At 12.27 on the afternoon of May 31 1975, before a virtually all-white Republic Day crowd at Pietermaritzburg’s Jan Smuts stadium, a little-known road
runner from Lesotho named Gabashane Vincent Rakabaele raised his arms in triumph as he completed the 50th Comrades ultra-marathon. There was, however, no winner’s tape left to break — that job had been taken care of 34 minutes earlier by defending champion Derek Preiss — while the gold medals were long gone by the time the 26-year-old mine employee crossed the finish line in 20th place. Rakabaele’s run, although largely forgotten, remains a defining moment in the history of South African sport: 40 years after Robert Mtshali’s finish in 1935 went unrecognised because of his race, and 14 years before Samuel Tshabalala finally closed the circle by taking the title, it was Rakabaele who became the first-ever black runner to officially finish the Comrades — and receive a silver medal to prove it was all real.
Rakabaele and Qokweni had arrived at 5a Luther Street, Bloemfontein, together with my uncle, Lionel de Haas, who had driven them back from that year’s Two Oceans Marathon in Cape Town. In those years, when a black man and a white man could share the same dark and dirty mine shaft by day, but not a beer in the bar at night, Rakabaele, Qokweni and De Haas (who runs his 35th Comrades today), became friends because they worked together at the President Brand mine in Welkom — and because they loved to run.