Did I Really Do That?

Wisden Cricketer

by Emma John

11 August 2010

Henry Olonga was the man who, alongside Andy Flower, risked everything standing up to Robert Mugabe at the 2003 World Cup. Now he’s ready to tell his story.

For those of a nervous disposition, Henry Olonga needs to carry a health warning. Within minutes of meeting him, he has demanded my life story, then peppers my faltering response with questions. Twenty minutes later, when I feel I’ve regained control of the situation and switch my tape recorder on, he looms over it and intones, solemnly, “Why did the chicken cross the road … ?” before leaning back in his chair, pleased with himself.

His wife, Tara, sits at his side with a tolerant expression. She seems used to this sort of behaviour, occasionally telling him in an exasperated voice to calm down a little. I can’t tell how much is Olonga’s innately irrepressible character and how much is for my benefit – he is, by his own admission, “a natural performer”. But I’m not sure it matters: either way, the former fast bowler is clearly a bit of a handful.

Perhaps I was expecting something more reserved, more statesmanlike. The image of Olonga that endures – will always endure – is that of the political protestor at the 2003 World Cup; the man who sacrificed his playing career, and his safety, to take a stand against Robert Mugabe’s regime by wearing a black armband to mourn “the death of democracy” in Zimbabwe. Forced to flee his home and, seven years later, still living in exile, Olonga might be expected to be serious, resigned, haunted even. Anything, in fact, but this bundle of energy seemingly wired to an invisible and non-depleting power source.

Wearing a Lashings shirt and looking trim, he has arrived at this pizza restaurant in Barnes in south-west London, a short way from where he lives, after a day of meetings about his autobiography, to be published this month. At a time when ghosted works are rushed to the shelves before the subject has even finished living the story, it is interesting that it has taken Olonga so many years to commit his to print – he has turned down approaches in the past, feeling that he was “still very raw” and unsure that he had lived enough to merit an entire book.

The timing of its launch couldn’t be more fortuitous. Zimbabwe is re-emerging as a topic of debate at the highest levels. After five years as one of the most shambolic and vilified of cricket nations – its Test status revoked, its finances scrutinised, its tours cancelled – order is, apparently, close to being restored. The Zimbabwe Cricket Union has readmitted previously blackballed senior players to the side and appointed respected coaches in Alan Butcher and Grant Flower. It is even lobbying for a return of its Test status and England coach Andy Flower, brother of Grant and Olonga’s fellow World Cup protestor, has appealed for his home country to be returned to the fold. MCC is now hoping to send a team to Zimbabwe on a fact-finding tour, which could be the first step in that process.

Olonga’s father John and older brother Victor still live in Zimbabwe. His mother lives in Australia but has begun to consider returning (“she misses home”). Olonga says he misses “certain aspects – friends, the lifestyle, the climate, the friendliness of the people”, but he doesn’t say it as if he’s desperate to go back any time soon. You wonder, of course, if he would be allowed to return – and what would happen to him if he did. “I can’t answer that,” he says, sounding serious for the first time. “I just don’t know what would happen. It’s possible there would be no problem. But while Robert Mugabe is still the premier I think it’s wise for me to say I consider it unsafe.”

He remains, officially, stateless – Olonga did not claim asylum when he fled first to South Africa and then, two months later, to the UK, and his ongoing application for British citizenship was sent back to square one when he married his Australian wife Tara. His Zimbabwe citizenship cannot be reinstated without visiting the country. He hints in his book that he and Tara may soon begin a new life in Australia.

But he is clearly tremendously grateful for his life in Britain and for the compassion and the opportunities it has afforded him.

“I came here with nothing,” he says, “but in a short amount of time I was shown a tremendous amount of kindness. There were total strangers who wanted to help me settle down here – some people sent £50, or £100, saying ‘Welcome to England’.” David Folb, Lashings’ gregarious impresario, welcomed him into his home for the first two years of his stay and signed him up to play for his roving all-stars. There were other generous work offers – TV producer Gary Franses, who had sought Olonga out on the very evening of his black armband protest, gave him commentary stints on Channel 4’s coverage, and the BBC hired him for Test Match Special.

Punditry wasn’t the career for him (“no one was going to remember me for my bowling figures”, he writes humbly in his book). Instead, while paying his bills on the speaking circuit – his Christian faith means he is as much in demand in churches as he is at club dinners – he has spent the last few years pursuing a more creative bent. He has recorded an album of his own music, Aurelia; his rich singing voice won him the title of Five’s All-Star Talent Show in 2006 although the music industry has proved a tough one to break and he has learned the hard way that record producers are not always as enthusiastic about you as they appear. He has rediscovered photography, another artistic outlet he had to jettison when he became a professional sportsman. He is learning web design and videography. He does the odd painting. “I am up to my eyeballs in glorified hobbies,” he declares. One glance at his website confirms this.

Despite all that has happened to him since, Olonga says Zimbabwe was a great place to grow up. “The opportunities I had were extraordinary,” he points out, “for a young black man in a country that only 20 years earlier had had segregation.” After his parents split up, he grew up with his father, a Kenyan doctor, on an acre in Bulawayo. The family were middle-class although Olonga says they “didn’t have a flash house”; while his father loved cars and owned a couple, they never had a swimming pool, which was the proof of privilege in
the neighbourhood.

He was, however, extremely lucky in his education, and attended a state school that offered extra-curricular activities from Gilbert and Sullivan to a toast-making club. He “made the most of everything it offered”, including its excellent sports coaching; in his teens he was running 100m in 10.6sec and reaching 7.35m in the long jump. But the departure of his athletics trainer and mentor spelled the end of his vague dreams of Olympic glory; instead he switched his attention to the cricket pitch, where his speed lent itself to seriously fast, if wild, bowling. By 17 he was being touted as a future fast bowler for the national team – and, even more significantly, as the country’s first black player.

In the end that title brought as much heartache as honour. As Olonga is the first to admit, he was a fairly average bowler and his eight years playing for Zimbabwe were made difficult through injury and inconsistent form but also, notably, by relationships in the dressing room, where tensions surrounding the cricket union’s racial policies (including quotas of black players) were high. Olonga says he got on well with the large majority of the team. “There were a couple of guys who were jerks,” he says candidly, “but they were jerks because they were jerks, not because they were white.”

As the World Cup approached, Olonga had just regained his best form and found some peace within his turbulent career. “Have you heard the song ‘Exhale’, by Whitney Houston?” he asks, a touch earnestly. “It was like that. I just went ‘Stuff ’em, I’m going to go out there and enjoy myself from now on.’” He had no thought of using the tournament as a political platform. And even when he agreed to join Flower in the protest – a brave step for anyone to take under a regime of brutality – you get the impression that the 27-year-old Olonga had no idea what the consequences would be.
He says he never imagined that his worst-case scenario would come true, that he’d “be sitting in England talking about not being a cricketer any more”.

I ask how often he sees Flower now. Rarely. If you thought that risking life and limb together was the basis of an undying friendship, you’d be wrong. Olonga has been open about the fact that they used not to get along and their working relationship in the team was always civil but cool. As he talks about visiting Flower at his Essex home, he starts, for the first time, to lose his fluency; it looks as if his general goodwill to all is about to crack. It turns out he’s just bitten a chilli. As he disappears for a glass of water, Tara leans forward. “I think the black armband was a really healing process between them,” she says. “It shed away a lot of stuff.”

Olonga returns and wants to know what we’ve been saying about him. He jokes that he texts Flower when England do well and when they do badly “I do nothing, because it seems like the right thing to do.” Then he suddenly changes tone. “He’s a legend. I’m a guy who couldn’t get in the side. I’m never going to be remembered for my cricket. But in spite of that, two different cricketers, different abilities, different backgrounds, different races, different world views, we were able to put our differences aside to stand up for the common good and I think there’s a lesson in that.”

In the aftermath of the black armband affair Olonga was a vocal, and influential, supporter of the removal of sporting links with Zimbabwe, both in England and in New Zealand, where the Green Party flew him out to join their (ultimately successful) campaign to stop the Black Caps’ 2005 tour. But after years spent urging boycotts he says he has recently reconsidered his stance. “It denied those young players the chance to play and I’m not pleased about that. Now that change is coming, albeit in a different way than I envisaged, it’s only fair enough that I should reassess my position. I’m sad that having made progress for 10 years we lost it all and went backwards. We lost a whole generation of players.”

He says he now backs the slow re-integration of Zimbabwe cricket, although he’s aware that certain corrupt officials – “the men I truly despise” – remain in the game at the highest level. It’s a situation, he says, that mirrors that of the country’s coalition government. “Young people of the country deserve better and, if the coalition government is one way to ease the turmoil, strife, suffering, brutality that’s happened, then yes, I’ll put my weight behind it. But ultimately the rot is much deeper than anything they will deal with.

“As long as those leaders who have been perpetrators of all those human rights abuses are still around it’s just a facelift. They’ve just tightened things to make it look a little more pretty but the underlying truth exists: you’re still an old granny, just with a tight face.” Clearly a politicised man, Olonga is nevertheless honest that he’s really only as informed as any other interested party who reads the papers. He talks to his father “occasionally” and has just one ‘inside’ contact – David Coltart, the Zimbabwe minister of sport.

One wonders how much Olonga’s life has become defined by that one, extraordinary gesture. I ask him how it and its consequences – the sudden, enforced retirement from the only job he had ever done; the flight abroad to countries he barely knew – have changed him as a person. He refers me to the final chapter of his book and when I get home, I look it up. He writes that the experience “stretched” him and “made me grow up”. “From the moment I walked out on to the cricket pitch in Harare,” he writes, “I have felt like I am in some kind of dream world … I sometimes fail to grasp that I am not an international cricketer any more. But then suddenly this roller coaster took off and it hasn’t stopped. The way the whole thing has played out, I sometimes find myself metaphorically pinching myself, saying, ‘Did I really do that?’”