For anyone living in Queenstown in 1970 there was no realistic prospect of seeing any part of the 24-match tour of the All Blacks rugby team. But two grade 10 boys hatched a plan, commissioned a mate to build a tandem bicycle and twisted their parents’ arms.
Barely 60km into the planned 1,600km trip, the bike broke on the first obstacle, Hobbs Hill. “An uncle in Cathcart welded it together and we carried on from there,” remembers Prof André Odendaal — a fix that says as much about him as anything he has published since.
More than 50 years later, that work has earned Odendaal international recognition. On September 2 he received the Howard Milton Award for Cricket Scholarship in Edinburgh, from The Cricket Society and the British Society of Sports History.
The award cites his “commitment to uncovering stories of those excluded” and his “lifelong dedication to giving forgotten cricketers their rightful place in history”. Odendaal calls it, more simply, “fighting erasure”.
His own path was hardly conventional. He captained Border Schools cricket at Nuffield Week, then Stellenbosch University, won a Cambridge Blue and played first-class cricket for Boland. As an undergraduate he self-published two histories, God’s Forgotten Cricketers and Cricket in Isolation — early attempts to tell stories the white cricket establishment ignored.
When he returned from Cambridge with a PhD in history, scholarship was no longer enough. “I didn’t want to sit on the fence anymore. I went looking for the struggle,” he recalls. At a protest meeting in a Soshanguve church he found “this beautiful singing”, and a space was made for him. “I just kept going.”
In cricket, that meant crossing apartheid’s sporting divide. With Queensland Cricket Club in Lenasia, he entered the nonracial cricket movement. He became the only white provincial first-class cricketer to play in the South African Cricket Board competition during apartheid — turning out for Transvaal in 1984–1985 and Western Province in 1985–1986.
His political engagement stretched beyond sport. In 1987 he joined the group of mainly Afrikaner South Africans who travelled to Dakar for talks with leaders of the then-banned ANC — one of the encounters that opened channels between white South Africans and the liberation movement before formal negotiations began.
At the University of the Western Cape (UWC), he became founding director of the Mayibuye Centre for History & Culture, set up to preserve the records of apartheid and resistance. Its multimedia archive later formed the core of the Robben Island Museum’s collections, which Odendaal also helped establish and led as founding director. In 1997 the former prison opened to the public: a closed symbol of repression turned into a place devoted to memory.
After unification, Odendaal chaired the United Cricket Board’s Transformation Monitoring Committee and drove the effort to recover the country’s missing cricket history. The “uncle” in Bloemfontein who once heard people laugh when he said he’d played cricket can now find, in print, reference to 125 tournaments involving more than 4,000 black, coloured and Indian cricketers. The book that once passed for the standard history contained one reference to black players — “an extra tour match”.
Individual authors began filling those gaps, including Odendaal with The Story of an African Game. In 2016, Cricket and Conquest opened the multi-volume History of South African Cricket Retold, drawn from decades of collaborative research. Divided Country followed. Three further volumes, together with a statistical database, are nearing completion.
Odendaal’s work extends well beyond cricket. His books on black political thought and the liberation struggle include Vukani Bantu!, The Founders and Dear Comrade President, which examined the role of ANC exiles in laying the foundations for South Africa’s constitutional settlement. Since 2021 he has been a writer-in-residence at UWC, and is now its vice-chancellor’s writer-in-residence.
Mogamad Allie, himself a sports historian, says the award is well deserved. “He has been phenomenal in setting the record straight and redressing the massive imbalance in the coverage of the complete history of South African cricket.”
Odendaal has spent 50 years crossing lines other people thought were fixed. The tandem journey never quite ended.
