‘Together-together’ – why South Africa’s triumph matters on the long walk to freedom
The Lord’s air sizzled with South African spirit.
I want to explain that better, but as someone who has always struggled with identity – a third-generation South African of Indian heritage and a child of the late Apartheid/early democratic era – I don’t know if it’s mine to explain.
It’s a deep belief (hope is too light a word, knowledge too strong) that anything is possible.
This is the blessing and the curse of being a South African of my generation: our parents and grandparents did not think they would live to see the end of segregation and we are still bungling our way through to proper unity. But we believe it’s possible because there are some things that always told us it could be. Sport, especially in the last six years since the Springboks won their third Rugby World Cup, is one of them.
On the fourth morning at Lord’s, as Temba Bavuma and Aiden Markram walked out down the pavillon steps, 69 runs away from history, I was on the outfield as a commentator for the BBC’s Test Match Special and I lingered longer than my colleagues. That’s when I felt it. And breathed it in. As the fans in the Compton and Edrich Stands drew the pair onto the pitch with their cheers, it was like a magnetic field had enveloped us. Our time was here.
The next two hours and 16 minutes were fraught. The crowd roared as Bavuma blocked the first ball and then the second. I yelped when the third hit him on the pad, involuntarily and to the giggles of those around me. Behaviour like that is usually frowned upon in the press box but they let me have it, because all the world’s cricket press knows how long South Africa have waited. Mistakenly, they also thought we all wanted them to win every time. Spoiler alert: some of us didn’t, at least at first.
A lot of people involved in cricket will tell you that cricket has been part of their lives for a long time, including me. I never played but grew up in a cricket-loving family and community, who saw sport as intensely political. My father and uncles (our mothers and aunts didn’t play) recognised how sport was used as a tool by the Apartheid regime to sideline people of colour. It was an act of rebellion, as well as a chance to have some fun, to stay involved. That’s what “board” cricket was about.
The South African Cricket Board organised cricket among people of colour, as opposed to the South African Cricket Union, which was the white administrative body. Board cricket was serious and competitive but often played in substandard facilities and some records have been lost. I was a child but I remember board matches feeling like “our place”, where we could just be and not be judged. I had the opposite feeling when I first started attending matches after unity, as someone from a previously disadvantaged race group. When unity came in 1992 and the Board got swallowed by the Union, there was very little space for people like us, and it left us bitter. Many of us grew up supporting India, Pakistan and West Indies, who looked like us, and actively disliked the South Africa team.
Cassim Docrat, an administrator from the Board, who did find a place in the Union, often reminds me that the decision to come together was rushed, and for the benefit of white cricket to get back to the international stage. Considering how few players of colour made it to the national team in the first 25 years of readmission, it’s difficult to disagree with him.
“I’ve allowed myself to wonder if it was always supposed to take 27 years, and scolded myself for daring to compare the length of Nelson Mandela’s imprisonment with South Africa’s trophy drought”
I was one of those who found a place on the periphery, in what was then a white-dominated and male-dominated space. By the mid-2000s, I was a teenager and I started working in cricket, as a scorer. Shukri Conrad was the Lions coach when I made it to the Wanderers score box, where I spent a handful of happy years doing ball-by-ball commentary for Cricinfo before moving into the editorial space. So it’s not just that cricket has occupied the major part of my life, Cricinfo has too. It’s through them that I have had a front-row seat to South Africa’s performances since 2009, a close-up to some celebrations and much heartache.
The 2012 tour to England is my highlight, especially as Graeme Smith won the hearts of the nation with his century in his 100th match as captain, and by bringing his new-born daughter Cadence to Lord’s, where South Africa won the mace for the first time.
Smith was also part of the broadcast team for this final and we’ve been exchanging little comments throughout the Test, increasingly with more stress in our voices. For a few minutes on the fourth morning, while Tristan Stubbs battled, we tried to distract ourselves by discussing where Cadence will go to high school. That’s how much time has passed.
The 2015 World Cup semi-final is an obvious lowlight, both because of the result, and the race-based selection interference which caused a major loss of trust in the administrators, but there have been others. Waking up to see that South Africa had lost to Netherlands at the 2022 T20 World Cup, the 2023 ODI World Cup semi-final and 2024 T20 World Cup final the most recent.
Of those, the 2023 defeat stands out because of the controversies around Temba Bavuma. He played the match with a strained hamstring and though that didn’t have much impact on the eventual result, was made to shoulder most of the blame. Cricket clearly has a sense of humour because Bavuma also batted in this match with the same injury and is now being hailed a hero.
Hearing his name, chanted to the tune of “Seven Nation Army”, around Lord’s showed how much South African cricket has changed. It helps that the expat community, especially, has fallen in love with Springbok captain Siya Kolisi and embrace his black excellence. It also helps that Kolisi has won two World Cups. I’ve always felt sorry for Bavuma for being in Kolisi’s shadow and when I heard the Lord’s crowd, I could see him stepping out of it. He was ready, and I knew that from the interviews he had done pre-match, in which he spoke openly about being labelled a product of transformation (I contributed to it with the 2016 piece I did on his century) had been a handbrake on his career. I was sorry for the crudeness, but I also had a job to do, and I know we can’t escape race. Bavuma also now knows that. He understands his role in the bigger picture, as does that squad as a whole, and there are some very sombre reasons why.
On the final morning of the victory over Pakistan that secured South Africa’s qualification for this final, batting coach Ashwell Prince lost his wife Melissa to cancer. She was 40 years old and beloved in South African cricket circles. Her death provided a completely different perspective to what was happening in front of us: just a game, with consequences, but clearly nothing as serious as what was happening in Prince’s life. It’s not that we stopped caring about the result, but we understood that there were important things going on. Three months later, Conrad lost his father, a former cricketer.
When Prince gave his batting talk to the team ahead of the final, he referenced those losses. Real, raw, heart-shattering losses. A game of cricket? He can get over that. But raising his three young sons alone, wishing for Melissa’s presence at every milestone and even every ordinary moment? There’s no getting over that. So, though the match matters and everyone is expected to do everything they can to win it, other things matter far more. It’s with that in mind that South Africa approached the final.
Still, it can be difficult in the moment not to think winning is all that matters, both as a professional sportsperson and, by the looks of it, as a diehard fan. I’m not quite that (and I can’t be as a journalist) but I also wanted the win badly, partly so I’d have something different to write but mostly because I had that feeling all Test; that belief that this was it.
When Bavuma was dismissed my heart sank. Not another mess-up for him to explain. I couldn’t watch Stubbs bat. He seemed so out of his depth. He’s a kid. He’ll get there. With 20 runs to get, I started to get serious about what was about to happen, what I’d need to say, what I’d need to write. I didn’t even realise when Markram was dismissed because of the non-reaction from the Australians. Kyle Verreynne’s awkward ramp made me grimace, and he told us afterwards he didn’t know what he’d been thinking, but by then they were on the verge. On screen, I saw Smith, barely able to contain himself as the winning runs loomed.
They came with a drive and a wave of emotion like nothing I’ve experienced at a sporting venue. South Africa, rejoice!
On air, I tried to remember all the names I wanted to mention, to pay homage to the generations of cricketers that wanted this victory deeply: Barlow and Procter; Pollock and Kallis; Amla and Philander. Bacher’s came out easily. A divisive figure among people of my parents’ generation, for his role in supporting rebel tours, he has become a dear friend and his recent, severe illness has been on my mind for months. Not everyone approves of my relationship with Bacher. To me, it’s proof that we are not our parents, and that there is a space to see someone as a human first. I look forward to explaining how the WTC works to him. He’d asked me a few months ago and we didn’t have the time, but now I’ll just say South Africa won and I don’t think he’ll have too many more questions.
Most of the rest of the names were more recent, men whose careers I had covered and some of whose struggles I’d seen. Makhaya Ntini stands out. He retired a few years after my career began and was always reluctant to talk about the experience of being the only black African in the squad until just before the Social Justice and Nation Building hearings of 2021, when he found his voice and told his story.
The hearings had their flaws but they cracked South African cricket open and let the light in. We gave ourselves the space to talk about our experiences. Personally, covering the SJN gave me an agency I was too scared to take hold of before. It reassured me that my community’s story, however small in cricket, also mattered, that the things I had endured, as a woman of colour in the press box, also mattered and that all the attempts I’d made to amplify the voices of players of colour were worth it.
One of my earlier pieces was about the two men of colour, Hussein Manack and Faiek Davids, who travelled with South Africa’s first post-readmission side to India. Manack’s father, Aboo, has collected and kept a meticulous history of cricket among our people, the Johannesburg-based South Africans of Indian heritage. I will stop putting off plans to go and see it, and maybe even digitise it. When I thought of who the Lord’s victory was for, I also thought of Aboo Manack, a contemporary of my late father.
Then I looked around and I saw little Milan Maharaj running in the opposite direction from where her father, Keshav, was calling her and I smiled through the tears I was also trying to hide. I saw what you saw as Bavuma held his son Lihle in one arm and the mace in the other. As Ian Smith put it, “The two most important things in his life.” And it felt right. It felt like South African spirit.
I’ve allowed myself to wonder if it was always supposed to take 27 years, and scolded myself for daring to compare the length of Nelson Mandela’s imprisonment with South Africa’s trophy drought. I remember, very vaguely, February 11, 1990 when Mandela was released and addressed the world from the Cape Town city hall and I know, from many readings of his speech, that what stuck with me was that he said we had reached a point on the march to freedom that was “irreversible”. He was right. Here we are. Six democratic elections later, and we have also ended the rule of Mandela’s former party in what is hailed as a triumph for peaceful power transition.
South African cricket feels like it reached that same point on June 14, 2025. It’s not that they overturned three decades of near-misses or proved themselves under pressure. It’s that they did it together. Or as we would say, “together-together”.
Those who know South Africans know we like to repeat words when we’re trying to emphasise them. “Now-now”, which is more now than now; “sure-sure”, when we want to be, well, sure of something. “Together-together” is not just the together of the squad and the support staff and the spectators, but the together that includes the past, the present and the future. The together that my generation believes is possible, even though there are still so many things that divide us.
Breathe Mzansi. We’re all right.