The ugly, hollow ring of South Africa’s reality

Should Temba Bavuma get his place back from Rassie van der Dussen at Newlands?

TELFORD VICE in Centurion

IF Rassie van der Dussen was playing in the real world he would feel confident that he has had a decent enough debut to keep his place for the Newlands men’s Test against England. But this is South Africa. Reality is another country.

Here, we spent centuries denying black people their humanity in ways vicious and insidious — including refusing to accept the truth that they play cricket. Now, we pretend apartheid is dead even as its zombies stalk our society. We also refuse to see the obvious struggling of a player if that player is black.

Born a year before Nelson Mandela was released from prison in 1990, Van der Dussen would have known all that when he walked to the crease at Centurion on Thursday. He faced 34 balls for six runs in a flinty but futile innings. Nothing about South Africa’s unreality had changed when he took guard again an hour before stumps on Friday. But something about Van der Dussen had changed — he found the gumption he showed at the World Cup to rap a fluent 51 that made him the first player to score half-centuries on debut in all formats. 

By the close on Saturday he had dropped two catches at first slip, not least because Quinton de Kock had dived across him. But that didn’t dent the likelihood that he would be in South Africa’s XI when hostilities resume in Cape Town on Friday. Hold fire. This is South Africa. Things don’t work like that here …

Van der Dussen cracked the nod because Temba Bavuma was ruled out of the match with a hip flexor injury. Bavuma has gone a dozen Test innings without reaching 50, and he has only one century to his name after 65 innings in which he averages 31.24. His place in the side should be under threat. Indeed, Van der Dussen’s success would, in the real world, displace Bavuma. But this is South Africa, remember.

Van der Dussen is white. Bavuma is black. In times past, the law would have prevented them from being considered for the same team. Now, black players need the protection of quotas — the suits prefer to call them targets — if they are to be given the opportunities, both in quantity and quality terms, that whites are still afforded more readily: despite the fact that whites comprise less than 10% of the population they amount to 63.64% of the XI at Centurion.

Where would South Africa be without Makhaya Ntini’s 390 Test wickets, nevermind the eternal flame of his spirit? How much has Hashim Amla’s massive patience and presence taught us a nation? Exponentially more than what his 9,282 runs were worth to the cause. What would South Africa have done for a proper Test spinner — after Imran Tahir, Dane Piedt and Simon Harmer had tried and failed to fill the vacancy — had Keshav Maharaj not been unearthed in the apparently barren wastes of franchise cricket? Who was surprised that Kagiso Rabada and Vernon Philander took seven wickets between them in the first innings at Centurion. No-one. All mentioned here, Harmer excepted, are black.    

Even so, a large number of South Africa’s whites who hold the irrational view that the game belongs to them are resentful of its darkening. And too many blacks are desperately protective of Bavuma, the only black African Test batter produced since cricket’s hopelessly optimistic and deeply flawed proclamation of racial unity in 1990. 

So much so that the door has been opened to the kind of reactionary poisoning of the body politic that has propelled racists and bigots to the leadership of supposedly First World countries. Enter the Black African Cricket Clubs (BACC), whose representatives, in a conversation with reporters at Centurion on Thursday that followed a meeting at the Wanderers the same day, held up Bavuma as a shining example of success despite his increasingly clear difficulties to come to terms with batting at the highest level. Not for the BACC the option of standing Bavuma down to work on his game out of the glare of the public eye. Like a battle-scarred flag, he must be paraded.

That said, the appointment of a bevvy of former major players to important positions in the past weeks will alarm blacks, and with good reason. They could well be the best people for their jobs, but they are all white. Blacks have only recently thrown off the yoke of white oppression but continue to live daily with the scourge of white privilege. What have whites done to earn blacks’ trust? Nothing, but earn it they must if our society is to heal. So blacks are only doing their due diligence to wonder whether cricket is trying, surreptitiously, to turn back the clock.

Are the legions of the recent appointees’ similarly hued supporters in this country and others celebrating the return of expertise or of whiteness? The validity of the question is only enhanced by the fact that the new brooms have followed the stumbling of black figures, notably Cricket South Africa chief executive Thabang Moroe, who was suspended on claims of misconduct on December 6.

But where were the BACC while Moroe was, not to put too fine a point on it, running cricket into the ground by making one disastrous decision after another and grabbing ever more authority as he went? Were they interested in what was good for the game, or only in what was good for black people in the game? “What has happened in the last two weeks has just brought forward this meeting [at the Wanderers],” BACC chairperson Ntsongo Sibiya said. “This meeting was long overdue.”

That rang ugly and hollow. As did the assertion by another BACC member, Lewis Manthata, that South Africa’s men’s under-19 team losing all seven of their one-day matches against Pakistan in June and July mattered less than the fact that the coach, Lawrence Mahatlane, was black African and had “flooded” the team with black players. “That’s not the issue,” Manthata said of the embarrassing series scoreline. “You cannot talk meritocracy in a country where there’s inequality. You first have to fix the inequality. You first have to make sure the transformational targets are reached, and then we can talk winning.” Manthata is, of course, correct. But at what cost to the futures of the young players being piled onto 7-0 scrapheaps while we’re blustering bloodlessly?

Another truth, that Moroe and Graeme Smith — who has been appointed CSA’s acting director of cricket — both attended the elite King Edward VII school (KES) in Johannesburg, was evidence that Moroe’s failures couldn’t be simplistically blamed on a deprived upbringing, was deflected with Kafkaesque illogicality: “Where were the KES old boys in supporting [Moroe]? They support every other captain of industry. They could have put him through training and support. Where were they?”

Having astounded their audience, the BACC proceeded to insult them. Why, they wanted to know, had none of us reported at the time of the rebel tours on the wrong being done by Ali Bacher and his cohorts? We pointed out that none of us had been reporters in the 1980s. One of us had yet to be born.

Manthata demanded that we read his Masters thesis, and reporters who have been at the forefront of writing about the importance of transformation for years were told their publications were getting it badly wrong on that front. Not that the BACC seemed able to match the reporters to their publications.

They were, in short, a joke. But soon South Africa will have to turn their attention to the entirely more serious business of what to do if, as expected, Bavuma regains his fitness in time to play at Newlands. Van der Dussen does not deserve to have to make way, but he has spent a good chunk of his first-class career opening the batting and — if Bavuma does come back — he could be bumped up the order to replace Aiden Markram, who is out of the rest of the series with a broken finger. But how is that fair on the uncapped Pieter Malan, who is in the squad as specialist opener?

It’s tempting to ask for answers from the real world. Perhaps we should instead strive to make our world more real.

First published by Cricbuzz.