When Lungi Ngidi said the national team should address racism it led to a backlash from white former players but ensured major change was coming, as this extract from a new book explains
South Africa was as surprised as the rest of the world at the popular uprisings in the United States in 2020, even though it had seen the 2015 student protests in support of decolonising South African education on various university campuses.
These highlighted the fact that despite two decades of democracy, systemic racism and exclusions were still rampant in education and every other sector of South African life. Rallying behind the call of #RhodesMustFall, they demanded the taking down of the statue of the arch-imperialist at the University of Cape, among whose vices was the formal introduction of the colour-bar into South African sport in 1894. The events in the northern summer of 2020 mirrored in many ways these earlier South African student protests, the impact of which have been particularly powerful because of the large-scale economic marginalisation of most black South Africans and the perceived failure of the democratic government to redress the situation. Rhodes’s statue was duly removed and South African students at Oxford University subsequently demanded the same treatment for a Rhodes statue there, too.
Written by Peter Hain and André Odendaal
This news first appeared on https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2020/nov/21/how-black-lives-matter-exposed-old-wounds-in-south-african-cricket under the title “How Black Lives Matter exposed old wounds in South African cricket”. Bolchha Nepal is not responsible or affiliated towards the opinion expressed in this news article.
