Niren Tolsi in conversation with Tara Weinberg and Tasneem Essop,
on race, class, identity and rainbow nationalism in South Africa and the cricket it plays.
In celebration of Writing Around the Wicket: Race, Class and history in South African Cricket, by Niren Tolsi.
Wednesday, 21 May 2025, 18:00
Humanities Graduate Centre Atrium, East Campus, Wits, Johannesburg.
RSVP: swop.events@wits.ac.za
Niren Tolsi is an award-winning journalist and recipient of the Ruth First Journalism Fellowship (2017-2018) and the Heinrich Böll Foundation Journalism Fellowship (2018). He is a research associate at the Society, Work and Politics Institute at the University of Witwatersrand.
Writing Around the Wicket – Race, Class and History in SA Cricket is his first book. His major work is the After Marikana slow journalism project which has evolved into regular reportage on the consequences of the 2012 Marikana massacre on the dead mineworkers families and surviving comrades, a major exhibition and public engagement programme at the 2022 National Arts Festival, pop-up exhibitions and outreach programmes with communities affected by extractive capitalism and political violence, and a podcast. Two books are scheduled to be published from this decade-long project.
Tolsi is one of the founding editors of the now defunct anti-media long-form and literary magazine, The Con. He has been published in various local and international media including the Mail & Guardian, Al Jazeera, The Guardian, Reportagen, The Cricket Monthly and Rolling Stone.
He turned to writing after failing miserably at playing cricket.
Dr Tara Weinberg is a Lecturer in the History Department at the University of Witwatersrand. Tara obtained their PhD in History from the University of Michigan in 2023. Tara’s research has focused on histories of land struggles and property law in South Africa. After playing cricket religiously from Age 5 to 17, mostly in boys’ teams in Cape Town, Tara took a two-decade break from the sport in an attempt to get away from some of the sexism they had experienced playing as a teenager. Over the last few years, Tara has returned to playing and watching cricket, as well as reading about it (thanks CLR James and now, Niren Tolsi). Slowly, Tara is falling back in love with the game and the telling of its political history.
Tasneem Essop is a researcher at the Society, Work and Politics Institute (Wits University), where she has been based since 2017. She works on the Popular Politics programme and has conducted research on community protests, the student movement, and electoral politics. Her broad research interests include work on political organisations, social movements, and popular politics.
