Although he was scarcely seen after the warm-ups, this was Makhaya Ntini’s day. On a different continent it is not a good time to be a black sporting icon, but here in South Africa millions were with Ntini on Wednesday as he joined that exclusive club of cricketers who have represented their country 100 times. Not just on Wednesday, either: the silent majority have been with him every step of his long walk to freedom.

It was a batting day, so Ntini spent it in the dressing room. The only sight of him on the pitch was a sprayed-on image on the outfield, finger raised, grinning, with the phrase "Inqaba Makhaya" underneath. It translates from the Xhosa as "Champion Makhaya" and a champion, if a slightly underrated one, he has surely been.

Inevitably, the colour of Ntini’s skin has been a blessing and a curse. A blessing because he has been afforded the kind of international opportunities and patience that might — only might — not have come his way had he not been black; a curse because that knowledge has sometimes camouflaged his achievements as a cricketer, rather than as a black cricketer. It is time he was given his due.

To have played 100 Test matches as a quick bowler — white, brown, black or yellow — in the modern game is a magnificent achievement. Just ask, say, Andrew Flintoff, Darren Gough or Jason Gillespie, fast bowlers with as much talent as Ntini but without the hardness of body to enable them to cope with the problems thrown up by a sport that is increasingly batsman-friendly. The treadmill, the training, Twenty20, the requirement to dive around the outfield, all take their toll, weakening bones and dulling the mind. For sure, Ntini, 32, is not as quick as he was — but he is still going.

Nature and nurture blessed Ntini with a body for all tasks: copious fast-twitch muscle fibres gave him pace to and through the crease; a cruiserweight’s build; powerful thighs and glutes to protect his back against an unorthodox action; a boyhood spent on his feet, herding cattle and sheep and running with the wild horses in the hills of his native Eastern Cape, gave him stamina in abundance. "I once thought he was made of titanium and carbon fibre," Richard Pybus, a former coach of Ntini, said this week. ’s such a phenomenal athlete."

Heart and spirit, without which no fast bowler can flourish, have accompanied these natural talents.

He was picked for four series before he had his first taste of Test cricket in March 1998 and the gibes and slurs that accompanied his early selection cannot have been easy to live with, nor the rape charge that came later and of which he was acquitted. There have been other black fast bowlers who promised to share the load, but Monde Zondeki was not quite good enough and Mfuneko Ngam’s body was not strong enough. Ntini was left to carry the torch alone.

While the South African authorities were desperate for a black cricketer to act as the role model and to be a champion of transformation, there is no doubt that the embarrassment of obvious over-promotion would have been far worse than not having a role model at all. Most international players have enough on their plates dealing with their own expectations and those of their friends and families, never mind a nation. Ntini has carried the load magnificently.

If there were doubts early on as to the merits of his inclusion, these were swiftly dealt with. His slippery pace and unorthodox style — jumping wide of the crease, a legacy of his spiked boots not agreeing with the concrete pitches of his youth — have caused problems for a generation of Test batsmen, so that before the start of Wednesday’s match only seven fast bowlers in the history of the game had taken more than his 388 Test wickets. His coup de théâtre came at Lord’s in 2003, when he took ten wickets in the match and, in an image high on resonance, knelt and kissed the turf.

It is important to celebrate Ntini’s achievements in their own right, but it is unquestionably more important still to place them in context.

He was not the first black cricketer of note in South Africa because historians have recently shattered the myth that cricket played no role in the non-white community pre-apartheid. In the Western and Eastern Capes and Natal, cricket was strong within the black communities — but not strong enough to resist those who used sport to build rather than break down barriers.

A little more than a century ago the Ntini of his day was called "Krom" Hendricks, a loose-limbed, extremely fast bowler who, those of an unprejudiced mentality agreed, ought to have represented South Africa on merit. It was his misfortune to be playing in the Cape about the time that colonial policy, dictated by Cecil Rhodes, was shifting from integration to segregation, by virtue of the Glen Grey Act, which reduced the amount of land owned by blacks, so giving a stimulus to the numbers of black labourers available for the mines.

Hendricks, scandalously, was not selected for the 1894 tour to England, even after agreeing under duress to accept the role of baggage handler to appease those who were uncomfortable with the thought of a black man being a bona fide member of the team. After that disgrace, he was drummed out of provincial and league cricket.

From that point South Africa travelled down the long, dark cul-de-sac of all-white selection until the promotion of Omar Henry, the left-arm spinner, in 1992.

Like it or not, then (and in this regard, Ntini is more Tiger Woods than Muhammad Ali), Ntini has been playing for the generations who were denied the opportunity to shine. Alongside him yesterday were Ashwell Prince and Hashim Amla, a Coloured and a Muslim, at the heart of this increasingly representative team. Still, there are too few black cricketers, and no black batsman of note yet. But there is no going back.