In the end, censorship won out. Usman Khawaja might have known that the words he scribbled on the sides of his boots would quickly garner critical attention from cricket’s power brokers. Not because the messages he sought to express during Australia’s first Test of the summer were overtly political. After all, what legitimate counter argument is there to the assertions that “all lives are equal” and “freedom is a human right”? What makes this outcome predictable is that the type of athlete activism attempted by Khawaja has never found a welcoming home in his sport.
It’s been 60 years since CLR James asked, “What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?” It was a prompt to fans and players to interrogate the game’s colonial legacy, to challenge existing racial inequities, and to recognise that forces beyond the boundary determined who had the privilege of scoring runs and taking wickets for their country. Six decades later, James’s question remains pertinent.
To better understand cricket’s shortcomings it is worth juxtaposing them against the actions of American sports stars and an ecosystem that is unmatched in its cultivation of athlete activism. Since Jack Johnson, a black boxer from Texas, won the heavyweight world title in 1907, athletes in the US have been plugged into a wider social and political discourse.
After Johnson came Jesse Owens, who made a mockery of Adolf Hitler’s worldview, as well as the segregationist policies of his own country, by claiming four gold medals at the 1936 Olympic in Berlin. By the time Muhammad Ali refused to fight in America’s war in Vietnam in 1967, the link between athletes and conscious activism was firmly established.
Today, every major sport in the US has its activist icons. And though Colin Kaepernick has been frozen out of the NFL since 2017, after his prominent role in the global Black Lives Matter movement which catapulted the taking of the knee into a globally recognised gesture, others like LeBron James, Simone Biles and Megan Rapinoe continued to enjoy successful careers after using their platform to speak out against injustices.
Dr Harry Edwards, the architect of the Olympic Project for Human Rights that emboldened Tommie Smith and John Carlos to protest racial inequalities from the podium of the 1968 Games in Mexico City (which was supported by Australian sprinter Peter Norman), has said it works in the US because “you need an ideological scaffolding that can project and frame the activism.”
“This is stoked by the outspokenness of powerful personalities who address what Dr Martin Luther King terms ‘the fierce urgency of now’ against a background and tradition of activism.”
As an Australian cricketer, Khawaja’s voice is more powerful than most. And there is no doubt that there is a fiercely urgent need to address the catastrophe unfolding in Gaza, which served as the basis for Khawaja’s words written in the colours of the Palestinian flag. What is lacking in this case is a tradition of activism in cricket as well as Australian sport more generally.
There are notable exceptions. In 1932, the Indian allrounder Vijay Merchant refused to tour England in protest against the imprisonment of Mahatma Gandhi and other freedom fighters. England’s Tom Cartwright played a key role in the Basil D’Oliveira affair that led to the international isolation of apartheid South Africa’s cricket team in 1970. The bravest example came in 2003 when Henry Olonga and Andy Flower wore black armbands to call attention to the crimes of Zimbabwe’s then dictator, Robert Mugabe. Both have since lived in exile after receiving death threats.
In 2014, England’s Moeen Ali wore wristbands that read “Save Gaza” and “Free Palestine”. Though the English Cricket Board cleared him to do so, the ICC acted swiftly, arguing he was in breach of the its code of conduct banning equipment or clothing carrying a political message.
Real activism challenges the status quo and starkly divides opinion, separating it from charity work or humanitarian efforts. Those with their hands on the levers of power will turn a blind eye to actors who stick to an accepted path. How else can one explain the ICC’s decision to allow MS Dhoni’s Indian side to sport camouflage caps against Australia in 2019 in support of their nation’s army during border tensions with Pakistan? Surely that was also a contravention of the ICC’s rules? By imposing restrictions on Khawaja, the ICC has shown its hypocrisy. Clearly it is not the content of the message that rankles but the target of the campaign.
Ignoring the hypernationalism of Narendra Modi’s government, or the conspiracy that the BCCI are the true masters of cricket, it is telling that the two prominent cricketers who have faced the ire of the ICC in this way are Muslim and have been othered in their home countries. Khawaja has previously received abuse for his support of the BLM movement and for refusing to wear kits emblazoned with alcohol sponsorship. Like the American icons of the past, he has remained undeterred.
“I stand by what I said, I’ll stand by it forever,” Khawaja said on the morning of the first day of the Test against Pakistan. “There has already been a precedent set in the past that the ICC have allowed. Players have done stuff in the past and the ICC hasn’t done anything. So I find it a bit unfair that they have come down on me at this point in time.”
He intends to challenge the ban placed on him and has the full backing of his board and captain, Pat Cummins, who has similarly used his position to spread awareness around the climate crisis despite heavy criticism. If Khawaja succeeds and is permitted to espouse his message, it would be a landmark moment in a sport that has long had an uncomfortable relationship with athlete activism.
