Oh captain, SA’s captain

Times Media

TELFORD VICE, Centurion

JOHN Vorster Drive is the N1 turn-off that many in the mostly white and presumably largely Afrikaans-speaking crowd at Centurion on Wednesday would have taken to see the start of the test series between SA and West Indies.

Apartheid is dead, but it lives. What else are we to think when the name of one of its most hated enforcers still adorns the conduit that spectators used to watch an entirely black team from another hemisphere take on a side from an African country that has for 30 tests now not included any black Africans.

Mad as all that was, it became madder still after SA lost their second wicket. With that, a figure who would have attracted the wrong kind of attention in these pale parts when Vorster wielded power stood at the top of the stairs that lead from the dressingroom to the boundary.

To describe as applause what rose from the stands and grass banks as Hashim Amla descended would do the crowd a disservice. It was admiration and respect made music. It was what happens when pretence and prejudice are peeled away to reveal passion. It was the lilt of love.

Amla was their captain and they knew it, and here, now, in his first home test in charge they wanted him to know that they knew.

Seven balls later, AB de Villiers, a son of this very soil who a single generation ago would have been a direct beneficiary of Vorster’s monstrous plan and has nonetheless been privileged by his race, stood at the top of the same stairs.

He, too, was afforded a grand ovation. It was the sound of a brother being welcomed home: “Howzit, boet. Goed. Self?” But it was not what Amla got.

He was oh captain, their captain, and the goosebumping truth of it would have left Vorster cold.