To knee or not to knee … the big question in sport

On Thursday afternoon, as South Africans fretted about whether the next stage of load-shedding will be two, three, four or, hopefully, an “exit stage left” for those stilldodgy Eskom officials fighting the bad fight, far too many of our country folk were getting themselves into a lather about a show of power of another kind in a country far, far away.

The power of the knee and the raised fist, either on their own or a combination of the two, can make grown men and women (also either on their own or a combination of the two) quiver with rage, to fall on bended knees and plead to their gods to strike down with fury those who dare to, er, take the knee against racism.

As the deadline for this column was before the start of play in the first Test between the West indies and SA in St Lucia on Thursday, I have no numbers on how many of the visiting team kneed or raised a fist in solidarity with the stand against racism, nor if any just stood to attention to show their respect for the campaign if they feel “uncomfortable” in making a gesture.

It is the source of that sense of being uncomfortable, that need to be seen to be doing something and nothing at the same time, that makes me uncomfortable. Who would they be doing nothing for? Well, for those who continue to shout “shut up and play” and “keep politics out of sport”.

They do it to avoid the maelstrom of abuse on social media, to appease those members of their families and their group of friends, and their friends’ friends who continue to push back against the notion of institutionalised racism in sport and society.

The ones who talk about “them” and “those days”. The ones who hanker after a dark past that gets lighter as the years amble on. The ones who refuse to look at their actions, their words and their motives. They do it to avoid the discomfort of the racists who booed the England football team before they played Romania for taking the knee. That would be England fans booing their own players, their countrymen, for daring to continue to shine a spotlight on racism. As Barney Ronay wrote in the Guardian, it is cowardly to suggest that the booing was about keeping politics out of sport.

“Romania’s players agreed to take the knee for the first time at the Riverside Stadium as a gesture of solidarity with their

English hosts,” wrote Ronay. “As loud, angry boos rang out around the ground the Romanians must have wondered what they’d stumbled into here. What kind of weird, contorted, backwards kind of country is this England anyway? Didn’t they used to be someone?

“Welcome to England 2021. Divided, belligerent, set against itself — and reduced now by the formalities of a football match to debating the idea of ‘Englishness’ until it falls apart at the seams.”

Sound familiar? The debate on what it means to be a South African has more seams than Frankenstein, a stitchedtogether cliched confusion of ubuntu with realities swept under a carpet of convenience.

But back to England, where Ollie Robinson, the England bowler, has been put on suspension pending an investigation into tweets he sent some years back that had more than just a twitch of racism about them. Two separate stories in The Telegraph on Thursday morning bemoaned “cancel culture”, one using the antics of the 1974 British and Irish Lions as an example.

This as British politicians said the England Cricket Board had gone “over the top” and “should think again”. That would be politicians getting involved in sport to keep politics out of sport. One Conservative MP said that taking the knee was the same as doing the Nazi salute.

There have been some, suggests the Guardian’s Marina Hyde, who say that we “need to listen” to the message those who boo the footballers are trying to put across.

It’s the same message that those who will tweet themselves into a froth about the Proteas taking a knee are making — that racism should not be heard nor spoken about. Those who cannot comprehend the problem, who cannot understand the need for a knee, should perhaps consider that the problem is not with the players but with them.

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