Heath Streak was loved, and he knew it

Heath Streak didn't die wondering what people thought of him. They thought the world of him, which they said when his death was erroneously reported on August 23. The warm tributes brimmed with admiration and came from the length and breadth of the game.

It is to be hoped some of that warmth stayed with Streak until the early hours of Sunday morning, when he did, in fact, die. He was surrounded by love from far and wide and, most importantly, near. Streak was taken, with a cruelty that should make atheists of all of us, just more than six months short of a half-century in a life that, had it endured, would have left the world a better place than he had already made it.

To know that a man who stood 1.84 metres tall and had shoulders to match, who played the last of his 175 first-class matches - in a total of 588 games of all descriptions - not quite 16 years ago, who was unarguably Zimbabwe's greatest allrounder and easily among world cricket's finest in his era, a man whose heart was as big as he was, could be taken down by cancer revealed as recently as May this year is to feel the rise of an anger made all the more terrible by its futility. How dare it.

Streak, born on March 16, 1974, was a huntin', fishin', shootin' boy from Bulawayo, a slow, sleepy, sprawling place of sunshine, shadows and melancholy. Actually, Streak was from a farm near Nyathi, 100 kilometres north of Zimbabwe's second city. If you have a decent grip on southern African politics you would feel entitled to assume much about him from those two short sentences.

He was the scion of one of the white families who, in the view of millions inside the country and out, owned land illegitimately and were propped up by a racist post-colonial government elected largely by whites to oppress the black majority. Enough of those millions believed that sufficiently strongly to wage war against the forces of that government. The conflict, which claimed around 20,000 lives, started almost 10 years before Streak was born and ended when he was five.

His father, Denis, played cricket for a country called Rhodesia. Heath played cricket for a country called Zimbabwe. They were, and are, the same country, of course. They are also as different from each other as two countries could be. Place and street names and laws have been changed, but you can smell the mingled stink of stale racism and fresh oppression on those renamed streets. Streak was a product of a society ripped apart by fear and hate. Yet, he became the embodiment of the best Zimbabwe and Zimbabweans could be.

Which is not to dismiss the elephant from the room: Streak died a fixer. In April 2021 the