The duo that has taken rural Limpopo to the world

As he made his way off the track, knowing that he’d won Team SA’s first athletics medal of the 2026 Commonwealth Games, Masala Makatu was caught up in a whirlpool of noise, backslapping and a media scrum as he negotiated his way through the mixed zone and into the safety of his support staff.

For the 20-year-old from Limpopo, a product of the Rivoni School For The Blind, it was a slightly bewildering and definitely new, experience. He has had very limited vision in both eyes, blind in his left and some sight in his right and with the television cables and metal dividers in the media zone, he was in danger of tripping.

Led through by the arm by people he’d never met before, he found the person at the end of the line, a safety net for the youngster who had just won silver medal in a time of 11.04sec. That person was his coach, Shery James and Team SA para-athletics coach Jason Sewanyana.

There, he was warmly embraced and then taken through the zone to continue his journey. That journey is both in life and as an athlete and the fact he’s able to call himself a Commonwealth Games silver medallist is largely down to James.

If her name sounds familiar it’s because it is. She is a medallist from the 2020 Tokyo Paralympics, a 2024 Paralympian and still a para-athlete running for her country.

“We started a club in Limpopo called Isability to find potential, because we know it’s there and we know that it’s not being developed,” James said after completing her own Commonwealth Games campaign in the Scotstoun Stadium.

“I remember the day I first saw Makatu. It was a rainy day, pouring with rain actually. The learners from the Rivoni School For The Blind climbed out of a taxi and he just ran. He did the 100m, the 200m, the 400m without evening warming up properly and he just had the X-factor.

“He took all his classmates and he warmed them up and he was initiating all of that. And the runs themselves were decent enough for us to say, ‘this guy’s got something’ and then we started working for him.

It was purely serendipity that Makatu and James hooked up. His version is that as an 18-year-old from Makhitha village in the Kutama area, his teachers set him a task. “They told me to run as fast as possible and come straight back. Within minutes, I was back and they were very surprised. That same afternoon, they took me to the sports field to compete with others during training and I outran them all.”

Things took off, quickly. Last year he won a silver medal at the Dubai World Para Athletics Grand Prix 2025 on his first trip outside of South Africa. “I never thought a rural boy like me would one day go places through athletics,” he said.

A few months later he created more headlines at the 2026 Toyota SASAPD Nationals in Stellenbosch, which is where he qualified for the Commonwealth Games in the T12. “The club took him for classification when we were in Dubai last year because we know his potential and we also know how long the classification process takes. I’ve worked intensely with him since the end of 2024,” James said.

Of her own career path, she said: “My coaching career started out of necessity, that’s the only way of describing it. We’ve got a throws coach who has Level 2 ASA and we are developing our coaches so that they can go into areas where we can’t reach.”

Makatu’s Glasgow experience will earn James R10 000 as coach while Makatu receives R50 000. She shies away from taking credit though. “It’s 100% his medal and it’s his work that he put in. It’s a privilege to have been a part of that, for him to achieve what he has.”

The dynamic of being a current international para-athlete and having to coach one would invariably test the border, and patience, of looking after oneself’s interests and the students’. “You just have to put him first. You don’t always get it right and it’s been clear in my performances that having to focus on him has contributed to my own decline in form and results. But you manage.”

James is hopeful that his performance in Glasgow will open up new funding opportunities from Limpopo province and other support systems. He’s come a long way in a short time. He is thankful to the support he has received from Jumping Kids and the Department of Sport, Arts and Culture.

“From the start his goal has been not one Paralympics but two or three, from 2028. He’s got a time in mind so right now is not the times he’s aiming for, this is just his start. Last year at his first GAPS camp I told him his goal is to run a sub-11 seconds and he’s hit 11, which is world-class. And he can go faster … he’s definitely shown the potential to do so.”

Makatu says of James: “We’re like brother and sister. We share the same wavelength and basically everything else. If she loses, if she wins, I think ‘my coach lost, I mustn’t lose’ or ‘I lost, my coach mustn’t lose’. It’s how I build my motivation because we’re both athletes but she’s also my coach and I’m her athlete.”

Makatu is a beneficiary of the Commonwealth Sport’s GAPS programme (Gather, Adjust, Prepare, Suatain) and James said they reached out to it “out of desperation. I coach myself and have managed myself for the last four years. I coach Masala and our club has other para-athletes as well. Few coaches are prepared to work with disabled athletes, they’re scared of us, because we need adaption in how we train. He’s a natural athlete, so it’s been easy to learn, easy to adapt and easy to make mistakes!”.

Not that many, mind you. A Commonwealth Games silver medal is proof of their work. One imagines it’s just the beginning of something even more special.