International cricket in South Africa from 1971 to 1981

International cricket in South Africa between 1971 and 1981 consisted of 4 private tours arranged by English sports promoter Derrick Robins, 2 tours by a private team called the "International Wanderers", and one women's Test match. The apartheid policy followed by the South African Governments of the day meant that no Test match playing nation was willing to tour, thereby depriving world cricket of leading stars such as Graeme Pollock, Barry Richards, Clive Rice and Eddie Barlow.

Sport in South Africa had been divided on racial lines since the early white settlers. Cricket was no different. In 1891/2 Walter Read's Englishmen first played against a non-white team, the Malays. No non-white South Africans played any other international cricket until 1956, when a team of Kenyan Asians toured against South African non-whites. However, with apartheid laws becoming ever stricter, no non-white was selected for the national Test team. This did not, however, stop white-majority Commonwealth from playing white South Africa at cricket. In the 1970s and 1980s, the South African Cricket Board ran a competition called the Howa Bowl, which was contested between non-whites.

The Basil D'Oliveira affair changed all that. D'Oliveira was a mixed-race South African (partly black - "coloured" under the Apartheid classification). Unable to play for his national side, he came to England and played for them instead, going on tour to the West Indies in 1967. His performance on that tour was not impressive, and he was omitted from the Ashes Test squads in the following summer until the fifth and final Test at the Oval. He scored 158, and was expected to make it to the team to tour South Africa in winter. When initially he wasn't selected, there was great controversy in England, with the English Test selectors being accused of pandering to the racist regime in South Africa. Then, when a vacancy became available through another player dropping out, D'Oliveira was selected in his place. But South African Prime Minister John Vorster opposed his selection, saying that it was not a team of the Marylebone Cricket Club, but of the Anti-Apartheid Movement. England did not tour.

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