IN MY VIEW | Go well, Bhuti Temba Ludwaba. We will finish what you started

There is a small boy standing on the bank at the Dan Qeqe Stadium.

The dust is rising. The crowd is roaring.

And out on that field is a lock forward who moves like a mountain that learnt to run.

That boy was me.

I did not know it then, but I was not just watching a rugby player.

I was watching the man who would shape my life.

Bhuti Temba Ludwaba groomed us.

He was my hero.

I followed him from Dan Qeqe to the Adcock Stadium, to Spring Rose, just to be near the sort of man I wanted to become.

When I had the opportunity to play for Spring Rose myself, I found stars and heroes there: Wilfred Khovu, Bruno Mbula, Zola Yeye, Lucky Mange, Makaya Jack.

But Bhuti Temba stood out among them, in the way he worked, the discipline, the drive, the motivation.

Up close, I watched how hard he trained, how he prepared, in the small things no-one else was watching.

That is where the hero in the stands became the man who groomed us.

Fifty years ago, in a final in Cape Town, he converted a penalty from 75m out, a kick people in this province still speak of like scripture.

They called him a man mountain. The bravest heart on the field.

But the truest thing about Temba Ludwaba was never the kicks or the tries.

There was no television to capture that kick.

No social media to carry it.

In those days, a man’s name travelled through the mouths of the people lucky enough to have stood in that crowd.

Story by story, fire by fire, his name reached us long before any of us ever saw him play.

In established rugby, there was one name spoken with that kind of reverence: Frik du Preez.

In our townships and villages, there was only one name too.

Temba Ludwaba. The same power. The same command of a rugby field.

The only difference was that one of them was given a Springbok jersey to prove it.

Bhuti Temba played his rugby on a ground that his community built with their own hands, lit by the headlights of borrowed cars, because the people in power would not give black men a field to stand on.

Every match he played was an act of defiance, proof that greatness did not ask apartheid for permission.

When his playing days ended, most men would have rested.

Bhuti Temba did not.

He spent 18 years driving to schools and clubs no-one else bothered to visit, all of it focused on rugby development, finding boys no-one else thought to look for.

He kept doing it into his 70s.

Long after the crowds forgot his name, he was still out there, still believing in some child before that child knew how to believe in himself.

I was one of those children.

In 2014, I started the Mzwandile Mali Schools Rugby Tournament, and I went to the men who had carried this game through its hardest years.

Lucky Mange came. Monde Duru came. Bomza Nkohla came. And Bhuti Temba came.

He never stopped coming.

Even when the walk from the car to the touchline had become a battle of its own, he made that walk, just to sit with us and watch our boys play.

This year, he saw that tournament reach 60 schools across seven towns.

I remember inviting him to speak to all the captains from across the tournament.

He was already in a wheelchair by then, but it did not matter.

He sat before them and was inspirational.

It was not only what he said. It was how he carried himself, the quiet dignity in every word.

Those boys will never forget his demeanour, and neither will I.

And this year, we took the step he had been preparing us for all along.

We launched the Mzwandile Mali Schools Rugby Champions League: 138 schools, 14 zones, from Gqeberha to Komani, to Dimbaza, to Mthatha.

A child in a village who has never seen a city stadium can now dream the same dream I once dreamed on the bank at Dan Qeqe.

That dream did not arrive on its own. Bhuti Temba planted it.

There would, at last, be one more thing.

Decades after his playing days ended, Bhuti Temba stood with Lucky Mange and the other stalwarts of that era and was finally handed a Springbok jersey of his own.

I was not in that room. But I have seen how they wear those blazers since, the way they carry them, the way a man sits a little straighter in one.

Grown men, I am told, wept like boys that day.

It could not undo what apartheid had stolen from them, but it answered it, finally, out loud: we see you, we always saw you, you were Springboks long before anyone gave you the jersey to prove it.

Wounds 50 years deep began, that day, to heal.

Bhuti Temba, I do not know how a man repays a debt this size.

You sacrificed everything so that Siya Kolisi, Batho Hlekani, Onwabe Tanana and Ndinani Tyuka can pass the ball to the next Temba Ludwaba.

So I will do what you taught me.

I will keep building. Sixty schools will become more. Fourteen zones will become more.

And every child who runs onto a field in a township or a village from here on will be running on ground you cleared for them.

Rest now, Bhuti Temba.

You carried this game, and you carried us, for 81 years.

Hamba kahle, Bhuti Temba. Lala ngoxolo, qhawe lethu.

Go well, our hero. We will finish what you started.

Lincoln Mali is the founder of the Mzwandile Mali Schools Rugby Champions League and the Lincoln Mali Leadership Foundation