He also declines and I suspect that this is uncharacteristic in both of us. The arts too are very important to Asmal and he is delighted to have been made a director of the Market Theatre in Johannesburg last month, a post he intends to take very seriously. Cricket has been his longest-held love and he would as happily watch a group of blacksmiths play on the village green as an international test. Cricket, he says, politicised him. As a child he was unable to play because he was asthmatic, but he became an umpire.
Cricket is a microcosm of politics.
They were very special to me. They adopted cricket from the colonials and learnt to play on the beaches with coconut balls. Of course, in those days the conquering captain was always white, sent to control the blacks. It was a case of the donkeys leading the lions. I can't divide my life into compartments.