I was, to tell the whole truth, affrighted by the Lara-Hooper and Walsh, wild-cat strike in cricket. I still am.

Maybe I had allowed myself to think that there could be a football strike in England, or a Basketball lock-out in the USA. But there couldn't be a wildcat strike in cricket in the West Indies. By no means. The cricketers understood, more than most that cricket engaged the innermost passions of being West Indian.

Maybe I wasn't convinced about my own argument raised in these columns, that capitalist values were replacing sporting values the world over. Or even though persuaded about my argument I wanted to see West Indies cricket as the beacon of light amidst the encircling gloom. Not so at all. I got a rude awakening.

Get me clear. West Indies cricket had been a champion in the struggle against apartheid. When other countries, which shall remain nameless but obvious, were championing the cause of "constructive engagement" with apartheid in cricket, the West Indies stood firm by the sporting ban. Andy Roberts of Antigua was the first West Indies cricketer to refuse a handsome monetary offer to play cricket in South Africa. I felt that directly or indirectly all that we had done here to enlighten people about the struggle in South Africa, and its pivotal role in the entire Black struggle had borne fruit. When Vivian Richards, refused $1 million US to play cricket in apartheid South Africa, I felt that as the son of poor parents from tiny Antigua and Barbuda, and a citizen of the Caribbean, Vivian Alexander Richards, like Anderson Montgomery Roberts before him, had made an imperishable statement, that not by money alone do people live, but by their faith in human freedom. Freedom as the free and full development of the human personality freed from race, class and gender domination.

How comes it now that on the first tour of a West Indian cricket team to a free South Africa, where the great Nelson Mandela rules, the tour was beginning in utter disgrace, a wild-cat strike over, not present, but future fees. It seemed to me that the entire West Indies team, Manager Clive Lloyd, former captain Courtney Walsh, all lacked a sense of occasion, a sense of history, a sense of the defining role of cricket in a Caribbean civilisation.

It seemed to me, that our alienation had reached so far, that nothing, just nothing mattered but money. All else was subordinate to Mammon. The conclusion was inescapable, which ever way I looked at it.

I tried to see the players point of view. They had to earn as much as they could, because cricket and their playing days was the height of their earning power. The players had every right to use their power to get their just due and the most that was due. I had and have no problem with that at all. But there had to be decorum, generosity, that is, the respect of equal for equal. All this was lacking in the players in this squalid dispute.

But did not the Manager, Clive Lloyd, on tour with the West Indies team in Bangladesh know that this storm over fees for the upcoming tour was brewing. If so, what did he do? If nothing then this is more than ordinary delinquence. Did he inform the Board? Apparently not.

Is it possible that Captain and Vice-Captain could be planning to take unprecedented wild-cat strike action, and the Manager, not know? I think not. He would certainly have known of their travel plans, that they were not proceeding to South Africa but journeying to London. Did he seek to persuade that a wild-cat strike, in view of the first tour to South Africa was in itself a disaster. Apparently he did. Apparently too not even Lloyd is respected when heedless action has become a mind-set among alienated and rootless men loyal only to money.

I wondered to myself if it was I alone who had put this great store by the West Indies cricket team touring South Africa for the first time after apartheid had been abolished by negotiation, thus avoiding a racial civil war. Cricket, and West Indies had played some part, however small or great, in bringing about this reality. Had this disappeared from the consciousness of the team and the administrators in the Players Union? Holford must know better. Has reason fled to brutish beast in the alienated West Indies, too long dispossessed?

For me, the West Indies tour of South Africa had a particular significance.

I do not have any illusions about South Africa. The whites will not yield economic power there, without a further struggle. For now, reconciliation is a necessary respite, before the next stage. I applaud Nelson Mandela's Herculean efforts in this regard. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, for all its short-comings, was a most significant innovation not only in South African history, but in World history. The primacy given to knowing the truth, in place of punishment and endless vendettas, was to me a restoration of nobility in human conduct, and affirmed that nobility of conduct is definitely not limited to a class of cultivated human beings at the expense of the many, but can be the common characteristic of human beings in mass civilisation. The poor who had suffered unspeakable crimes at the hands of a white monster state, were asked to know the truth, and in knowing, forgive, without forgetting. That is nobility of spirit, for sure.

This probably sounds a bit idealistic. Let me be more practical. The hearings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission allowed the black victims of apartheid's brutal racism - racism is always brutal since it assaults both the physical and spiritual being of the victim - to tell their stories of ghastly torture and humiliation in public. This helped the country to heal and opened the eyes of many whites, still hard-headed in their racism, to the brutalities of apartheid.

The amnesty process, while it allowed many of the worst criminals to escape punishment, allowed the families of the dead victims to know exactly what happened, in cases so numerous, that no court system could have handled them, and completed them in less than a decade! And not a few would still have escaped for want of compelling evidence beyond all reasonable doubt.

Further the process of helping victims with scholarships and other aid, is applying resources not to incarcerating the guilty, but to helping the victims to overcome the degradations of apartheid. The expenditure was not on the criminal, in expensive dramas of litigation, but on the victim. It was novel. Significantly novel.

Nor do I wish to leave the impression that I see the new South Africa through the proverbial rose tinted glasses. I know that violent crime is as much a reality in South Africa today as it was in the bad old days before 1994 - but far more widely decried by the whites now, as a means to prove that blacks cannot govern.

The murder rate in South Africa is about seven times that of the United States - which itself has one of the highest in the world. Car-jacking, which can be murderous, is notoriously common in South Africa, sometimes leading to homicides. There were 8,000 car jackings in and around Johannesburg alone in 1997. Some say, that reported rapes and unreported rapes have reached epidemic proportions. Organised crime, carried out by international crime syndicates, and rooted in criminal enterprises established during the days of apartheid, and condoned by its officials for the most part, is on the increase. While domestic violence, lubricated by alcohol, is rampant. The routine brutalities of apartheid for 50 years, could not and cannot be eliminated by a mere transfer of political power, without redistribution to undo excess.

With the abolition of the pass laws and influx controls, suburban homes and banks are vulnerable targets for a new type of professional robber - probably ANC military cadres without work now, or apartheid's military men from the repressive past, and no doubt both. As Mandela himself put it recently: "What is happening now with liberation is that criminals [who plagued the black townships] have also been liberated to move in white areas."

At any rate, the Crime Information Centre in South Africa counted 497 bank robberies in 1997. And these were of modern banks, with highly sophisticated security systems. And these 497 bank robberies in '97 did not include what are called cash-in-transit heists, which often occur in broad daylight in busy streets.

On top of all that there are squatter communities with poverty-stricken migrants from the countryside and the rest of Africa coming to the "new heaven" who create this "hell" ringing the cities, which become, in time, nurseries of violence and crime.

It is obvious then that I have no illusions about the new South Africa. And it ought to be clear, that I am aware that armed struggle is not as cathartic as Fanon held. Violence does not always cleanse. It leaves a residue of more violence not as liberation, but as crime. Re-integrating into society thousands of men who have learnt nothing but to kill in combat, is open to no easy solution. And worse so, where wealth is in the hands of a small minority. Until distribution undo excess and each man have enough, then social decay will contest with reconstruction.

But in that context I see sports as having a particularly important role to play. Rugby gives the white South Africans a sense of their own rugged, individual power. Football is the game of black South Africans, with its moments of flair, even panache, amidst the regular 90 minute defensive routine. Cricket, pits the races against each other in intense rivalry when it is the West Indies, and allows for all sorts of vicarious resolutions in the mind, in victory or defeat. Each race comes to realise the high quality of the other, in victory or defeat, and comes to a new recognition and respect, one for the other.

Cricket too, by its sheer length, over five days, is a particular and peculiar drama, unequalled by any other 90 minute sport. The vagaries of life are reflected, and it allows for daily and continuous debate, leaving room for the entirely unexpected and the unpredictable, even the fortuitous. Many forces come into play, aggression, patience, tact, grace under pressure, even dejection followed by delight, above all, a sense of style, style that ennobles and lifts and uplifts beyond the ordinary hum-drum life in a squatter community or a township.

All this and more I saw coming after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission as adding to the healing process in post-apartheid South Africa, in this West Indian tour of a new South Africa, freed from racial minority brutish power.

Do you think I see too much in sport or in cricket? OK, you think so, and you are quite entitled to your opinion. But watch this. Here is Chris Searle an English intellectual of high quality. Searle wrote: "There is no doubt that for some English and Australian cricket experts, sunk into the conservative traditions of the sport, the prospect of an exceptionally fast Caribbean man with a cricket ball carries the same threat as a rebellious, anti-imperial black man with a gun. They want him suppressed, disarmed - he fits nowhere into their rules and ways of the game [since often they have no counter-punch] and only challenges them." They hate to be challenged especially in their own creation - cricket!

If even you are not a cricket follower, everybody knows the official efforts that have been made to "disarm" the West Indies fast bowlers, one bouncer per over, 15 overs per hour, and all sorts of interpretations as to what constitute intimidatory bowling. The sissyfying of the game is well under way. However South Africa and West Indies is a very different story.

For, a South Africa vs West Indies series, puts fast men against men. Allan Donald against Ambrose, etc. etc. What a contest. Lara vs Donald. Cullinan and Kirsten vs Ambrose and Walsh and McLean. South African fielding against West Indian power and placement. And for my money, the derring-do of Philo Wallace against Allen Donald. What effect would such a contest, freed from needless controversy, have had on South Africa. But now we have had this needless controversy throwing a damper over everything. Heedless men, alienated from all causes, acting heedlessly in the service of Mammon, and rebellion without a cause.

I am reminded that three West Indians Hall, Favier and Thomas writing on apartheid and West Indies cricket had this to say. "While the West Indian players' income earning skills are sharpened by competing with some of the best players in the field ..... the cricketer's contractual obligations could easily reinforce the urgency to isolate cricket from politics."

By politics there one means ideas. Ideas as to the context in which the West Indian cricketer is playing the game, such as this series, the first in post-apartheid South Africa. Certainly Lara and Hooper put their contractual considerations above the sense of occasion, seemingly indifferent to what their playing without needless controversy, could have meant or would mean in post-apartheid South Africa. If they themselves, that is Lara and Hooper, Ambrose and Walsh did not know, or paid little attention to such extra-cricket matters then Lloyd should have been there to guide, counsel and remind of obligations other than, even higher than, contractual obligations as to fees. If Lloyd the worshipped icon of West Indies cricket was ignored, then in our alienation and too long dispossession, all fall down.

But I will not stay there. Let me return to a hint I made earlier about that unique thinker on declonisation Frantz Fanon. Fanon wrote: "Decolonisation never takes place unnoticed for it has an effect on being, it changes being fundamentally. It mentally transforms spectators crushed with their inessentiality into privileged actors, caught in a spectacular manner by the flood-lights of History. It introduces into being a particular rhythm, heralded by new people, a new language, a new humanity. Decolonisation is a veritable creation of new human beings. But this creation owes nothing of its legitimacy to any supernatural power, the colonised "thing" becomes human during the same process by which it frees itself."

Decolonisation, the opposite of alienation and dispossession, is an experience which neither Lara and Hooper, nor Ambrose and Walsh, nor Rose and Adams, have ever had. All they have known is increasing marginalisation in pointless insularity, structural adjustment downwards, with its attendant ever-lasting insecurity, and the resultant fear of deprivation leads to this worship of Mammon, heedless of all other Gods. All other Gods have fallen.

The process now on-going in South Africa is "decolonisation", or dismantling apartheid. It is not an event. It is a process. A process in which blacks "crushed with inessentiality" transform themselves from the inessential to the essential, from being nothing, so to speak, into somebody. The concourse and discourse which the first South Africa vs West Indies full Test series, freed from needless controversy, could have brought about could have helped to transform people "crushed by inessentiality" to a new awareness of being in the world, to transform the world.

I do not now say that Lara, Hooper and Walsh have ruined those prospects, what I do say that this needless controversy over "contractual relations" the reduction of sporting values to capitalist values, has somewhat compromised those prospects almost totally.

What I say, and say clearly, is that our alienation, our too long dispossession, is producing a certain mindlessness, a certain heedlessness of all things save money, and more money. The whole Lara and Hooper, Ambrose and Walsh wild-cat strike, had a certain wildness mortified in it, which disregards all else save Self. Any suggestion that this dispute about inadequate meal allowances and pay for the week-long camp in Johannesburg has anything to do with "Players Rights", is a stone disguise as a banana to fool a monkey.

I am told that there is a new code which governs the modern American. And it goes like this: "We, the relatively unbothered and well-off, hold these truths to be self-evident: That Big Government and Big Deficits are bad, but that big bathrooms and 4-by-4's are not bad, that American overseas involvement should be restricted to [one-sided] trade agreements enforced by the WTO, to the advantage of American companies, and the visiting of beach front resorts abroad, preferably owned by Americans; that markets can take care of themselves as long as they take care of us, and that the only rights which really matter are those which indulge the Self."

It appears that we, in our alienation, and as represented by Lara and Hooper have adopted this modern American credo as our own. What other meaning could this Lara and Hooper rebellion without a cause, have? Just what?