Basil D'oliveira: Cricket And Controversy

The story of how Basil D'Oliveira defied South African Apartheid, escaped from the backstreets of 1950s Cape Town and eventually came to play cricket for England is one of the great sporting adventures. And yet its consequences went far beyond sport. The D'Oliveira Affair of 1968, when South Africa banned the touring England side because of the inclusion of a black man, marked the start of the twenty-year sporting isolation of South Africa and helped spark the end of Apartheid itself.

This important biography contains devastating revelations about the way the English cricketing and political establishment conspired with the Vorster government in an attempt to keep D'Oliveira out of the England side, and places D'Oliveira's story in the context of the great battle for racial equality in the second half of the twentieth century.