Ashwell Prince is the latest South Africa cricketer to open up on the racial discrimination within the team during Social Justice and Nation Building Project hearings.
Prince, who played 66 Test matches for SA and scored 3665 runs averaging 41.64, revealed that he was tagged as a ‘quota player’.
“You think that you’re playing for your country, that you’re living a dream, but it was no dream.
I raised my bat to my parents, then to my wife on the other side of the stadium, and then, lastly and reluctantly, I raised my bat to my teammates.
If I had a choice, I wouldn’t have raised my bat to them. We weren’t a team.”
Prince stated.
Earlier, Paul Adams, who played 45 Tests for SA, had revealed that he was racially abused with nicknames such as ‘brown s*it‘ by his teammates, including the current coach Mark Boucher. A lot of other big names from South African cricket have been mentioned during the SJN hearings.
The SJN Advocate Dumisa Ntsebeza asserted “that those who were adversely mentioned during the course of the hearings will be afforded the opportunity to formally respond to such allegations”.
It is not the first time that allegations of racial abuse have rocked South Africa cricket. Several South African players from past and present have come forward in recent times to express the racial discrimination that goes on within the team.
Last year, the Black Lives Matter movement gave a platform to countless victims of racial abuse and started a discussion towards a change. The current pace bowler Lungi Ngidi showed his support to the campaign by taking a knee.
It proved to be the catalyst for the formation of the SJN project. Aaron Phangiso and Thami Tsolekile have shared their stories of discrimination from teammates and coaches during these hearings.
The next phase of hearings will resume from August 23, with the deadline for the submissions set as August 18.
