STANDING AGAINST RACISM

All lives don't matter until black lives matter: Faf du Plessis

"I'm speaking up now, because if I wait to be perfect, I never will. I want to leave a legacy of empathy."
"I'm speaking up now, because if I wait to be perfect, I never will. I want to leave a legacy of empathy." ©AFP

Rassie van der Dussen became, on Thursday, the first current South Africa player other than Lungi Ngidi to express his support for the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. In a society that remains riven with racial and other divisions, it will be noted that Van der Dussen is the first white player to do so. And the first, current or former, from the Afrikaner community - though not the only one whose first language is Afrikaans.

In reply to a twitter exchange between noted journalists Dougie Oakes and Max du Preez, Van der Dussen posted: "I support BLM, I'm against all murders; physical, character, and cultural murders. I support equal opportunities for all. Just because I support BLM does not mean I support violence or Marxism, so I refuse to be labelled by people. Long live Africa!"

The conversation started on Wednesday, when Oakes posted: "I'm waiting patiently to hear white Proteas - past or present - state that they support [BLM]." Du Preez replied: "I am too. AB, Faf, Quentin, Rassie van der Dussen, Mark Boucher et al: where do you stand?"

The thread encapsulates South Africa's tangle of races, ethnicities and cultures. Van der Dussen posted his response to Du Preez in Afrikaans, his and Du Preez' first language - and which millions of South Africans considered, to quote a prominent slogan during the country's struggle against apartheid, "the language of the oppressor".

Van der Dussen and Du Preez are white. Oakes is, in the widest South African context, coloured. In the progressive South African context he is black, though not black African. In the rest of the world he would be considered black, brown or mixed race. Although Oakes' first language is English, he is fluent in Afrikaans. But many others who self-identify as coloured are first-language Afrikaans speakers.

Few coloureds would consider themselves or would be accepted as Afrikaners, a group reserved for whites who grew up speaking the language - even though some of the oldest written Afrikaans was recorded in Arabic script in Cape Town's mosques in the 1830s. That's part of the substantial evidence that slaves transported to the colonised Cape from Java, India and Madagascar, among other places, invented Afrikaans. The slaves encountered Dutch in the Cape's finest white settler houses, took the language into the kitchen, baked it into what we now call Afrikaans, and served it up to their masters, who claimed it as their own and made it the centrepiece of their white supremacist ideology.

So the original version of Van der Dussen's tweet could be seen as masterfully subversive. But chances are he was simply trying to communicate as carefully as he could. Hence he did so in his mother tongue. Welcome, gentle reader, to the complexities of life in South Africa's myriad contested terrains.

Strictly, Tabriz Shamsi beat Van der Dussen to the punch with his social media support of Ngidi. But he muddled his message by, along with referencing BLM, also posting "#AllLivesMatter" - a controversial trope used to denigrate and undermine the BLM movement.

Doubtless Shamsi wasn't trying to do that, but unsurprisingly the focus was on Van der Dussen, who spoke up the morning after a Cricket South Africa (CSA) release on Wednesday night that began: "[CSA's] board of directors and executive committee reaffirm their support of [BLM], and its relevance in South Africa and South African sport. We note the claims of discrimination and racism that have been made by current and former players and coaches, and we acknowledge that these are a part of the sport's past, and, sadly, its present. We have to face the reality, as management and custodians of the game, that we need to come up with creative, tangible and meaningful ways to address this - even more than we have done already - to make sure that they are not part of our future."

The saga started last Monday, when Ngidi voiced his support for BLM in response to a question he was asked during an online press conference. He also said he wanted to take the conversation into South Africa's dressing room. That prompted, last Wednesday, criticism from white former players, notably Pat Symcox and Boeta Dippenaar, that Ngidi was trying to convince his teammates to support his stance.

The wave of backlash against the white figures' view crested on Tuesday when 36 black and brown former players and coaches released a statement of support for Ngidi and said they had suffered racial discrimination during their careers. The document was written in English, but some of the brown players named in it might have been more comfortable, like van der Dussen, making their feelings known in Afrikaans. On Wednesday 49 black and brown former rugby players, coaches and administrators - among them six former national team members and a head coach - issued a similar release.

Also on Wednesday, Hashim Amla, who is of Indian heritage and therefore brown, posted a photograph of himself and Ngidi on Instagram, which he captioned: "In the Islamic tradition it is understood that the first man, Adam (pease be upon him), was of dark skin. Henceforth all of humanity have deep roots to this proud heritage and should have zero qualms in being referred to as black. This makes it even clearer for the person who believes... that the imagined superiority of whites over blacks or whites overs blacks, or one nationality over another, is delusional."

That prompted former first-class player Craig Marais, who is brown, to post on Facebook: "White lives count because we are all black." Doubtless that will give all concerned, of whatever race, pause for fruitful thought.

Including CSA, whose release said they welcomed "the statement of support for Lungi Ngidi's BLM stance, made by 31 [sic] players and coaches, and the CSA board and CSA [executive committee] stand with this group, and every other cricket player, coach and fan that believes that there is no place for racism of any kind in cricket. CSA encourages more current and former players and coaches to do the same."

Then followed a litany of the opposite of what Faf du Plessis said last season his team do not do, as in see colour: "[Fifty-two] of the 64 full-time CSA employees are black, as is the current president and chairman of the board. Ten of the 12 board members are black, of which six are black African. Two-hundred-and-forty-four of the 261 nationally accredited men's coaches in South Africa are black, and nine of the 15 nationally accredited women's coaches are black. Seventy-two of the 115 nationally accredited male referees and umpires in the men's game are black, while six of the 15 umpires and referees in the women's game are black. CSA also supports 612 [black] township-based cricket clubs, 1,052 township primary school cricket clubs, and 572 township high school cricket clubs."

On Friday morning, Du Plessis remedied the situation on his Instagram account: "In the last couple of months I have realised that we must choose our battles. We are surrounded by many injustices in our country that require urgent attention and action to fix them. If we wait only for the ones that attack us personally, we will always live for 'my way vs your way' and that way leads us nowhere.

"So I've remained silent, with the intent to listen, but not respond. Slowing down my point of view, but quicker to hear the pain of someone else. I knew that words would be lacking and that my understanding is not close to where it needs to be.

"I surrender my opinions and take the knee as an intercessor. I acknowledge that South Africa is still hugely divided by racism and it is my personal responsibility to do my best to emphasise, hear the stories, learn and then be part of the solution with my thoughts, words and actions.

"I have gotten it wrong before. Good intentions were failed by a lack of perspective when I said on a platform that - I don't see colour. In my ignorance I silenced the struggles of others by placing my own view on it.

"A race problem is a human race problem, if one part of the body hurts ,we all stop, we empathise, we get perspective, we learn and then we tend to the hurting part of the body.

"So I am saying that all lives don't matter UNTIL [sic] black lives matter. I'm speaking up now, because if I wait to be perfect, I never will. I want to leave a legacy of empathy. The work needs to continue for the change to come and whether we agree or disagree, conversation is the vehicle for change."

Anrich Nortje has also come out in support of BLM, as have Marizanne Kapp and Dwaine Pretorius - who pledged to take a knee at the 3TC game in Centurion on Saturday, a gesture he said on Facebook would be "only the start". Van der Dussen, Du Plessis, Nortje, Kapp and Pretorius; five of the whitest Afrikaners you could hope to find.

Here's another number: more than 90% of South Africa's population are black and brown. But more than 90% of South Africa's Test players have been white. A few are batting for the other side. But they are few among many. The majority's silence is as alarming as it is deafening.

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