Cricket runs in the veins of Alex teacher
ALEXANDRA -– Alex educator Makhosazana Tshabalala just loves cricket which she says runs in her veins.
If you ever thought cricket only started running in the blood of women at the dawn of democracy, then an Alex teacher is living proof that it did not.
Cricket started running in the blood of Gordon Primary School teacher Makhosazana Tshabalala when she was still at secondary school in Soweto after she had fled Alexandra during the June 16 Soweto Uprisings in 1976.
Tshabalala said she fled Alex because the then apartheid regime was more brutal in Alex than in Soweto, as the police used to raid home by home to fish out the troublemakers. “Alex was a small township then and it was easy for the cops to hunt you down.
“When it all died down, I returned to Alex. I started feeling that cricket runs in my blood when I was in then JC [junior certificate] level which is now equal to Grade 10 as I wanted to play [cricket] then while at Alexandra Secondary School,” Tshabalala said.
But it was not to be until Tshabalala, now 62, an Alex born resident who has been teaching for the past 18 years, took up a teaching post at her former school, Emfundisweni Primary in 1983, a year after she matriculated at Thabo Secondary School in Soweto.
“I started coaching cricket four years [1986] later than the start of the Mini-Cricket Series in 1982 and I never looked back,” she told Alex News in an interview on the sidelines of the KFC Mini-Cricket Provincial Seminar at Wanderers Bull Ring.
One of her exceptional prodigies was the late Alex cricketer Walter Bafana Masemola who rose through the Mini-cricket Series ranks to become a Highveld Strikers cricketer. Masemola died in his sleep in London in April 2002.
“I love cricket and it runs in my veins. I was the one who instigated the idea that we should teach our children cricket while I was still an educator at Emfundisweni.”
