Cape City, South Africa – One morning in December 1967, jail warders strode into Robben Island’s Cell Block 4 with a soccer and randomly selected two groups of 11.
Whereas strolling to the grassless pitch that they had cleared themselves, the prisoners unexpectedly mentioned techniques and got here up with names for his or her groups: Bucks would play Rangers within the maximum-security jail’s first-ever organised soccer match.
The gamers have been rusty, malnourished and exhausted from their backbreaking work within the island’s slate quarry. Barefoot, and carrying their khaki jail uniforms, in addition they needed to take care of a vicious summer season southeaster that whipped throughout Cape City’s Desk Bay.
“The game was riddled with poor passes … and the men’s lack of stamina and match fitness were obvious,” Chuck Korr and Marvin Chase wrote in Extra Than Only a Recreation: Soccer vs Apartheid. “None of this mattered to the players or the fans. For them, it was the most exciting event that had ever taken place on Robben Island.”
Not one of the 22 gamers concerned that morning might have imagined that tons of of Robben Island prisoners would go on to take part in organised soccer leagues for the subsequent 23 years.
Anti-apartheid chief and former South African President Nelson Mandela – who died 10 years in the past on Tuesday – burdened that the conquer apartheid was a collective one. And the position of the Makana Soccer Affiliation (MFA) is a narrative of such perseverance and unity that also resounds right now.
In 1961, a 12 months after white policemen massacred no less than 69 Black protesters at Sharpeville, apartheid Prime Minister Verwoerd started sending political prisoners to Robben Island, a small outcrop surrounded by shark-infested waters and within the shadow of Desk Mountain.
Verwoerd’s authorities noticed to it that circumstances have been abominable. Simply attending to the island was an ordeal: prisoners have been shackled collectively and tossed into the maintain of the boat which might take them the 10km (6 miles) from Cape City harbour. By the point they arrived on the island, they have been stumbling and coated in each other’s vomit.
Dikgang Moseneke, who was 15 years outdated when he was despatched to the island in 1963, informed Al Jazeera that it was the primary time he ever noticed the ocean.
Apartheid was a extremely legislated racial pecking order, with whites on the high and Black Africans on the very backside. This permeated each facet of life, each out and in of jail. Moseneke and the tons of of different Black prisoners have been allowed to put on solely shorts – a reminder that they have been simply “boys” – and have been pressured to scramble for sandals from a communal pile each morning. “You were lucky if you got a left and a right shoe,” Moseneke remembers. “Never mind the right size”.
Reluctant to spend any cash on individuals they seen as “terrorists”, the federal government decreed that the prisoners ought to construct their cells with rocks minimize by their very own arms. Till then, they might be crammed into the crumbling buildings constructed by the British. Work within the quarry was gruelling, Moseneke recalled, and the boys have been pressured to endure frequent beatings by the white guards. However being subsequent to the ocean was uplifting – and the lengthy hours spent toiling collectively within the solar additionally gave an opportunity to speak and to organise.
“The biggest mistake the authorities made was to put us all together in that slate quarry,” former inmate Sedick Isaacs informed the Greater than Only a Recreation docudrama based mostly on the MFA earlier than his dying in 2012. Moseneke agrees: “They could have spread us across the prison system. I was 15, I would have been smashed and abused. Instead, I was put in a warm environment of learning and revolution.”
Robben Island introduced collectively political activists from completely different events and areas of South Africa. Most prisoners got here from both the African Nationwide Congress (ANC) of Nelson Mandela or the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), of which Moseneke was a member.
In an try and reclaim their humanity, the prisoners campaigned for the best to training and the best to recreation. Soccer was an obsession for a lot of inmates, and whereas they waited to play correct matches, that they had clandestine kickabouts of their cells.
“We made soccer balls with anything. Pieces of rag. Paper. Anything,” Tony Suze, who went on to grow to be one of many league’s star gamers, remembers within the docudrama.
The prisoners knew that presenting a united entrance was important. For months on finish, they made use of the official complaints channel to submit an equivalent demand: “We request the right to play football on the weekends.”
They have been roundly ignored – till they launched into a starvation strike in 1967. After 18 days of consuming solely water, with lots of the males in dire bodily situation, the authorities – with the Worldwide Pink Cross respiratory down their necks – blinked first.
The prisoners might play soccer, supplied they funded the complete train from the pittance they have been paid for his or her work within the quarry.
The chief warder was satisfied that soccer can be a short-lived fad.
“In his white supremacist eyes,” Korr and Chase wrote, “not only were the prisoners too physically weak, they were also far too undisciplined to organise regular matches”.
The prisoners had different concepts. On the sphere, gifted gamers like Suze and Dimake “Pro” Malepe took it upon themselves to enhance the talents and conditioning of the boys. Off the sphere, intellectuals like Moseneke and Isaacs set about organising a proper league based on FIFA rules.
They determined to call it the Makana Soccer Affiliation after a Xhosa warrior-prophet who drowned whereas making an attempt to flee Robben Island in 1820.
“We decided to run it properly,” says Moseneke, who was unanimously elected as chairman of the MFA when he was simply 20 years outdated. “We kept laborious minutes. We had a log which we produced every week. We had a referees’ association. We held disciplinary hearings.”
Moseneke, who was learning regulation by correspondence, was chosen to write down the MFA’s structure. Little did he know that 20-odd years later, he can be writing one other structure.
The gamers divided themselves into groups and designed kits for themselves, which have been duly ordered from the mainland. Eight golf equipment have been fashioned, principally alongside political strains. The prize for the perfect identify should go to Ditshitshidi (actually “Bedbugs”) and their unforgettable conflict cry: “Bedbugs will not let you sleep, they are a bother you can’t wish away.”
By far essentially the most profitable membership, nevertheless, was Suze’s Manong FC, which admitted gamers of all political persuasions. Their on-field successes carried an necessary political message to the boys of Robben Island: collaborate or perish.
For the groups in A Division, successful was paramount. However for the organisers of the MFA, it was necessary that everybody who needed to play obtained an opportunity. To this finish, they created three divisions and inspired coaches to present all of their gamers – even “hopeless” footballers like Isaacs – an opportunity.
On this spirit of inclusion, prisoners additionally launched a rugby league (the Springboks’ inspirational captain Siya Kolisi hails from an extended and proud custom of Black rugby within the Japanese Cape province), constructed their very own tennis courts, and even organised a Robben Island Olympics.
After all, there have been challenges. On many a Saturday, the warders merely refused to permit the boys out of their cells to play. And in 1970, a bunch of gifted footballers led by Suze left their very own golf equipment to type the Atlantic Raiders.
It was, says Moseneke with a smile, “very similar to what’s happening with LIV Golf … Except there was no money involved, only ego.”
Tom Eaton, who obtained to know 5 of the boys concerned whereas writing the screenplay for the Greater than Only a Recreation, mentioned the episode nonetheless stood out for the boys, 26 years after the actual fact.
“Suze was unrepentant, but I got the feeling from the others that the affair was seen as a threat to the overarching goal of the MFA which was to present a totally united front to the white supremacist government to prove that they were a bureaucracy in waiting,” Eaton informed Al Jazeera.
Within the early Seventies, soccer on the island gave the impression to be on its means out, as gamers obtained older and/or have been launched from jail. By some means, the MFA managed to climate this storm till 1976, when the aftermath of the Soweto rebellion noticed tons of of latest prisoners being despatched to the island – lots of whom have been younger, match and good at soccer.
The MFA, and the Robben Island group basically, got a brand new lease of life, and organised soccer was performed on the island till the jail was closed in 1990.
A long-lasting legacy
Very high-profile prisoners like Mandela, Walter Sisulu and Robert Sobukwe have been housed in separate components of the island and never allowed to participate in organised sports activities. However, says Moseneke, “they came to know about it, they could hear the cheers every Saturday morning”.
The MFA included many gamers who would go on to play distinguished roles within the new South Africa. After his launch in 1973, Moseneke certified as a lawyer – he represented Mandela’s spouse Winnie in her frequent run-ins with the apartheid authorities.
Throughout the democratic transition within the early Nineteen Nineties, he was considered one of eight individuals chosen to write down the structure of South Africa, and in 2005 he was appointed Deputy Chief Justice. Jacob Zuma – a skilful defender who attended a literacy class given by Moseneke – was elected president of South Africa in 2009.
And Isaacs went on to grow to be an internationally famend professor of medical informatics.
Eaton was struck by “how incredibly generous, compassionate and charismatic all five men were. They were genuinely upset about some of the young white warders who had committed suicide.”
And he couldn’t assist however discover that “most of them had stayed in community service, especially working with children” however all of them appeared to have left energetic politics: “There wasn’t a political slogan among them.”
“Soccer wasn’t the only thing we had,” says Moseneke. “We had book clubs, we had chess clubs, we could study.”
However, he stresses, “soccer was the biggest thing in town and the only thing that got us out of prison clothes. Every single Saturday we re-engaged with ourselves and became these freedom fighters who would ultimately overcome. Soccer was the most prominent way of saying ‘we shall overcome’.”
