Why Temba Bavuma’s second century matters, for himself and South Africa

H e got there with a lofted cover drive. There is no stroke in cricket that better captures the artistry and grace of a batter in full flow than a flashing scythe through the offside. But add in a bent back knee, an arched torso, a flourish of the hands and the delicious parabola of a ball careening over the infield and what you’ve got now is a statement.

Temba Bavuma has been making statements ever since he first held a cricket bat in Langa, an underdeveloped area of Cape Town that was solely reserved for black Africans under apartheid. But he rarely uses words. Those rarely leave his mouth in anything other than a mumbled tone as they coalesce into a collection of media-trained athlete-speak.

Instead, Bavuma has had to construct a narrative in the universal language of run-scoring. But his pages have been caveated ever since he edged England’s Steven Finn to deep third for four runs on 5 January 2016.

That was Bavuma’s first Test century. It was a streaky stroke in an otherwise superb knock at Newlands and was a landmark moment for a nation perpetually gripped by the horrors of its past.

It wasn’t just Bavuma’s skin colour that mattered. More importantly, he is a batter, still the only black African batter with a Test century for South Africa. His craft relies on more than physical gifts and fast-twitch muscle fibres. That high elbow on defence, that understanding of length, those wrists and nimble feet, all of that is the product of meticulous development on the manicured training pitches of an elite talent factory. In South African cricket those are predominantly expensive high schools that are disproportionately filled with white students. Bavuma’s milestone was a sign that the crimes of the past generation were