The Makhanda Khaya Majola Week was as good as it gets

 

The first Khaya Majola Week I went to was in 1989. It was still the Nuffield Week back then and it was in Johannesburg. That was the first year that I was engaged as a freelance journalist – I was still a teacher then – and I was to cover every week, bar one or two, as a journalist until 2018 when the Saturday Star School Sport supplement was canned by the new owners of Independent Media.

By then, I’d become so much a part of proceedings that the organisers – more about them later – found a way to keep me coming.

I have to admit to an increasing level of grumpiness as I’ve grown older and I’ve, unkindly, been accused be of being cynical and complaining. I suppose I’d have to agree, to an extent, with that and that I went to Makhanda for the 2023 Khaya Majola Week with a less than fully positive attitude.

I got back home on Thursday cured, for now at least. I guess what I needed was to meet up with and mingle with people who make big sacrifices to provide opportunities for schoolboy cricketers to play the game, and to be engulfed in the spirit of generosity and the attention to detail that characterises the hospitality you get when these events are held in a small town.

And so it was in Makhanda. The tournament began with an official opening at which a guest speaker was to address the boys. A mistake, I thought. The players don’t want to hear what some self-important has-been has to say, they just want to play. But I was wrong, the speaker was Adi Birrell who has a coaching CV as long as your arm. He imparted some homespun Eastern Cape wisdom and his message was aimed straight at the players. It was spellbinding, and it set the tone for what was to come.

Graeme College – the Grahamstown school that isn’t St Andrew’s or Kingswood – was the venue and at that opening function I met Kevin Watson, the headmaster of Graeme, and Gregg van Molendorff, his deputy and the man in charge of the local organising committee. They were in our faces, in the nicest possible way, for the rest of the week.

Mr Watson is just remarkable. I’ve been to many of these sorts of things. But I’ve never seen the headmaster of the host school take ownership of the event the way he did. He was out there supervising the rolling of the wicket, painting the lines himself, and pulling the covers off – you don’t see that every day, but it went further. His mission seemed to be to make everyone feel at home and enjoying themselves. And at the closing dinner at the end of it, I watched him go around the room thanking everyone for their contribution. Even me, who really didn’t do that much.

He had a willing and able accomplice in Gregg van Molendorff. I’ve come across organisers of big events who pay attention to the details and make sure the proceedings run like clockwork. And I’ve seen others who are more people orientated and concentrate on relationships with the visitors. He was both, and then some. Indefatigable, always smiling and completely incapable of saying no to any request.

They were the locals. The CSA people were also there. Morgan Pillay, the tournament director for 28 years now, is simply the best sports administrator I’ve ever come across. Niels Momberg, for many years CSA’s manager of Youth and Tertiary Cricket, has been promoted to another role and in that one he is in charge of umpires and scorers, among other things. So, guess what? He used that as an excuse to spend the week in Makhanda anyway, and miss yet another birthday with his family.

Morgan’s birthday is the day before Neils’s, by the way, so he has also been away for it for close to 30 years now.

The men in charge set the tone and everyone else involved with running the event followed suit. At some tournaments and festivals it’s all about exclusion. Not everyone’s invited to the functions, you have to have the right accreditation to get into certain areas and they kick you out at closing time.

Not at this one. You got the idea that, of course you’re welcome – they made sure of that.

And then there was the setting. The schools of Grahamstown are pristine exceptions to the rule in a town that’s crumbling. The potholed roads have become famous, as have the wild donkeys roaming the streets.

There were matches at the clubs of the Farmers League in the surrounding areas. We took a drive to Salem, reportedly the oldest cricket field in the country. It was magical.

My colleague Hannes Nienaber and I had a beer in the pub there – he has a strong regard for the history and traditions of the game, and in that spirit, we also had to have a beer at the Rat and Parrot, the heart of university life in the town – although it was eerily quiet with the students not there.

It’s all about cricket and the players, of course, and I got the feeling that they were having a great time too. It showed in their play. There were some great performances and they can only have benefitted from playing on those fields, in those historic settings.

I wrote once before that if I was in charge the Khaya Majola Week will always be held in Potchefstroom. The fields are great and they are all close to each other, and the people there are just so nice. After the week gone by, I think we can alternate between Potch and Makhanda – it’s even better down there.