Black Lives Matter: perspectives from South African cricket

The killing of George Floyd sparked mass protests worldwide and forced all facets of society, including sport, to re-examine race, racism and inequality. Given South Africa’s post-apartheid transition from institutionalized racial segregation to a democracy in 1994, transformation has been prioritized. However, nearly 30 years post-apartheid South African sport is still struggling to transform. The Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement has given impetus to many prominent South African sportspersons to raise their voices. This paper, drawing on narrative inquiry aims to better understand the experiences of black cricketers in South Africa in the wake of BLM. Personal, radio and webinar interviews with leading players and administrators, media reports and social media forums were used to collect data. A thematic analysis was followed and four key themes emerged from the data were: critiques of a rainbow utopia; the timing of the critique; conundrums of quotas and breaking the system.