Cricket in South Africa — The Cape Colony Game Grows, 1860s

The Cape Colony in the 1860s was a prosperous British possession, enriched by the wool trade and the diamond discoveries that were imminent. The English-speaking merchant and administrative class that ran Cape Town also ran its cricket.

Cricket had been played in the Cape Colony since at least the 1820s, when British soldiers introduced it to the garrison town. By the 1860s the game was well established among the English-speaking population of Cape Town and the farming districts of the Western Cape; Afrikaner farmers were less engaged but not hostile. The Western Province Cricket Club gave the Cape colony's cricket a permanent institutional home, and matches between club sides and garrison teams attracted respectable crowds. The racial structure of South African cricket was already entrenched: the game was played exclusively by white settlers, with the Malay and African populations excluded. This exclusion — built into the foundations of South African cricket in the 1860s — would persist in organised form until the 1970s and would eventually cost South Africa international cricket for two decades.