Lunch with Temba Bavuma

Coy restaurant is aptly named. Opened in August last year by Ryan Cole, the executive chef at Salsify at the Roundhouse, it prides itself on being “hidden in plain sight” at Cape Town’s Victoria and Albert Waterfront.

Coy by name, and by nature, it doesn’t offer up its gastronomic pleasures easily: a map app is required to find its location near the waterfront’s Bascule Bridge and, settling breathlessly into a seat in the restaurant’s darkened wood interior I discover several missed calls from Temba Bavuma’s management team. The Proteas Test and one-day cricket captain is also lost and a little confounded. He arrives 15 minutes late for our appointment, apologetic but breathing easy despite the brisk walk — as befits an international sportsman.

Bavuma is in a light mood, cracking an early joke about not “being as big a captain as Graeme [Smith]” both physically and volubly in the Proteas dressing room. Smith had led the Proteas to more than a decade of global domination with his macho charisma. Where Smith was built like a brick shit-house, Bavuma appears the diminutive en suite. 

But Bavuma has every reason to be cheery. SA’s international home season has just ended with the Proteas’ 10-wicket victory over Pakistan at Newlands the previous week completing a 2-0 Test series win to follow up on a similar series result against the touring Sri Lankans earlier in the summer.

While the SA20 started a few days after the Newlands Test match, Bavuma isn’t contracted to any of the franchises and has been kicking back, connecting with friends and family in Cape Town’s Langa township where he spent his childhood, hanging out with old cricket chums and preparing for a traditional Xhosa thanksgiving ritual for his mum.

It is a welcome break for him after a hugely successful summer of cricket. An unbeaten run of seven wins in eight matches since Bavuma assumed the captaincy in 2023 has ensured his entry into the record books for the best start of any Test captain in 74 years. It also means that SA have qualified for the World Test Championships final against Australia at Lord’s in June.

The 34-year-old Bavuma, the team’s only black African batsman, has been in scintillating form with the willow scoring a century against Pakistan at Newlands and another against Sri Lanka at Kingsmead while averaging a remarkable 72 over the summer. It has been a period of runs, redemption and affirmation for a player who, since making his debut against the West Indies in 2014, has had “tokenism” brickbats chucked at him whenever registering a low score.

Currently sitting at number six in the International Cricket Council’s Test batting rankings, he enters 2025 as the Proteas most successful batsman.

In 2016 Bavuma became the first black African batsman to score a Test century for SA when he made 102 not-out against England at Newlands. His recent 106 against Pakistan at the same ground appears to have book-ended nine years of highs and lows, huge fan support for his success matched only by waves of toxic, racist social media trolling at every low score. He has admitted the criticism he received for being included at matches during the 2023 ICC 50-over World Cup was the lowest he has felt in the years between the two Newlands centuries.

He acknowledges that politics and sport cannot be separated and admits that he “struggled for the longest time to come to terms with my performance always being seen through race and politics”.

He doubts whether the system was ready for a black African batsman and captain, or whether he could have prepared himself for “the system” with its myriad racial and class pitfalls at the time of his appointments.

I’ve been wanting to test a hypothesis with the Proteas captain since sharing a beer with Tengo Sokanyile, one of the maternal cricket-playing uncles who was instrumental in Bavuma’s introduction to and love for cricket: that it could only have been Bavuma, or someone like him, who would score the first Test century by a black African for SA.

Not merely because of the “privilege” that Bavuma mentions often during our conversation as one of the reasons for his success. A privilege based on his being part of an upwardly mobile family in a poor township where cricketing connections and familial support meant he never wanted for cricket kit and a plan was made with coaching. A privilege further entrenched when he attended the elite SA College junior school in Cape Town and then St Davids Marist Brothers when his family moved to Johannesburg. Two institutions where his batting technique and nous about how to build an innings were developed through coaching and facilities denied the cricketing friends he had left behind in Langa.

Bavuma has intergenerational batting DNA that can be traced back almost to the very introduction of the game of cricket in SA in the late 1800s. Such are the obstacles preventing  black South Africans from reaching their sporting potential that it required both privilege and history to combine for Bavuma to score that maiden century, I argue.

We turn our attention to the food. Coy offers a choice of a two- or seven-course set menu at lunch. We both choose the smaller option since Bavuma is heading to the gym after our interview. He orders the yellowtail sashimi with caramelised coconut, daikon radish and a syrup of tamarind and sugar cane as a starter. I cannot resist the ox-tongue glazed with a pomegranate sauce and served with a black rice pilaf and ras el hanout, a north African spice mix. We both order the braaied line fish (kingklip) with a mussel salsa, potato salad and a peri-peri velouté for mains. 

I cannot tempt Bavuma towards anything stronger than sparkling water.

The bread course arrives and it seems Coy is an apt choice for more reasons. The kitchen is geared towards indigenous ingredients and cooking. The bread course includes fermented amadumbe sourdough bread with bokkoms (salted fish from the West Coast) and kefir butter topped with black onion ash. A fine culinary backdrop to discuss the indigenisation of cricket.

SA’s cricketing structures are reliant on an elite school system to provide provincial and national team players. These schools focus on developing cricketing and social orthodoxy among students and I wonder whether the system prevents a more indigenous version of the game to develop in SA, in the manner seen in Sri Lanka from the mid-1990s onwards.

“Its an interesting take,” says Bavuma, before reflecting on how difficult it is for a township kid to handle the pressures of “the system” and succeed because of the cultural adaptation and confidence required to fit into it. Institutions like St Stithians help to “refine” players for the international glare, Bavuma says, but he also notes that the system has to change because the pressure is always on the black players to make cultural concessions.

Our conversation is peppered with references to how black kids have to “assimilate” into a system where the “flair” on the streets of Langa or Soweto is lost. But Bavuma feels this Proteas team is playing with more freedom than previous iterations, scoring big in the limited-overs format especially.

He says the emergence of T20 has led to a more exciting generation of cricketers playing with less orthodoxy, but he also feels that the money in the shortest version of the game is not good for cricket.

Bavuma has never played in the Indian Premier League and is critical of the money concentrated in the T20 format and how it affects young cricketers’ egos.

Our starters arrive and he wolfs down the sashimi, declaring it “very good”. The ox-tongue is a sublime combination of sweetness, spiciness and meatiness.

The Proteas captain is also mournful over the shrinking number of Test matches SA have lined up whenever a future tours programme is announced. The “Big Three” of India, Australia and England dominate the Test schedule with longer series against each other and there has been talk of a two-tier Test system that will allow series like the Ashes series to be played more regularly.

People with their eye on the money, rather than “cricket purists” are making these decisions, says Bavuma: “I do hope it changes for the sake of the game. You want the best to play against the best, but it shouldn’t be reserved to the best just playing against each other. And the best isn’t necessarily who has the most money,” he says.

Preparing for the World Test Championships final will test the Proteas. The upcoming Champions Trophy and IPL season means most if the team will be playing white-ball cricket until a month before the finals. Cricket SA doesn’t have the financial muscle to buy out part of the players’ contracts like the English and Australian boards do, Bavuma says.

“We’ll just have to deal with what it will be,” he says philosophically, “it’s nothing new for us because we always have to deal with whatever it is that’s in front of us. We’re South Africans, we’re used to that,” he says, suggesting that cricket and life in SA sometimes mirror each other.

Bavuma attributes the team’s current success to a collective effort from a “band of brothers” and says there isn’t the “lack of trust” he sometimes experienced in previous dressingrooms.

I wonder if the lack of trust was due to race — has he experienced racism within the Proteas changing room? 

“There are moments when you question certain things,” he says, “I guess the easiest one is selection and there are moments where you question it. You’re like ‘OK, that doesn’t make sense, or are there other factors to it?’”

But Bavuma adheres to a lesson learnt from his father, a former journalist, Vuyo Bavuma: “The one thing he always said was never allow yourself to use racism as an excuse for either your shortcomings or your failures. Never allow yourself to sit there and say you’re not playing in the team because you are black. That’s very defeatist and a convenient excuse.”

The current Proteas set-up isn’t blind to race, Bavuma says, but an atmosphere has been created “where we’ve allowed ourselves to get into spaces and conversations where we can look at our own [individual] ways, our attitudes and behaviours and ask what may cause someone else to feel that you may be racist?”

Bavuma also attributes the creation of this safe space to Proteas coach Shukri Conrad’s own empathetic team-building. Conrad is “like a father figure to me, I can be vulnerable with him and tell him about things eating me up inside”, he says.

All through our meal Bavuma has responded to my hypothesis that it could only have been someone like him to score that first century by a Black African by underlining the hard work involved and the privilege and familial support he experienced in getting him to that point. I push him on the idea of ancestors and intergenerational batting DNA.

We discuss African cosmology and the notion that the ancestors are present in the ambitions and actions of the living. As we wind down our lunch it is clear that he achieved what he has because of his and his community’s dedication towards an excellence that colonialism and apartheid were unable to extinguish.