The BLM movement has brought the gaping inequality in South African society - and cricket - even closer to the forefront. ©Getty
Dorothy Tsotsobe is formidable. Not solely because she is a woman, nor because she is a black woman. And from the Eastern Cape, no less, where South Africa raises, from the depths of hardship, giants in all areas of life. Neither is she celebrated only as the wife of a fine rugby player, nor as the mother of three children, two of whom carved careers in international sport. Tsotsobe is, in her own right, in her tall, confident, focused, serious, smiling self, in the very fact of her life, formidable.
As someone who was born into a time when millions like her had their lives systematically broken by evil engineered to do exactly that, she had no choice. She had to stand tall, confident, focused and serious or, like so many others, be broken.
So did another Tsotsobe, Anthony, who was among three members of uMkhonto We Sizwe, or the Spear of the Nation, the armed wing of the then outlawed, now ruling African National Congress (ANC), who were condemned to death for high treason in 1981 after, in 1980, attacking a police station and a state-owned oil-from-gas installation. Their sentence was commuted to life imprisonment in 1983, when they were moved from death row to Robben Island, the infamous prison off the coast of Cape Town where Nelson Mandela, the world's most renowned political prisoner, spent 18 of his 27 years behind bars.
The head of the snake was chopped off in 1994, when for the first time South Africans of all races exercised the right to vote. But apartheid's scaly carcass writhes still, its coils stunting the lives of the generation born of those it had lawfully subjugated, violated, imprisoned and murdered.
Living while black in South Africa's cities remains an unfairly heavy burden, and exponentially more so in the black residential areas, where the mass media rarely go, where police are part of the problem rather than the solution, and where politicians pitch up only every few years trying to secure votes with promises and T-shirts, both of questionable quality. Anthony Tsotsobe is a case in point. He was released in 1991 and served as a bodyguard for Mandela and other ANC luminaries. On September 2, 2001, the night before what would have been his 47th birthday, he was shot dead in front of his house in Soweto.
Authority and needs don't disappear because they have been abdicated and unmet. Sometimes they end up in the wrong hands. Other times good people stop the buck. People like Dorothy Tsotsobe, who in 2004 capped her career in sport by becoming the first woman to serve on the South African Rugby Union's presidents' council, the game's highest authority in this country.
Three years earlier she achieved something more impressive. Prejudice has poisoned all of South Africa's communities, not just the white component. Women playing rugby? In the Eastern Cape, where black men have kept rugby's heart beating for longer than anyone has been alive? Who did she think she was establishing rugby for women in KwaMagxaki, a black area in Port Elizabeth?
"Some men [on club executives] don't want to be told by a woman what to do," she said in 2017. "They are holding on to the African mentality that women have no say; only men must speak." In 2012 parents were in her firing line: "When a child is in a [formerly white] model C school the parents will attend all the activities. But if the child is in a [black] township school you hardly see parents watching their own kids playing or attending meetings. We will always complain that there is development in other areas while we are not promoting sport and events or programmes in our areas, and complaining about crime and substance abuse. What are we doing to combat these challenges?"
Tsotsobe's daughter, Nomsebenzi, played in South Africa's inaugural women's rugby international, against Wales in May 2004, and was named captain for the next match of that series a week later. Now 41, she became the team's manager in May last year.
She was an imposing presence on the flank. Her father, Toto, sped down the touchline on the wing for the Leopards, the black national team during South Africa's racially riven past. He played against the British and Irish Lions in 1974, for an Invitation XV against France the next year, and against the All Blacks the year after that. Also in 1974, he was part of a squad that - unusually for black representative teams of that era - was let out of the country. Toto Tsotsobe scored three tries in the six games the Leopards played in Italy.
These are a few of the bare bones in the immense body of work the Tsotsobe family has done for sport, much of it against the grain of what it meant and still means to be black in South Africa. To be born healthy, to grow up strong, to garner an education, to earn decent money, to forge a life - simply to survive - was and is far more difficult for black South Africans than it is for whites. Democracy has succeeded apartheid as the law of the land, but not as the everyday reality. We have achieved little in the past 26 years besides making a pitifully small percentage of blacks as affluent as most whites.
Not only did the Tsotsobes survive. They prospered, in a community rather than a material sense. And so others prospered, too. If a Tsotsobe was involved, you knew what needed to be done would be done. And done well. They are firmly among the giants the Eastern Cape has produced, an honour roll that includes Mandela.
But mention the Tsotsobe name outside of the province now and none of those good things are evoked. Instead, because of the choices made by a single member of the family, there is cutting disapproval and the stink of fecklessness.
Here it comes, what you might have been waiting for since the second word of this piece: