Conrad Hunte, a man for all seasons

Centurion - Conrad Hunte, a simple and humble West Indian of Bajan upbringing, a great Test batsman whose last years were devoted to the development of the game among South Africa's underprivileged, has died in Australia barely a month after acting as pall bearer at Malcolm Marshall's funeral.

Knighted earlier this year by the Barbados Government for services to the game, the inscription should have also included: For his devotion and duties to mankind.

Watching him bat was a special treat, watching him talk to youngsters about the game was also an entertainment as he recounted anecdotes about his playing days; not about himself but the greatness of others.

Watching him score his 260 at Sabina Park on Jamaica in late February and early March 1958, and in partnership with the then Garry Sobers, three years his junior, was in itself a privilege: an unexpected one as there was no hint to this then young traveller he had stumbled on an island in the sun the day a Test started.

He scored two centuries in that series and in a Test career spanning 44 matches between 1958 and 1967 his average of 45.06 showed the quality and calibre of his batting. He managed a further six centuries.

He was naturally aggressive as a batsman but when he played for his country he adapted his technique in an effort to give the innings a solid base. He was a particularly strong player off his legs.

Born on Greenland Plantation, Shorey's Village, in the parish of St Andrews of humble parents who battled to make a living, Hunte's Test career had started some five weeks before in Bridgetown, Barbados with a dramatic entry, a century. His monumental innings in Kingston, Jamaica, much of it in partnership with Sobers, still haunts the memory; his upright stance, classic in style and well-organised in batting approach, he was one of the old Caribbean batting school. It was said to have been based of George Challenor's style; powerful yet gracefully elegant: full of flowing drives mixed with the West Indies flair for wristy strokeplay.

He preferred to talk about Sobers' efforts in the partnership and how the younger man batted with gifted footwork and handsome drives as they added a massive 446 for the second wicket; at the time it fell only five runs short of equalling the highest for all Test partnerships held by Bill Ponsford and Sir Donald Bradman against England, at The Oval, in 1934.

Hunte was later deprived of the Test captaincy of his beloved Caribbean islands when passed over for Sir Garfield. Yet he was all too aware of the agonies of Africa: ancient and modern. After all, he visited South Africa during the dark days of the apartheid era: arriving for the first time shortly after the 1976 Soweto uprising over yet another unwanted imposition. Yet, here was a man, strong in Christian beliefs and Moral Rearmament values, who when he first played for Barbados and later the West Indies was still disenfranchised.

Under an archaic British colonial ruling, to have the vote meant you needed to own property; only after independence in 1960 was adult suffrage conferred on the former colonies in the Caribbean community.

Yet Hunte was as much a missionary in Africa as he is a pioneer in the field of cricket development and spreading God's gospel. In 1996, at the age of 64 his role in Africa was a mixture of missionary and explorer. As the representative of two important bodies, the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) and International Cricket Council (ICC) it was his job to "oversee the coaching and develop the game on their behalf" in what was originally 10 countries south of the Sahara.

Throw in the four West African English-speaking countries - Nigeria, The Gambia, Ghana and Sierra Leone - along with the Seychelles and Mauritius, it is easy to see how this job had grown beyond its original job description of February 1992. From his base at the UCB office at the Wanderers from where he worked between November 1991 and April 1999, he had overseen what has been an amazing, vibrant revival.

There were times during his UCB years that when others would become angry, or feel acrimony at the tardiness of the pace in which the game grew, he would suggest it was time to light a candle.

At the Zone VI tournament in Pretoria in late August, 1996, Conrad Cleophas Hunte, refused to admonish an errant Tanzania official for what others felt was the administrator's oversight on a matter of team travel arrangements and the protocol involved. Instead he suggested we should remember how we also could make errors.

"We always need to light a candle for the world, in times of darkness there is a need for a friendly light," he suggested with a smile.

Advancing the regrowth of the game in areas where, although there was war, famine, detrimental tribal influences and revolution, had at times been like competing in an obstacle course. Even the tyrannies in Uganda during the despotic excesses of the Idi Amin era failed to diminish an interest in the sport. Through a programme of careful husbandry and involvement from 1994, Hunte had, with the aid of Hoosain Ayob, the UCB's national director of coaching and since 1998 the ICC regional director for Africa, given a new direction to the game in that oft-troubled country.

Mini clinics had success with surprisingly good results in Uganda; similarly Tanzania and Malawi, where the game had been hobbling along, needing an infusion at school level of the same development programme. Although in Lesotho sport has generally suffered from the apartheid era, there are signs of regrowth and redevelopment. Yet there has been surprising success and promise from unexpected areas: the Namibia Cricket Board, as one example, had in 1996 received the country's sports council award for presenting the best sports development programme.

It needed more than a loosely woven west African slave link, however, to attract the nimble, yet piously urbane mind of a man of Hunte's calibre, to a country such as South Africa in the years of demeaning oppression.

In 1996 the pictures which haunted him were twenty years old when after the 1976 Soweto uprising he arrived in South Africa. In a matter of a few days he had experienced the harsh ghetto-style surroundings of Soweto and then the luxury and comfort of a white friend's home in the smart Johannesburg suburb of Westcliff and later Pretoria. What he discovered was traumatic: relationships among people and their Maker were perpendicular.

"People had a working faith in God and themselves, but not between themselves and their neighbours and God." Which he readily admitted created a dilemma.

Moving next to Stellenbosch he discovered a large provincial town of leafy suburbs, whitewashed Dutch colonial buildings with a strong sense of history and culture - all which Soweto lacked. It was then that an inner voice explained what he was experiencing was an extreme situation "of the human condition".

"For me it explained that the white man needed the black man and the black man needed the white man, that Soweto needed Stellenbosch," was his frank assessment of the culture diversity.

He has argued, with some emphasis more than once, that despite this uncertain and fractured background South Africa would create an example of successful racial unity for all follow.

What changed his attitude that South Africa could, and would, one day survive and overcome the trauma of the apartheid laws, their obstacles and divisions was an incident during his second visit in 1977. He travelled with a party of fourteen to Cape Town, when they were forced to take a break at Colesberg and stay a night in a hotel. While the twelve whites in the party had comfortable warm rooms in the front of the building, Hunte, an overseas visitor, along with a South African black, was thrust into the spartan accommodation of a dank, damp room at the back. The toilets were filthy and there was no bathwater for washing. An inner voice spoke calmly, rationally, as it had done when he had first been confronted by the juxtaposition of the political and cultural shocks of the comfort (Stellenbosch) and the squalor (Soweto).

"What you have to realise is that this is not about black and white, as there are poor people everywhere in the world. What we have here is a terrible chasm that no human goodwill can solve: that only the crucified Christ can solve. From this He can build a path of reconciliation and freedom from bondage."

It was early in his life when Hunte realised that he had three strikes against him: he was born poor, black and disenfranchised, which he did not either merit or create. They were obstacles which he had to overcome, giving him inner strength, and resolve, to teach others similarly disadvantaged how to climb over the hurdles of injustice and repression.

Hunte felt he had, within the ICC/MCC development programme the ideal platform to help the youth of Africa create a system just and fair for all on the continent: a continent from which his ancestors were shipped to the New World, facing a lifetime of suffering and bondage.

His more recent development areas in South Africa covered the growth of the woman's game in the country and one which he saw as being an area of importance. As the mothers of the future they had a role to play in helping the game's structures improve to a level where the game can be seen is for everyone.