Young, black and talented: a week of firsts that matter
Imay be wrong, and I probably am, but I’m guessing that India’s second innings in the second Test was the first time all 10 wickets had been taken by black Africans. Oh, I know, there’s the run-out, which involved AB de Villiers, but it was Lungi Ngidi who put in the big run to pull it back from the boundary. Ngidi and Rabada had a rare old time of it against India.
In Australia, Nicholas Dlamini has become the first black South African to wear a category leader’s jersey in a World Tour event. On Thursday, the Team Dimension Data rider spent his third day in the King of the Mountains jersey at the Tour Down Under.
He got into the break for the third day on the trot and stayed away until he gained the points on the hotspot in the Adelaide Hills.
By beating Scott Bowden, the Australian, for the points was a perfect example of how to counterattack. Bowden went hard, Dlamini followed his wheel until Bowden ran out of puff, and then blew past him, opening a gap before tapping off the metres to the line.
Ngidi, Rabada and Dlamini, three black South Africans in their 20s, competing at the top end of their sports. It shouldn’t be important, I hear you sigh, but it is, I sigh, because it matters to those who would wish to follow them.
Each barrier pushed to one side encourages others to go through it. Dlamini comes from Capricorn near Muizenberg outside Cape Town, a hard place to grow up as a child. He looked up to Luthando Kaka and Songezo Jim, both professional cyclists from Khayelitsha, and they made him believe it was possible.
Jim has ridden in two Grand Tours, the Spanish Vuelta and the Giro d’Italia, the first black South African to do so. There will be other young black cyclists who will mark the path Dlamini has taken and seek to ride it themselves some day.
Ngidi looked up to Rabada when he played cricket as a youngster. It was his dream to play with him one day, and at SuperSport Park, he lived that dream with a magical beginning.
Down in Fort Hare, at the academy run by Mfuneko Ngam, young black men would have stopped and taken note of two black Africans bowling in