Ubuntu is the African philosophy that can be simplified as “I am because we are”. It means that nothing great ever achieved is done alone and it takes a community of people to be. Whimple is our community and the Whimple Cricket Club is where that community meets.
When the team takes the field it is made up of 11 players each with a role and an impact working together to win or lose – but all contributing to the game of cricket. But the team isn’t just made up of the playing XI. It is the 12th man, all the other players, the coaches, the scorers, the groundsmen, the administrators, the cooks, the friends and family who come to cheer their team along. It is the opposition who bring the same hubris to make the match. It’s the drivers that get the teams around, it’s the people who make the bats and balls and food. It is an ever-expanding circle of community. It is the joy, the pain, the interactions that we as humans need. I am because we are.
We at Ubuntu Wildlife Trust are very proud of our humble roots in Whimple and the community that has helped form us and created us. This has allowed us to connect across continents and have far reaching impacts in opposite hemispheres. Because of the people of Whimple, there is a football team in rural KwaZulu-Natal that gives young men a chance at friendship and a way out of negative cycles that could impact their families over lifetimes. There are rhinos alive and walking the savannahs and there are pangolins and cheetah that are being tracked for research. Because of the people of Whimple, there is growing data of new species distributions and potentially new species to science being recorded. We have big plans for 2023 and everything we achieve and every animal and person that is positively impacted can be traced right back to Whimple, and this club. In today’s social media world, it is so easy to take for granted the importance of authentic, real-life human interactions and their impact on mental well-being. It is easy to not see the forest for the trees on how these impacts radiate outwards and can change someone or somethings life on the other side of the world. What we have here at the Whimple Cricket Club is something special. Something that should be cherished, and something that should be grown even further.
It is the people of Whimple. It is the community that forms the bedrock of who we are. I am because we are.
