People need to teach not just what is comfortable, we need to have uncomfortable conversations so we can put it behind us. Just like Mandela, we know this history wasn’t good and wasn’t right and we can have a better future.”
Holding has recently announced his retirement from the commentary box after 31 years and will step away from cricket almost completely, having become disillusioned with the way the game is heading.
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“I will miss the people, I am missing already the fact I won’t see all the good people I have worked with,” he said, “but I won’t miss the game. That game is not what I used to play and the administration and management of what I used to play is no longer the game I played. The game has made me what I am is now destroying me. I am very disappointed.”
