CHRIS ROPER: Batting to a special future
Temba Bavuma’s Proteas have become the latest sports team to demonstrate how transcending South Africa’s onerous past is the route to victory
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...
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