"BAT ON TEMBA BAVUMA...BAT ON"

It has been a little over 22 years since South Africa’s Apartheid system gave way to a participatory democracy which allows its Black majority population as well as South Africans of mixed-racial background to participate in their electoral process and South African life in general. The political transformation may have given its Black population the vote but this transition of its majority population has been a slow and tedious process. Racial discrimination has been a part of South Africa’s history since its colonization in 1652, and even with the events of 1994 the levelling of the playing field has been long in coming with the expected dismantling of the exclusionary policies that characterized that country grinding slowly but still in the favor of the Whites.
In South Africa, playing sports provide participants with a huge platform from which they are able to improve their life’s chances and the best way in which this development can be assured is through the school system.
Rugby and cricket are the premier sports in that country and given its history of apartheid where sport is for the white elites and at all times they enjoyed the best of available facilities. For its majority Black population precluded for generations from equal access to such facilities, this represented an institutionalized stunting of their development.
It is for this reason why the maiden Test century made by Black South African batsman Temba Bavuma earlier this week becomes so special.
Bavuma is the first Black man to play for South Africa as a batsman and he did so 17 years after Makhaya Ntini became the first Black man to play Test Cricket for the country as a bowler. Since then only Mfuneko Ngam, Monde Zondeki, Lonwabo Tsotsobe (all bowlers) and Thami Tsolekile (wicket-keeper) have won a South African Test cap and after that, Kagiso Rabada, another bowler, was capped. Born in 1990, (the same year Nelson Mandela was released from prison) Bavuma best epitomizes the change that is really possible in South Africa even after having struggled through an unfair quota system that is largely designed to minimize the participation of Blacks in the sport.
On the back of this century by Bavuma rides the opportunity for other Black players for whom he has demonstrated that if they were to be allowed (as he was) to attend the best schools where the seeds of transformation can be planted, a hundred at the wicket is just a start. Hopefully Bavuma will continue to ‘bat on” as his presence in the side and especially at the wicket provides a solid base on which the potential of more than 40 million other Blacks in South Africa can dare to hope.