Fire in Babylon
Stevan Riley (2010)
To sharpen his account of the transformation of the West Indies Test eleven from a collection of delightful but defeatable ‘Calypso cricketers’ into a team of merciless world-beaters, Stevan Riley ignores a fair amount of earlier cricketing history. He does the same in order to emphasise the political significance of the West Indies’ victories against England – the victories, in other words, of men whose ancestors were slaves over those whose colonialist antecedents introduced the game of cricket to the Caribbean islands. It’s true that the West Indies didn’t win a Test series in Australia until 1979-80 but they had beaten Australia 2-1 in the 1965 home series. The first Test matches I can remember from childhood were those between England and the West Indies in 1963. My recollection of these was that the visitors won but anyone watching Fire in Babylon without any prior knowledge would assume that the West Indies’ 1976 drubbing of England in England was a first. In fact, the West Indies beat England at home as early as 1934-35 and won their first series in England in 1950 – then again in 1963, 1966 and 1973. Although this is understandable dramatic licence on Riley’s part, it’s poor documentary practice. What’s more, the racial aspect of the material is so resonant that the story he tells simply doesn’t need this kind of obfuscation in order to exert its power.
That 1976 Test series in England certainly was crucial. The West Indies had lost 5-1 to Australia in the series there at the turn of the year. England was captained by a white South African, Tony Greig, who declared, notoriously, just before the series in England began, that he intended to make the West Indies ‘grovel’. It’s clear from Riley’s interviews with players such as Clive Lloyd, Vivian Richards, Gordon Greenidge and Michael Holding that they and their teammates were highly politically sensitised. They were aware of widespread prejudice among the white British against West Indian immigrants to the country (Gordon Greenidge had personal experience of this: he had lived in England since his mid-teens); of the racial stereotypes underlying the ‘Calypso cricketers’ tag; of the forthright political positions and impact of black American athletes like Muhammad Ali, Tommy Smith and John Carlos; of Bob Marley’s music and Rastafarian philosophy. Although there are passing references in the narrative to Frank Worrell, Gary Sobers and Wes Hall, Riley doesn’t make clear what they achieved (except that Worrell was the first black man to captain the West Indies). His decision to de-emphasise the team’s cricketing success up to 1976 not only rewrites sporting history but obscures the fact that Clive Lloyd’s team were evidently motivated by the persistence – in spite of cricketing success – of received ideas about ‘lazy’ Caribbeans.
For someone like me, never that interested in cricket but brought up in a family who seemed to believe that the Marylebone Cricket Club was prejudiced chiefly against Yorkshiremen, the variety and extent of racism on display in Fire in Babylon is a revelation. Footage of the grey-haired, white-skinned members of the MCC sitting round a table doesn’t need any words to express the political predispositions of cricket’s powers-that-were in the 1970s, and well beyond. (At least the arrival of Kerry Packer on the international cricket scene meant, according to Riley, that the top West Indian players started to be paid according to their talents.) The racist abuse the West Indies received from Australian crowds and players is shocking, even if it’s not surprising; and the non-cricketer contributors to the film, including Bunny Wailer, express justified resentment. Although I instinctively reacted against these men’s certainties (and, as usual, found a little calypso music went a long way), it’s hard to argue with them.
In spite of the powerful political basis of the story, there’s a lot of melodramatic sporting cliché in the interviews in Fire in Babylon and I quickly tired of clips of aggressive fast bowling. (The West Indies fast bowler Charlie Griffiths was, in the early 1960s, surely no less controversial than his successors in the team during the following decade. And I suspect it wouldn’t been too difficult to put together similar montages with accompanying this-is-war commentary from Ashes Tests.) The batsmen are something else, though, and it’s fitting that Viv Richards, the epitome of the enduring success of the West Indies from 1976 to 1991, comes across as the soul of the team – in terms of athletic grace and panache, and of political awareness and responsibility. The anger in Richards’ eyes at certain moments of the interviews eloquently expresses the ‘fire’ of the film’s title. His refusal of the ‘blank cheque’ offer to play for a rebel West Indies team in South Africa in 1983 and 1984 caps his heroism. In contrast, Colin Croft is pretty shocking when he claims – twenty-five years on – not to be able to see the difference between signing up for Packer’s World Series Cricket and for the rebel squad in apartheid South Africa.
It’s not surprising that Stevan Riley doesn’t explore why West Indies teams of more recent years have never consistently scaled the heights of those captained by Lloyd and Richards (for the vast majority of the Tests of the period); but it would have been interesting to know their thoughts – and those of Greenidge, Holding, Croft and other contributors like Deryck Murray, Andy Roberts and Joel Garner – on the subject. Fire in Babylon is far from a great documentary but it has a great subject, as well as a particular resonance now that Caribbean sporting prowess is epitomised not by cricketers but by Usain Bolt and the other top Jamaican sprinters. In his interview, the Barbadian academic Hilary Beckles notes that West Indies cricket is the sole sporting context in which players from the different Caribbean islands come together as a unified team. It’s Beckles too who, towards the end of Fire in Babylon, reminds us that, between the mid-1970s and the early 1990s, cricket was the first internationally competitive activity for which the region became the undisputed best in the world.
3 April 2013