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Journalism of Courage
Two sharp 90 degree turns and a 2-minute leisurely walk separates the Langa Cricket Club and Rubusana Avenue. Around here, cricket hardly stops. If the club gates are closed, there is always the street.
Years back, on this stretch leading to the club, Temba Bavuma, barely 4 then, would shout, stamp his feet and eventually tear up as his cricket-playing uncles would try to shake him off. The uncles thought he was too young to face the hard ball, Bavuma didn’t agree. The cricket-crazy neighbourhood still remembers the persistence of the howling child.
With time, the uncles gave up. They could no longer stop the tiny-tot from following them. Bavuma wasn’t just following in his uncles’ foot-steps, he was exhaling the cricket that he had taken in since the time he was born in the black neighbourhood that has given South Africa several international cricketers.
Over the years, the boys from Rubusana Avenue’s tin-roof row houses, which wakes up to the lbw shouts from Langa CC, have been writing a mostly-unread chapter of this country’s cricket history.
A morning spent walking the very vibrant and full-of-life lanes of Langa busts several South African sporting myths. The blacks do have a cricketing past and it wasn’t Ali Bacher who introduced the sport to the community post-1992. This is a black township that can take you back 150 years and still talk about their cricket.
Their proximity to the strategically important and historically significant port at Cape of Good Hope had exposed the Xhosa-speaking blacks to outside influences. So when the British encouraged their own citizens to migrate to South Africa — history books call them the 1820 Settlers — and occupy the eastern frontier areas, cricket stepped onto a new continent. The Settlers would plant, along with agriculture crops, stumps. Cricket would take root and eventually spread to the neighbourhood black areas.
After years of wars, coups and a blood-soaked churning, the original inhabitants, the blacks from this eastern frontier, would become migrants working for Cape Town’s privileged whites. They would settle at Langa, a segregated township for blacks. It was only a matter of time before Langa CC would be formed. That was some 85 years back.
Clearly Bavuma had many more reasons to pick up a bat than a boy at Shivaji Park or Barbados. The convenient hypothesis that the blacks only played football and didn’t have it in them to bat or bowl wasn’t just false, it was malicious too.
Bavuma will always have a special place in South African cricket history. He proved that boys from townships don’t necessarily run in and bowl fast; they can be equally graceful bending their elbow, taking a stride and driving the ball.
***
It’s the day after the Cape Town Test, we are at Langa CC with Cagew Ezra. Appointed by the Western Province Cricket, he is the man responsible for the development of cricket in the black townships. He is 65 but looks barely 50. He has a hearty laugh, and smile that he exchanges with everyone on the street. His friends call him Langa’s de facto mayor.
Once angry about his son and daughter making him wait for an hour when he went to pick them up at a night club, he told them without smiling: “Next time you make me wait, I enter the club, take-off my shirt and hit the dance floor.” Ezra hasn’t had to wait after that. He is that kind of a guy.
It’s morning, Langa CC is deserted. Ezra’s assistant is there, making arrangements for the main team nets in the evening. They expect Bavuma to be there, take a break from the Proteas and be with old friends. To walk the street where he once shed tears, pleading to his uncles to take him along to Langa.
The old Bavuma home is locked. Once his father, a journalist, got a job in Johannesburg, they moved. Now, Wanderers is his home. He keeps returning to Rubusana Avenue, where the kids are on the street playing cricket. They have to keep alive a legacy. Not that they are conscious of it, they are busy fighting over a contentious catch.
Not far from the Bavuma house is a cricketing shrine of sorts. It’s the house where Langa’s brightest son, Ben Malamba, lived. He was a multi-talented cricketer who played for South Africa under Basil D’Oliveira. The three parallel lanes around Rubusana Avenue have produced at least six South Africa Schools cricketers. Thami Tsolekile, was the last one to play international cricket before Buvama.
The two lived so close that a shout from one’s backyard could reach the front-door of the other. However, the mention of Tsolekile ensures a strange silence in Langa. A couple of year’s back he was banned for match fixing. It’s a tragic tale of a promise not kept. But first the Bavuma success story that starts with a funeral.
***
Back in the day, Ezra had just crossed 50. Buvama was 13. Langa’s main team was to travel for a club game but the regular driver of their travel vehicle, a combi, had to attend a funeral. Ezra could always be trusted to chip in. So he got behind the wheel.
On reaching the ground, the team was to realise that they were a player short. It was going to be a hectic day for the veteran for he wouldn’t let Langa be a player short.
“It was a very, very hot day, the temperature was about 35 degrees. Even while fielding, I would go out after every over to drink water,” says Ezra recalling the day.
Langa were in trouble, they were given a target of about 280. An exhausted Ezra had demoted himself to No.9. Finally, it boiled down to him and Bavuma, the youngest and oldest of the team, to save Langa.
“He was very young. I was making him understand the game, whenever we would meet in the middle at the end of the over I would tell him the number of runs we got in the over. These kids they didn’t know if wides and no balls are part of the partnership. They will just count the runs they run,” he recalls.
Ezra would break it down for the young boy and the two would take the team home. Those at the game, recall a touching scene: The rival team walking up to Bavuma and shaking his hand. They were sure that they had seen a future Protea. Langa were surprised, they just had an added swagger to their walk.
It is this age-old cricket culture that has contributed to Bavuma’s strong basics. At Langa, you get constantly corrected, advised and mentored. There are always several Ezras around to hand-hold young Bavumas. And once they make it, they become the inspiration, pass the baton.
“Temba is a big role model because every kid feels that I will get there one day,” he says.
***
Tsolekile too was an inspiration once, but his career wasn’t a fairy tale. He was a sporting prodigy. From a very early age, the thin boy with dazzling legs and great hands would get discussed at local cafes and talk of him wafted about at braais. By way of applauding his dribbling skills on the astro-turf, they would call him Maradona, or just plain Mara.
“He was such a gifted player, very skilful. They would come to watch him play,” recalls Ezra, who also doubled up as a coach with Langa’s hockey club.
If Bavuma had cricket-crazy uncles, Tsolekile had a grandfather who played for Western Province. As a teenaged wicket-keeper batsman he was chosen ahead of Graeme Smith to lead South Africa at the U-19 World Cup in 2000. It would be a busy year for the multi-talented teenager.
He was part of the South Africa national hockey team as well, that won the continental title and qualified for Olympics. However, the South African Olympic association wouldn’t allow the hockey team to travel to Sydney, saying that they had not been true to the country’s transformation policy.
The hockey setback saw him give more time to cricket. He made his Test debut in 2004 in India. Things didn’t go as planned as he couldn’t cement his place in the side. He would hit international headlines again in 2016 after being named as one of four players banned by Cricket South Africa for “contriving to fix a match or matches in the 2015 Ram Slam; failing to disclose to the CSA Anti-Corruption Officer the full details of an approach to engage in corrupt conduct”.
Tsolekile would be banned for 12 years.
In Langa, they say he has been framed, for he had taken on the system and complained about selection policy. He is no longer Bavuma’s neighbour, though his home has a plaque that says Tsolekile lives here. In Langa, they retain nameplates of their famous sons and daughters, even when they have moved on. It’s a tribute.
Tsolekile hasn’t totally cut his ties with Langa. Actually, the bond has become stronger. Not far from his old house he now owns a Tshisa-Nyama – a Zulu slang for ‘buy and braai’ (braai is short for Braaivleis, an open fire meat grill). Tshisa Nyama were once started to make the township butcheries a party place and increase sales. It’s a watering hole, where Langa’s young and old gather to gossip, reconnect and talk cricket over meat and drink.
Invariably, there would be mention of the boys from Langa CC. They talk about what Bavuma can do or what Tsolekile would have done. The writing on the red wall in big bold reminds them of the magic they once saw. The name of this Tshisa-Nyama is Mara10.
***
Just opposite Mara10 is a cluster of houses with a common toilet. A young mother drags a shopping mall cart filled with plastic bags while balancing her baby with one hand. About 70 per cent of Langa’s 50,000 plus population is unemployed and 50 percent are way below the poverty line.
The streets have very few cars but many tourist buses. Township tourism is big here and better organised than the Hop-in-Hop-off Dharavi jaunts. There is a cultural centre that has interesting pottery and art sections.
Ezra says that things are changing in the township. He points to the few high-rises – buildings with satellite discs perched on the balconies. The old match-box like units – a reminder of the apartheid era – are being brought down. Ask Ezra about those old days and he says they were very tough. It was a nightmare.
“You look at those common toilets. There was hardly any partition between two units and no privacy,” he says. And then he lets that hearty laugh. “We had a joke about it. We used to say, it was like being in the slip cordon.”
In Langa, cricket gives you fame, provides a second chance, forgives your faults and make you laugh through your troubles.
Stay updated with the latest sports news across Cricket, Football, Chess, and more. Catch all the action with real-time live cricket score updates and in-depth coverage of ongoing matches.
