Bavuma stands up to the fire

“If transformation is bad when black African players are not doing well, then, when we are doing well, let’s also recognise transformation for what it’s done.” – Temba Bavuma

TELFORD VICE in Cape Town

JAMES Baldwin turned up at South Africa’s press conference at Newlands after Tuesday’s ODI against England. At least, a reasonable facsimile of the writer who had a vocation was speaking truth to power, especially on matters of race, was there to answer questions. His name was Temba Bavuma.

Look at Bavuma from outside South Africa’s reality and you see a batter; a nuggety battler given to digging his team out of trouble, a reputation deserved even though he has scored only one Test century in 67 innings. Often he has taken guard in adverse situations. Rarely has he failed.

From the reality of the other side of the looking glass, we see a lot more than a cricketer. Bavuma is black in a society in which blackness has, until comparatively recently, not been valued by a white establishment that has considered cricket part of its cultural property. It still does, although it admits it less readily.

So when Bavuma was dropped from South Africa’s squad after the first Test against England, which he missed through injury, the racist dog-whistling reached almost audible proportions. Across the vividly real divide, black anger hit a crescendo, some of it irrational. Bleating from the middle were the voices of other South Africans — coloureds and those of south Asian descent — who bemoaned having become not black enough to be accepted as equals after centuries of not being white enough.

Except for the odd, in every sense, social media post, Bavuma kept his own counsel in public — even after he returned to the squad for the fourth Test. That changed on Tuesday, when his batting shimmered with attacking intent. We’re used to seeing Quinton de Kock light up the day/night arena. But Bavuma? He had, before Tuesday, featured in only two of the 138 white-ball games South Africa had played during his more than five years as an international player.

Yet there he was, driving and pulling and ripping his bat at the ball with power and elegance as if he had been to the short-format manner born. He followed a deft cut, dabbed late to third man, off Chris Jordan with a short, sharp on-drive that hurried away to the boundary 180 degrees in the opposite direction. The symmetry was breathtaking.

De Kock scored 107 in his first match as the appointed ODI captain, Bavuma made 98, they shared 170, and South Africa had time to stop and smell the roses on their waltz to victory — only their second in five matches on England’s tour.

And then there Bavuma was again, his big eyes looking down the barrels of the press guns that had, some felt, unfairly taken aim at him in the preceding weeks. Ask the press and they will say they reported fairly and accurately reflected the mood.

“It has been hard,” Bavuma said. “It’s not so much the dropping part. All players get dropped. Everyone goes through slumps of not scoring well. But the awkwardness and uncomfortability from my side is when you are thrown into talks of transformation.

“Yes, I am black. That’s my skin. But I play cricket because I love it. I’d like to think the reason I am in the team is because of performances I have put forward in my franchise side, and also for the national team, whenever I have been able to. The discomfort was there, having to navigate around all those types of talks. Players get dropped. I am not the last guy to get dropped. That’s something we’ve come to accept.

“The thing that irks me is when you are seen through the eyes of transformation. When you do well transformation is not spoken about. But when you do badly transformation is thrown to the top of the agenda. I have a serious problem with that. We’ve got to be able to take the good with the bad. If transformation is bad when black African players are not doing well, then, when we are doing well, let’s also recognise transformation for what it’s done.” 

Transformation exists to ensure that black players of all stripes are not denied their opportunities. Without it, South Africa’s teams would surely be what they should not be: largely white. And weaker because they would not be tapping into more of the available talent. Tuesday is far from the only occasion that has been proven.

Perhaps it’s a blessing that someone as thoughtful as Bavuma is trapped in the middle of all that. Others would not be as receptive to and respectful of the prevailing nuances. “A lot has happened, for the good and for the bad,” he said. “The time away from the team has given me time to reflect and realign with my goals and to find the strength and courage to keep chugging along. And keep enjoying the game. 

“It was just good to be on the field, running around with the guys. I felt like I was a kid with no burden out there.”

But burdens he has, not least to keep convincing decision-makers that he deserves a place in South Africa’s white-ball teams, especially with a T20 World Cup looming in October and November. “There’s a lot of players out there who fall into that category and are seen as one-format type of players,” Bavuma said. “I never internalised the narrative that I was just a red-ball player.”

In the wider sense, Bavuma was on another burning deck when he walked out to bat at the end of the seventh over with South Africa 25/1 chasing 259 — more than had ever been scored to win a day/night ODI at Newlands. The bigger flames were all around in the shape of South Africa’s increasingly poor form in the Test series. Beyond that, Cricket South Africa itself is ablaze with problems.

In “The Fire Next Time”, his 1963 book on race and religion, James Baldwin asked: “Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?”

Bavuma has answered that question for himself: “That’s how my career is panning out. I guess maybe I find motivation when the team is in situations like that. My thing is to contribute to the team’s good cause. When the team is in trouble, there is a big motivation, an opportunity to want to stand up.”

Both Baldwin and Bavuma are famously short men. And both are all about standing up. Tall.

First published by Cricbuzz.

Race debate moves past Bavuma

“We don’t see colour.” – Faf du Plessis

TELFORD VICE in Newlands

TEMBA Bavuma spent much of his time in the Newlands nets on Thursday under Jacques Kallis’ unwavering gaze. When Bavuma moved, so did Kallis. When Kallis had something to say, Bavuma listened intently. 

Enoch Nkwe ran from the furthest net and up to Dwaine Pretorius as the latter was about to face some spin in the nearest net. Nkwe spent the best part of two minutes making his point with authority. Pretorius was all ears and nods. Job done, Nkwe turned on his heel and made his way back where he had come from, and with the same urgency.

If South Africa’s dressingroom seethes with race-based unfairness, as many of their compatriots seem to suspect, the players and coaches have a funny way of showing it. That black South Africans — and black Africans in particular — are worried about their place in the game is plain from a cursory visit to social media platforms. It’s not difficult to share their concerns.

Thursday was Bavuma’s last full day with the squad. On Friday, when the second men’s Test against England began, he was released to rejoin the Lions for their first-class match against the Knights at the Wanderers starting on Monday. He had passed a fitness test on the hip injury that had kept him out of the first Test at Centurion but, even though he is the vice-captain, Rassie van der Dussen — who replaced Bavuma at Centurion and took his chance by scoring 51 in the second innings — was preferred. Bavuma has gone a dozen Test innings without scoring a half-century. Although Bavuma is considered difficult to dislodge, last year Vernon Philander — who typically bats three places lower than Bavuma — faced 76 more balls despite having two fewer innings.

Also on Thursday, Faf du Plessis, a beacon of clarity and intelligence on cricket matters, came up with a tone-deaf reply when asked what black South Africans should make of Bavuma’s axing: “We don’t see colour. It’s important that people understand that opportunity is very important; opportunity for any colour. That’s why, when I mention Rassie, it’s to have a consistency that comes with giving opportunity and backing opportunity being fair to every player to get a chance. Temba will be the first guy to acknowledge that he got a really good opportunity. You can’t point any fingers at that. It’s important for the game in South Africa that we keep producing good cricketers. For me the colour is irrelevant.”

That view is a problem in a society still trapped deep in a social and economic spiral almost 26 years after the end of apartheid, and that remains riven along racial lines. All South Africans have to see colour if they are to work towards closing the divisions. Even in the best case scenario, that will take decades. How much longer might the healing process endure if people in powerful positions don’t want to see the source of the problem?  

“I know what you’re asking, and there’ll be things in place and people will be put in place to make sure that we keep producing players of all different colours,” Du Plessis said. “But right now what we need to do is win Test matches. We need to win games of cricket. So what we need to do is raise the level of performance for all of us. If you do that, naturally all the other things will fall into place.”

Many South Africans will hope that happens. Many more will doubt that it will, and they have evidence to fuel their argument. The XI for Newlands includes four blacks, one of them a black African, who make up more than 80% of the population. There should be at least six blacks, two black Africans among them. Four blacks also played in the same fixture in 2016. But two of them were black Africans: Kagiso Rabada and Bavuma, who scored an undefeated 102 — his only century after 65 innings — in the first innings. Makhaya Ntini, the first black African to play for South Africa, ended his career with a T20 in Durban in 2011. Ntini was the only member of the hegemonic race in that XI. But he was one of six blacks in the side.

Could transformation be regressing in South Africa? Increasing numbers of blacks think so, and are saying so. And their ranks extend beyond the likes of social media warriors shielding behind their screens and pressure groups of questionable relevance given to sweeping, opportunistic blanket outbursts despite little evidence of mandates to make them.

“The next thing we’re going to hear is, ‘Where are they?’,” Ntini said, in causal conversation, at Newlands after Friday’s play. The “they” he spoke of are black players considered good enough to reach the highest level and stay there. Cricket South Africa (CSA) say they have spent millions on developing them. In the last two financial years alone, transformation cost the game R670-million. But, of the 108 players capped since readmission in 1991, only eight have been black African. What is going wrong at the domestic level, and where every team needs to include six blacks, half of them black African?

“Transformation targets have been set for all our teams below the international level that have to be implemented on a game-by-game basis,” CSA president Chris Nenzani was quoted as saying in a release on Saturday issued in response to the mounting tension. “This is an obligation to a very important bottom-up approach. The CSA board is mandated to enforce these policies without exception and to take corrective action where non-compliance occurs.

“As far as our national representative teams are concerned the evaluation of the achievement of the targets over a year is meant to give team management the flexibility to select teams based on the unique match-to-match requirements and in line with obtaining objective realities.”

Earth to CSA: it’s not working. Their installation of a slew of white officials and coaches in the wake of the failure of a black-led operational arm and a majority black board has brought matters to a head. “The recent appointments do not represent a threat to transformation or the process of Africanisation of cricket in our country,” Nenzani was quoted as saying. “We must all recognise that transformation is not an act of exclusion but one of inclusion informed by the desire to achieve the constitutional ideals of equity, fairness and a non-racial society. CSA remains committed to this vision.”

Tell that to Herschelle Gibbs, who tweeted, “I got rightly dropped after three years without scoring a hundred, also not batting in my preferred opening spot. You score one hundred in five years, you question technique and temperament. Some batsmen just can’t cut it at the top level. Just another case of it.”

It only complicates matters that Gibbs is black, and blessed with more talent than most people who have picked up a bat. That includes Bavuma, who without uttering a word on the issue has become a standard-bearer in a debate that has moved past him and onto where South Africa’s next black players will come from. Or won’t come from.

First published by Cricbuzz.

Cricket needs rugby’s radicalism

“Cricket were ahead of rugby. Have cricket taken their eye off the ball? I don’t know.” – teacher and rugby zealot Brendan Fogarty.

TELFORD VICE in Cape Town

MAYBE Kagiso Rabada should have heeded the signs and not veered off his original path.

Rabada was born on May 25, 1995 — the same day Francois Pienaar’s team started their journey to World Cup glory by beating the Wallabies at Newlands. He arrived at St Stithians as a hotshot fullback.

Had he not kicked rugby into touch for a future in fast bowling, might he have been welcomed back to Cape Town on Monday among Siya Kolisi’s heroes to help thousands of their compatriots celebrate the Springboks winning the William Webb Ellis Cup for the third time?

Rabada has been the top ranked bowler in the world in two of the three formats, and is currently in the top five in both. He is also one of the 66 unfortunates who have tried and failed to claim a single men’s cricket World Cup for South Africa.

Clearly, rugby is getting a lot right. Just as clearly, cricket is doing something wrong. But what?

“There’s too much emphasis on racialism, on certain groups needing to be there,” Cassiem Jabbar said as the crowd awaiting the Boks grew outside Cape Town’s city hall.

“I believe that this Springbok team was there on merit. I don’t think there’s any other wings that we could have chosen for South Africa, or any other front row forwards.

“We are past the stage were we talk about quota players and players of colour.

“Some people are still stuck in that conversation.”

Cricket people included, and specifically the prevailing philosophy that some black people are blacker than others and thus more deserving of opportunities.

It was a radical statement coming from someone who might have been recognised as the best scrumhalf in the world had he not been guilty of playing rugby while black during apartheid.

Surely there is more to South Africa’s perennial failure to launch at cricket World Cup’s than an obsession — mostly healthy and necessary, sometimes damaging and dangerous — with colour coding?

“It’s not about plucking talent and putting it into [elite] schools,” Brendan Fogarty said. “We need to invest in communities to ensure that that talent grows in those communities.

“Cricket were ahead of rugby, when you look at programmes like Baker’s Mini-Cricket. Have cricket taken their eye off the ball? I don’t know. But you need a thousand children playing rugby to create one international.

“So if you’re taking a talented player out of a community, that community might not play anymore. We need to have communities, in their thousands, playing cricket. It’s a numbers game.”

That, too, is radical. Fogarty is an isiXhosa teacher at Bishops Preparatory School — about as elite as schools get. But he also runs the Vusa rugby development programme, which counts Springbok and Stormers flank Sikhumbuzo Notshe as an alumnus.

A much highlighted feature of the Boks’ success is that their players come from more than the familiar crop of schools.

Cricket has and is making sincere attempts to spread the gospel. But, of the 16 SA-born Proteas in the 2019 World Cup, only Beuran Hendricks did not attend a high school that has an illustrious sporting history. And Good Hope Seminary School in Gardens is hardly an impoverished township alma mater.

Maybe what cricket needs is what rugby has embraced: radicalism.

First published by the Sunday Times.

CSA miss own deadline on Cobras transformation issue

“I can’t comment on what goes on right at the top but I can certainly say there’s great talent in South Africa.” – Robin Peterson focuses on the positive.

TELFORD VICE in Cape Town

CRICKET South Africa (CSA) seem set to miss their self-imposed deadline for getting to the bottom of a transformation target transgression last month.

The Cobras’ XI for their first-class fixture against the Warriors at Newlands included seven black players — one more than the stipulated number.

But only two of them, fast bowlers Thando Ntini and Tladi Bokako, were black African — one fewer than the target.

“CSA has noted the submission by Western Cape Cricket [WCC] in lieu of a request for a deviation from the administrative conditions,” a CSA spokesperson said at the time.

But, according to Cobras coach Ashwell Prince, there was nothing “in lieu” about how he had approached the issue.

“I followed the protocol,” Prince told TMG Digital.

CSA also said they would “launch a further enquiry into this incident and will consider all the related and relevant information in order to arrive at a decision about the strength and the validity of the argument by WCC”, and that, “It is anticipated that the investigation may take up to 14 days.”

That was on October 29 — the 14 days expires on Tuesday.

Asked on Monday night whether CSA had reached a decision, a spokesperson said only, “We will announce the outcome once we have concluded the matter.”

Pressed for a better answer, he became defensive.

The Cobras squad contains four other black Africans — batters Aviwe Mgijima and Simon Khomari, and fast bowlers Akhona Mnyaka and Mthiwekhaya Nabe — while another, spinner Tsepo Ndwandwa, has played for them this season.

None were injured when the game against the Cobras started at Newlands on October 28.

Mgijima has scored just 39 runs in five first-class innings this season while Khomari made two and four in his only match of the campaign.

Mnyaka took 1/30 in the nine overs he bowled on his debut in January, his only first-class match to date.

Nabe also last played for the Cobras in January, and has taken 47 wickets in 31 first-class games at an average of 43.27.

Ndwandwa has claimed three wickets in the two first-class games he has played for the Cobras this season.

In cricket terms, none of those players are banging down the door for a place in the Cobras team.

Who might have been left out to make room for another black African is another consideration.

Five members of the top six who played average more than 30 this summer, with Kyle Verreynne topping the list at 70.66 and Matthew Kleinveldt weighing in at 56.00.

The only merely black — not black African — fast bowler in the side, Dane Paterson, has taken 18 wickets at 21.55 in four games.

The other three members of the team, Zubayr Hamza, George Linde and Dane Piedt, the captain, were all freshly back from South Africa’s poor Test series in India.

It was thus in the national interest that they played. 

And in the Cobras’ interest: before that match they had lost to the Lions and drawn with the Titans and Dolphins.

The game against the Warriors was also drawn, leaving the Cobras second from bottom in the standings.

There was, therefore, no good cricket case to be made for forcing an out-of-form player into a side that needed a win at the expense of someone better equipped for their role.

But, as the Springboks proved emphatically at the men’s World Cup in Japan, quotas can lead to triumph because they open eyes that were previously closed.

There’s a good argument to be made that the Boks would not have done as well as they did had teams not been forced to pick black players.

Decades of selection bias — consciously or not — robbed black players of their opportunities.

With their presence guaranteed, they could not be unfairly sidelined.

And, what do you know, they turned out to be among the best players South Africa had.

That Siya Kolisi, Makazole Mapimpi and Cheslin Kolbe merit their places is beyond question.

As is the likelihood that, without quotas, they would never have been given the chance to prove it.  

It’s a happy ending cricket is still chasing, and the dwindling confidence in CSA’s current leadership won’t bring it any closer. 

Perhaps that vital task should be left to people who know what they’ve doing, like Warriors coach Robin Peterson.

“I can’t comment on what goes on right at the top but I can certainly say there’s great talent in South Africa,” Peterson told TMG Digital during the now controversial Newlands match.

He is about 18 months from completing a Masters in sport directorship at Manchester Metropolitan University.

Peterson hasn’t yet decided what his dissertation topic will be, but he has an idea.

“Maybe I’ll do it on ethical transformation,” he said. “Is there such a thing as ethical transformation?

“I’m living in a situation I can write about, so why not.”

Given South Africa’s past and present, Peterson won’t want for research material.

“It’s very difficult to heal wounds, but if this is your only skill in life it’s very difficult to kill people’s dreams.

“You have to give them opportunities if they’re good enough to play.”

It seems a simple statement, but South Africans will know just how complex it is.

First published by TMG Digital. 

Exhibit A in Andrew Hall’s case against quotas: Temba Bavuma

“He’s showed time and time again in Test cricket that when the pressure’s on he’s bailed South Africa out of trouble.” Andrew Hall on Temba Bavuma.

TMG Digital

TELFORD VICE in London

TEMBA Bavuma represents many things to many people, and to one former South Africa player he is an argument for abolishing quota selection.

“Realistically, they should be scrapped,” Andrew Hall said about what Cricket South Africa calls the “target” of picking five black players, two of them black Africans, in the national team.

“It’s pointless to have quotas and put players under the pressure of having that tag.”

Which brought Hall to Bavuma.

“Why does he have to carry the big Q around his neck? He’s a superb player.

“Don’t put that pressure on him. Leave him alone and let him play and he’ll come good and score you runs.”

Hall played 21 Tests and 90 white-ball internationals in which he earned a reputation for getting the job done — most famously when he delivered a convincing impression of an opener in Kanpur in November 2004, scoring 163 in almost 10 hours at the crease against Zaheer Khan, Anil Kumble and Harbhajan Singh.

Not bad for a bloke who, in his previous innings, made 32 batting at No. 9 against West Indies at Kingsmead.

Maybe that connects Hall, who spent as many innings — 11 — batting at Nos. 2, 3, 6 and 7 as he did at each of Nos. 8 and 9, with Bavuma, who has also been bounced around the order. And who also gets the job done reassuringly often. 

“He’s showed time and time again in Test cricket that when the pressure’s on he’s bailed South Africa out of trouble,” Hall said.

“Why put extra pressure on him by making him feel like he’s playing for any other reason than he’s good enough to do it?”

Bavuma is the only black African batter to play Tests for South Africa — a fact his detractors, many of them white, tend not to mention when they take issue with what they say is his failure to convert promising starts into bigger scores more often.

His critics’ refrain is that he has reached 50 in 13 of his 59 innings but has gone on to a century only once.

They rarely add that Bavuma often comes to the crease when South Africa are in trouble: he has taken guard with the total still in the double figures 24 times, or in 40.7% of his innings.

Part of the other end of this complex equation is that Bavuma’s century — an undefeated 102 against England at Newlands in January 2016 — is rightly held up as a great moment for racial progress in a sport that too often, in its following at higher levels, is still representative of apartheid attitudes.

Bavuma’s achievement upended the unfortunately prevalent racist view that black Africans are at more physical aspects of cricket like bowling and have less of the mental strength required to bat for long periods.

It also drew South Africans who might not have paid much heed to cricket, and who happened to be black, to the game.

But Bavuma’s innings was less important in a cricket sense. South Africa were 439/4 when he walked to the middle on the fourth day of a match that had already yielded three centuries, two of them double hundreds.

The demand on Bavuma to perform, then, was lighter that day in Cape Town than would have been the case on many other No. 6s in other innings.

But he is often subjected to less than fair scrutiny than most players in his team and others.

Bavuma can do something about scoreboard pressure, and he does.

Not so the kind of pressure Hall talks about. Whatever else happens, and whether or not race continues to be a factor in how South Africa select their teams, Bavuma will always be black.

And that will always bother some people.