My knowledge on South African cricketing history is rather tit ass and vague on certain era’s but the formal origins of the South African game are usually found in the wake Xhosa cattle’s killing’s of 1856, where Cape Colony governor Sir George Grey sent the sons of his officers/high chiefs to Zonnebloem College and cricket was introduced onto the schools curriculum. The weather in the Cape made cricket an extremely easy commodity to export and due to this it was a sport which unlike in England could be played all year round in schools. From then cricket spread to Grey College’s and with the help of Christian mission schools throughout the Eastern Cape- where the African was introduced to the game. Their history in the game is fairly rich and cricket was played and supported extremely well by the African populace. This obliviously changed when apartheid was introduced and then the ANC’s Fanonian like mantra on separating itself away from its white supremacist rulers saw cricket lose much of its African basis. However, the creation of Transkei, KwaZulu, Lebowa and the other entire falsely configured African national states really meant cricket no longer had a basis for the African.
Cricket from an Afrikaner perspective wasn’t openly supported until the end of WW2, it was a game which many Afrikaners were not only prevented from participating in due to its English heritage but its apparent following from the Bantu African educated elite soured the game for many. Even when South Africa hosted Wally Hammond’s England in 1938/9, the Afrikaner media hardly reported on the series. The only time infact the series got much coverage was when a paper devoted its front page in celebration that England had finally left South Africa. This was in spite of South Africa’s team actually featuring Afrikaner players but the tour occurred within the height of the voortrekkers movement and Broederbond society, so any apparent support of a sport created by the English wasn’t going to go down with the Great Trek crew - who at the time were forming the Ossewabrandwag, a ‘group’ based upon Adolf Hitler’s NDSAP model of swearing loyalty to the volk and the volksleier. Supporting cricket would have undermined the Afrikaner fight to challenge English dominance over South Africa.
I’ve currently got two books on order (Black in Whites: A Century of Cricket Struggles in KwaZulu-Natal, Caught Behind: Race and Politics in Springbok Cricket) which should elucidate further on the Africans/Asian/Cape Malay/Coloured participation in the game but that’s about me done.
If you want to learn more about South African cricket through a more ‘conventional’ approach, Luke Alfred’s, The Story of the Men Who Made SA Cricket is an excellent read. Alfred’s book focuses on how South Africa was able to forge a cricketing self identity (away from its English roots) and go from the laughing stocks of world cricket to world beaters.