Mick Hartley

One for Norm, perhaps:

The applause drifts gently across the ground as bat strikes ball and the figures in whites make their dash for the crease. A boy leans on his bicycle on the edge of the outfield to take in the scene and catch up on the score.

It may sound like any village on a pleasant Sunday afternoon – but this is Kicukiro Oval in French-speaking Rwanda, where eager schoolboys are getting to grips with the unfamiliar English game.

It is the only cricket ground in the country and its rudimentary pitch, where cows usually graze, lies next to the infamous École Technique, where 2,800 Tutsi men, women and children were massacred by marauding Hutus in the genocide of 1994.

“When we first started playing, we found piles of bones on the boundary over there,” said Julius Mbaraga, captain and a founding member of Right Guards, the nation’s first cricket club. One early game was interrupted after an unexploded landmine was discovered at silly mid-on.

This week Rwanda will be welcomed at the Commonwealth heads of government meeting in Uganda as a full member – only the second, after Mozambique, with no formal links to the British Empire.

Its unlikely inclusion owes much to cricket. Introduced to the country in 2000, the game has rapidly become the most potent symbol of the tiny central African state’s drift away from the French-speaking world and towards Britain. President Kagame, an Anglophone with a deep dislike of France, pursued membership of the Commonwealth to undermine French influence in his country…

“I think you can say we have batted our way into the Commonwealth,” said Charles Haba, president of the Rwanda Cricket Association, who has persuaded six schools to start playing and has gained affiliate status with the International Cricket Board.

The new-found enthusiasm for cricket chimes with Mr Kagame’s desire that Rwanda, a former Belgian colony that became a close ally of France at independence, should adopt English as the language of choice. Language is an emotive issue because of its association with the genocide. Those responsible for the killings of some one million moderate Hutus and Tutsis were largely French speakers…

Many of the Tutsi “boys” who grew up in exile learnt to play cricket. When they finally returned home, they brought the game – and the English language – with them. The game is now helping to overcome some of the divisions left by the genocide. The country’s five teams contain Hutus, Tutsis and several Rwandan Asians.