Lungi Ngidi: ‘Racism is a factor in South Africa that must be addressed’

Lungi Ngidi has been South Africa’s cricketer of the year, and man of the match on his Test match and T20 debuts, as well as a two-time winner of the Indian Premier League, but on a sunlit evening in Taunton he takes me back to a time before he was even born. “They shared these stories with me when I was still very young,” Ngidi says as he relives some of the pain his parents endured while living under apartheid.

“My dad was a petrol attendant and a white customer wouldn’t even put the money in his hand. He just threw it on the floor.

“I don’t think I’ll ever lose that story. It was just so degrading. For my dad to go on in life as if everything’s fine took a lot of courage but this is how they raised me. The stories they shared were eye-opening and painful to hear, because those scars never really close up.”

Ngidi and his South Africa teammates have begun a tour that will stretch into September and he will soon turn his attention to the opportunities he and his fellow fast bowlers see as they prepare to confront the swaggering aggression Brendon McCullum and Ben Stokes have injected into England’s Test team.

But before we consider even the limited-overs formats, which start with the first ODI at Chester-le-Street on Tuesday, it is important to understand Ngidi’s past as well as the seismic way he helped South African cricket address its racial wounds in 2020.

Calmly and thoughtfully, Ngidi answered a question at a press conference two years ago this month. George Floyd had been murdered in Minneapolis six weeks earlier, when a white policeman pressed a knee against his neck and suffocated him slowly to death. Ngidi was asked if he and his teammates would show solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement.

“It’s