On online chat rooms around South Africa, people are expressing their anger that Hansie was turned into the fall guy for something many prominent cricketers are known to do. Special Correspondent BINYAVANGA WAINAINA pays the tribute that the media still withholds

These were few, but they were addictive. What beats watching Mandela walking out of jail? Or watching him speak for the first time as president? Or winning the Africa Nations Cup? The Rugby World Cup?

Sport was where the magic was pure. Instant gratification, instant results. After apartheid, politics seemed to have become terribly boring. Soccer and rugby provided the drama: the messy administration, the race wars, the big trophies. Cricket somehow managed to escape scandal and become the sport that worked, despite its lack of big trophies. For, of course, there was Hansie.

Cricket is the summer game in South Africa. We would come out to sunlight as summer began, and everywhere, you could hear the cricket jingles. Lithe young girls sunbathed in bikinis at Centurion Park, you saw spectators on TV having picnics and barbeques. Everybody dressed in shorts and bright colours. The cricket team made us think of sunshine and youth.

Hansie was only 25 when he was made the captain of the Proteas in 1994, a year South Africa wrapped in magic. The youngest man ever to lead the national team, he immediately stamped his authority on the game as a selfless, hardworking captain. He led by example. The Sports Science Institute in Cape Town declared that he was South Africa's fittest sportsman. Not many would have bet on that title going to a cricketer.

Hansie also came without baggage. His family were liberal Afrikaners. While at university, his father had refused to join the Broederbond, the secret Afrikaans society that managed apartheid.

The year he was selected as captain, he had turned to religion after a young black girl was killed when he was driving in Durban in 1994. Strangely, the same year he seriously considered accepting $10,000 to persuade the team to throw a match.

The cricket team was fondly referred to as Hansie and the Boys, though many of the "boys" were much older than Cronje. It was never implied by anybody that Hansie was a boy. He was serious, often it seemed that he had no sense of humour. Everything about him seemed geared to portray honour, incorruptibility. Even when he was paid money to sell us something on TV, his smile seemed forced, he was so embarrassed to play the advertising game. Once, he was the guest star on a well-known talk show hosted by the late Oliver Tambo's sleek and effeminate son, Dali. Dali patted him on the hand, and simpered, "Oh Hansie, all the girls must want to kiss you."

Hansie's jaw clenched and unclenched, his smile pasted on to his face. He blushed. We all told ourselves, "Ah! Why don't they just leave him alone, these spin-doctors and public relations people. Can't they see he is pure? Can't they just let him play cricket?"

We read in the newspapers how his inner circle on the cricket team had a Bible study every night while on tour. They did not go out and get drunk and cause havoc like the rugby players. They did not get into fights in nightclubs like the Pakistani cricket team.

So it was eternal high noon for Hansie and the Boys. Their sun shone so brightly, the country hardly listened when activists made noise about the lily-whiteness of the team. When the first black player, Makhaya Ntini, was charged with rape, the stadiums remained full, the songs continued to play.

If you walk in any black township on a Sunday afternoon, you will see young kids playing cricket. It has become the game for the new black South African.

Then the Indian police charged him with match fixing in April 2000. If Hansie had decided to deny everything, we would have been ready to believe him. The press had already made much about the inefficiency of the Indian authorities. Even faced with proof, we would have refused to believe it possible that Hansie Cronje would deal with sleazy people like match-fixers.

But unlike other cricketers around the world, Hansie confessed. Later, he said greed made him do it. Not the devil, or blackmail, or family pressure, or a sick grandmother, or a nervous condition. 

Greed, the love of money. 

Truth had no currency in South Africa at the time. People went to testify to the Truth Commission and lied. They lied even when proof was presented to them. Many victims of the worst excesses of apartheid had waited for years to hear the truth, and now files were found to be missing, lawyers hedging, experts becoming ignorant, generals not knowing what their troops did. Even FW De Klerk was accused by many of been less than forthcoming with the whole truth. 

But Hansie confessed. 

For the first time, the sun stopped shining on the Proteas, because this batsman, who played spin better than anybody, refused to play spin-doctor. And cricket had failed again. Rugby's seminal moment was when Mandela wore the rugby jersey, and the country won the World Cup. The entire country had one emotion that night. Soccer did the same by winning the African Nations Cup, and qualifying for the World Cup. Cricket had only acquired the undivided attention of the entire country twice. When 10 seconds of mind-boggling incompetence cost them the World Cup (when Herschelle Gibbs, showing off, dropped Australian captain Steve Waugh, on 20, and Waugh went on to make 100); and when Hansie confessed that he had cheated and lied and been bribed.

The day he confessed, I was having lunch at a friend's restaurant in Cape Town. I wandered into the newsroom of a local paper in the afternoon pretending to have something to do, but really fishing for more news. One of the photographers who had shot his face at the press conference crossed the newsroom waving the photograph at me in triumph. Like many Muslim people, like many people of Indian origin, like many black people, he resented the blind support the press gave Hansie, even when the evidence against him was blatant. Even after the transcript of the tapes had been released, the press continued to give him the benefit of the doubt.

Many people would say: "Oh, even Mandela had to prove himself pure, to be the redeemed communist, the changed terrorist. The media refused to take him at his word until he proved to them that his motives were pure." In South Africa, black leaders, however clean-cut, are not received with unreserved faith by the predominantly white-controlled media.

The newsroom was divided. Some people huddled together in disbelief, some in triumph. Then the photographer crossed over to wave his picture of Hansie at a white journalist. The guy smacked the photo aside. A bitter row ensued.

Hansie Cronje died in a plane crash on the morning of Saturday, June 1. He was on his way to meet his wife in a private plane belonging to friends of his.

In an interview with the South African Sunday Times, Hansie Cronje's mother suggested that her son's pain as the "hero to zero" of South Africa was finally over. Most people who do what Hansie did get away with it. Not Hansie.

South African cricketers are notoriously bad players of spin. South African cricket, for years the country's PR success story, was unable to play the bowling that started with a vicious googly from the Indian police, and ended with the dramatic death of the chosen villain, Hansie Cronje. The South African cricket team has been on a losing streak for the past few months, the first sustained losing streak since 1994.

On online chat rooms around the country, people are expressing their anger that Hansie had to take the blame for something many prominent cricketers are known to do. That Hansie was turned into the fall guy. In his home town, Bloemfontein, a city bigger than Mombasa, there is a shortage of roses. Ordinary people are showing their support for. his family by buying up all the available flowers in town. Not many leader's funerals get shown live on South African television and radio. Not many leaders' funerals get shown live on South African television and radio. Hansie's funeral service was held in Grey College, where he was once the head boy. It is a mark of how much people think of him that his old school chose to see Hansie as a hero. They didn't need to; Grey College has more sports luminaries than any other school in South Africa.

While the media continues to suggest that Hansie had not yet redeemed himself, the cricketing public has already decided that he had.

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Binyavinga Wainaina, an author and journalist, is currently based in Nakuru, Kenya.