Like millions of other South Africans, and indeed many neutrals, I shared in the effulgent emotion when Temba Bavuma led the Proteas to victory in the ICC World Test Championship. I could feel what it meant. But feeling is easy and amorphous, whereas understanding is complicated and hard work. And I wouldn’t have been able to understand why this particular victory carried so much meaning if I hadn’t just read Niren Tolsi’s excellent new book, Writing Around the Wicket: Race, Class and History in South African Cricket.
You don’t have to be a cricket fan to realise that this win has the characteristics of a morality play. In his post-match interview, Bavuma was asked what it felt like to have the trophy in front of him. “The word that comes to mind is ‘special’,” he said, special for the team and for the country.
“I watch the rugby guys and I think the biggest thing I admire about them ... is how they’ve embraced what being South African actually means. South Africa, we’re unique in a lot of ways. Our present and future is shaped by our past. The way [the Springboks] have gone about it to capture the hearts of everyone has really made us love them. Within cricket, that’s something we’ve spoken about, to really do something special,” Bavuma said.
In his book, Tolsi describes cricket as “a sport rich with literature and politics; with the colonies playing and writing back to Empire’s centre — confronting its underbelly; a game held together by political contradictions, moral hypocrisies and millimetres”. Included in the book is an interview with Hashim Amla, in which they discuss the 2016 Test against England in Cape Town, where “over three days and 707 minutes at the crease Amla scored 201 off 477 balls”, and then shocked the cricketing world by resigning his captaincy. Describing the press conference, Tolsi writes that there was “the collective gasp of a country left confused. He had redeemed himself as captain, and batsman, yet decided to step down.”
In the same match, Bavuma became the first black African to score a Test century for the Proteas with an unbeaten 102. Reflecting on how we can understand these sporting moments, Tolsi writes that “the paradoxes of representation inherent in South African cricket were manifest at Newlands. Both Amla and Bavuma did not represent their side, they were their sides. They were their country. A divided, fractious country, obsessed with race and class and riven by a staggering inequality that keeps more than half the population living in poverty. Equally, a country generous of spirit, determined in action and resilient against adversity.”
It was that moment there, to be recognised more than as just a black African cricketer, but to be seen as someone who’s done something that the country has wanted
— Temba Bavuma
Fast-forward to Bavuma’s press conference at Lord’s, and he is asked what this triumph means to him personally. “For me, it was that moment there, to be recognised more than as just a black African cricketer, but to be seen as someone who’s done something that the country has wanted. So I think that’s something [about which] I’ll definitely walk around with my chest out. And I can hope that it continues to inspire our country.”
Interviewed by Tolsi, Amla also talks about this idea of what the country wants, and about working out what the Proteas’ ethos should be. “We tried to understand what is a South African, because the Proteas team has to be the identity of the South African people, it has to understand what South Africa has to be. That is the most important thing: what do you want South Africa to be? The players wanted a team that mirrors the country. The mirror of the country that you want to see is a team that is happy, a team that works together, a team where when you go through difficulties … You are resilient ... You maintain your dignity in your success and your failures. That is what you would like the country to be, and that is what we wanted the team to be.”
Bavuma’s formula for success is pithier, and quintessentially South African. “It takes a little bit of crazy at times to deal with everything as it comes.”
I can’t pretend to understand entirely the real meaning of this victory to players such as Bavuma and Amla, but thanks to Writing Around the Wicket, I can at least achieve a tangential understanding. In his conclusion, Tolsi writes: “It is with some resignation that I acknowledge … that ‘no normal sport in an abnormal society’ still haunts the country … It is clear that the rainbow nation project is but a chimera and that much work still needs to be done within society to confront racist privilege. Cricket remains a game of contradictions in South Africa, a country of such great paradoxes: of the economic, the political, the imagination, of lived realities and supposedly shared aspirations — both within the boundary and beyond.”
It’s striking that both Bavuma and Amla talk about working out what South Africa wants to be, not what it is. It’s a work in progress, and one likes to think that Bavuma and his team have set down another positive marker in that journey.
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