Blood, sweat and treason

What do you do when the government murders 20,000 people from your region?

What do you do when your country is torn apart by racism, corruption, poverty and lawlessness?

What do you do when the police deliberately destroy evidence – right before your eyes – that could have helped catch those who have just carjacked and beaten you?

International cricketer Henry Olonga faced those questions squarely in 2003 when he came to the conclusion that his “beloved Zimbabwe was starting to fall apart”. Ultimately he and team captain Andy Flower decided to make a stand at the World Cup. With the eyes of global media on them, they released a protest statement and wore black armbands during their first game to commemorate, as they put it, “the death of democracy in our beloved Zimbabwe”.

Aware that they were putting their lives in danger, the two were forced into exile. Olonga fled to England and has been there ever since, unable to leave as he has no passport. There are three years to go before he qualifies for British citizenship and Zimbabwe has denied him a renewal of his existing passport.

This July Olonga released his autobiography entitled, ‘Blood, Sweat and Treason’. It is not a tell-all, which has undoubtedly cost him sales, particularly given the racism he has endured, even within the Zimbabwe national team. Neither is the book an anti-Mugabe political tract, though there is enough to make you applaud his actions as well as have sympathy for those who still adore the dictator who helped take his people out of racial subservience.

Instead, Olonga’s autobiography is an overview of his life from early childhood until now that includes enough incident to cover several lifetimes.

It started when he was four, when his mother took him back from Kenya to Zimbabwe after she found out her husband – Henry’s father – had 12 children from a previous marriage. Then, between the ages of six and 11 the new regime of Robert Mugabe set about massacring their opponents, many of whom came from the Matabeleland province in which Henry lived.

“I remember hearing one teacher telling us”, Olonga writes, “that if we heard a shot it meant that we were still alive, that we would never hear the bullet that killed us.” Grenade shutters across the windows at school were an accepted, even exciting, part of everyday life.

Olonga escaped two kidnap attempts as a child, the first aged eight on a school trip to Switzerland when a white woman who claimed to be his natural mother briefly took him. One wonders at what point it dawned on her she was unlikely to pass as having given birth to such a dark-skinned African boy.

As a teenager, he excelled at rugby and athletics (holding 18 school records), making a relatively late entry into cricket. He became Zimbabwe’s youngest ever debutant, and first black international player, in 1995 aged 18.

Injury and variable form dogged Olonga for all eight years of his career as an international cricketer. At times, like when he beat the Indians almost single-handedly with three quick wickets in the 1999 World Cup, he could be dominant. For most of the rest of the time however he struggled.

Speaking with Olonga to discuss his life and autobiography, he was refreshingly, almost disconcertingly, candid when assessing his abilities:

“I didn’t have accuracy. I just had pace…I was mediocre.” Olonga is being refreshingly self critical for a sportsman and the stats back it up, compared to contemporaries such as Australia’s Glenn McGrath then he was nowhere near as good. “I was fast and wild”, he continued, speaking with awe of the likes of Pakistan’s Wasim Akram with his “amazingly vast shoulders” and enviable height.

But it wasn’t just his precarious place in the team that increasingly bothered Olonga. From his youth he suffered from a huge sense of anticlimax after each victory, and the bigger the win and the better the performance, the deeper the sense of anticlimax awaiting him.

After what he describes as his finest moment, securing that win in the 1999 World Cup over India with three wickets, the anti-climactic low was at its worst.

Olonga describes it like this:

“I enjoyed the feelings victory brought, but…think about it: my whole life revolved around bowling a red leather ball down 20-odd yards and trying to whack some stumps out of the ground.

Other people were out there saving people if they were doctors or nurses and here I am just bowling balls…naturally when you reach the pinnacle of what you spend your life doing…and you realise you still feel a sense of OK, it feels great, but there’s got to be more I can be doing with my life…that’s when you ask the deeper questions, which is something I’ve always had to deal with”.

His was not a state of mind shared by his teammates, and he made it clear that he didn’t think less of them for that, in part perhaps because, as a committed Christian, he already felt like something of an outsider in his own dressing room.

The protest of 2003 helped change that – at last he felt like he was doing something that really mattered.

As he and Andy Flower said in their press release,

“Let history record that when we saw injustice, tyranny and oppression we were brave enough to speak against them – lest our children and their children shame us for our cowardice. May the Lord bless Zimbabwe.”

Olonga, with the minimum of fuss and none of the tub-thumping associated with many who fight for a cause, has answered the question of “What do you do when confronted with injustice?”

The question posed by his book and his life is whether we are prepared to do the same.

‘Blood, Sweat and Treason’ by Henry Olonga with Derek Clements, is published by Vision Sports Publishing Ltd.