ABSTRACT
In the West Indies, "knowing cricket" is indivisible from a consciousness of history, colonialism, race politics, and socioeconomic conditions. It was in this spirit that West Indies cricket delivered its stinging indictment of South Africa's white team during the 1996 World Cup. Within South African culture, cricket has come to occupy a signal position. The achievements of these players and the traditions of their various clubs and provinces demonstrate that nonracial cricket is of an old vintage. The symbolic Basil D'Oliveira has been reclaimed in toto, transformed from metaphor and metonym of nonracial cricket into icon of an egalitarian postapartheid sport. In negotiating between apartheid and postapartheid, the transformation of the antagonistic South African Cricket Board and South African Cricket Union into the United Cricket Board of South Africa, the nation's cricketing community is clearly privileging only one version of the past.
