Proteas' WTC win is redemption for unsung black players who went before

South Africa has long chased Desmond Tutu's vision. On June 14 at Lord's, it finally felt within reach

On May 10, 1994, Nelson Mandela skipped his own inauguration parties. Instead, he sat among a largely Black crowd at Ellis Park, watching South Africa play Zambia in football. “I wanted our people to know how much I appreciated the sacrifices made by our athletes during the boycott,” he said. A year later, at the same stadium, he walked onto a rugby pitch wearing a Springbok jersey — an apartheid-era symbol — and handed the World Cup to a stunned Francois Pienaar.

 

It was a gesture loaded with grace, timing, and vision. Mandela knew: In a country broken by race and memory, sport wasn’t a sideshow. It was where the nation could be remade. Nowhere was that tested more than in cricket.

 

Which is why South Africa’s 2025 World Test Championship victory wasn’t just overdue. It was transformative. Not because the “chokers” finally won — but because they did so as themselves. In full colour.

 

When Temba Bavuma and Aiden Markram stitched together their 147-run partnership at Lord’s, the weight was more than scoreboard pressure. Bavuma, South Africa’s first Black African Test captain, had carried years of coded whispers and overt scrutiny. A “transformation pick,” some said. But he stayed. He endured.

 

Limping to the crease, shoulders squared, he walked like he belonged. He walked for many who never could.

 

Like Krom Hendricks, South Africa’s fastest bowler in the 1890s, who was denied a Test cap and offered instead the job of a coolie. Or the generations who played under apartheid in dusty fields and “Board” leagues — for pride, not for glory. Their records were ignored. Their legacies were oral.

 

During apartheid, cricket mirrored the nation’s divisions. In 1968, Basil D’Oliveira’s selection for England sparked diplomatic fury. South Africa had already outcast him in 1948 for being “Cape Coloured”.

 

The D’Oliveira Affair triggered decades of sporting exile. Return came in 1991, when Clive Rice led the team out in India. It felt redemptive — but also conservative. White structures were preserved; Black cricket, with its culture of defiance, was folded in, often uncredited. The late Peter Bacchus, who captained non-white sides during apartheid, once said he played not for victory but for resistance. That resistance lingered. Ask Makhaya Ntini, South Africa’s first Black African Test regular, who ran solo laps of the stadium just to feel visible. Or Ashwell Prince, booed by home fans for daring to wear the Protea badge. 

 

The Proteas — named for the national flower — were meant to symbolise new beginnings. But for years, they didn’t. Players of colour were often treated like passengers, not peers. Bavuma grew up inside that contradiction. In 2016, he became the first Black African to score a Test century. The celebration was polite. Not roaring. He stayed. He earned his place. And when he lifted the WTC mace — his son in one arm — it meant more than a title. Markram, a white cricketer raised in post-apartheid Pretoria, didn’t ignore the past. He stood alongside it. Their stand was a bridge, not a bandage.

 

For years, South African cricket felt burdened. With pressure, with misfortune, with something unnamed. In The Curse and the Cup, Gaurav Bhalla gives it form. On a cursed day in 1991, Vuyisa Lingani and his son, Manga — two gifted Black spinners — die in separate tragedies. The matriarch, Mama Nonkosi, blames the white system and places a curse: South Africa will never win a world title. Fiction, yes. But it captured a feeling. That something always went wrong. Until now.

 

This win belonged to all of them: To A B de Villiers and Jacques Kallis, to Vernon Philander and Kagiso Rabada, to Hashim Amla and Keshav Maharaj. To Faiek Davids and Hussein Manack, who were part of the re-formed squad in 1991, unsure if they truly belonged. To Barry Richards and Graeme Pollock, brilliant but exiled. To Graeme Smith’s certainty and Omar Henry’s heartbreak.

 

And to every child watching now —dreaming not in spite of who they are, but because of it.

 

South Africa has long chased Desmond Tutu’s vision: The Rainbow Nation. On June 14, 2025 — at Lord’s, 13,000 km from Johannesburg — it felt real. The Rainbow wore white.

 

Mandela once said sport “has the power to unite people in a way that little else does.” In 1995, he proved it by wearing a jersey. In 2025, the Proteas proved it by wearing the past — and still standing tall.

 

No theatrics. No slogans. Just the long arc of history — finally bending the right way.