More Than Just a Game: Football v Apartheid

Shortly after the Sharpeville massacre, Lizo found himself in the back of a car with a group of young ANC comrades, being driven through Northern Rhodesia to join a secret MK military training camp – but the men were soon to discover that the existence of the camp and their journey to it was a fairly open secret. White Rhodesian policemen had been tipped off by South African security agents that Lizo and his compatriots were arriving upon their soil to be trained in terrorism. The young men were arrested and sent back into South Africa – into the less than welcoming arms of the security police, who subjected Lizo to the same regime of interrogation that Sedick had suffered.

One of the charges levelled against Lizo was that he had left South Africa without permission. Ironically, though at the time being transported back to the country in the custody of security agents, he was also charged with returning to South Africa without proper permission.

Marcus Solomon never even made it over the border. A few years older than Sedick Isaacs, he had also attended Trafalgar High. Like Sedick, the studious and intellectual Solomon was planning to become a teacher. The secret police, however, knew all about his extracurricular activities. Throughout 1964, white Cape Town newspapers had run scare stories about a particularly dangerous bunch of subversives, the Yu Chi Chan Club (the name came from a book on guerrilla warfare written by Chairman Mao), also known as the National Liberation Front.

In truth, the club’s numbers were small and its members more interested in discussing theories of resistance and how to build a socialist society than in training for armed struggle. However, given the fervent, almost paranoid anti-communism of the government and their fears of a militant communist China, it was easy for the press to portray the Yu Chi Chan Club as a genuine threat to a ‘free’ Christian capitalist South Africa. Security operatives put its members under constant surveillance.

Solomon and one of his comrades in the club were leaving the country to help raise support for their cause. They had established a connection with some members of the ANC, who had set up their departure, and were now in a car with Winnie Mandela and her driver, being taken to a rendezvous that would be the next step on their journey. They were stopped by security forces, who demanded that Marcus and his friend go with them. Mrs Mandela and her driver were allowed to go on their way.

By 1963, much of the leadership of the ANC and PAC were in detention or in exile but, as more men became actively involved in trying to bring down apartheid, so the security forces redoubled their efforts to sweep up the very youngest members of the ANC and PAC, to make sure they would not supply new forces for the struggle. The government mass-produced laws that allowed it to detain and imprison opponents for any number of new ‘offences’, which went well beyond the legally enshrined crimes of treason and sabotage. Due process no longer mattered to a government claiming to protect society from a communist revolution – even if the suspects were little more than children.

Across South Africa, in a Pretoria township, a young student called Tony Suze was playing football in his school playground. By his own admission, Tony was football mad. Abundantly skilled and very athletic, his schoolmates knew never to go into a game against him half-heartedly. He played hard and always to win, even if it was just a kickabout during break.

Tony was good enough to harbour hopes of making it into the top ranks of black South African football but, like Lizo the rugby player, he knew that, under apartheid, he would never stand a chance of playing for his country, or in a racially mixed team. South Africans played football as they lived – apart. White teams and leagues were given the best playing facilities and by far the most funding. Black and coloured teams had to battle hard just to win the right to gain land for their own football pitches.

Tony’s township school was tidy, if not pretty. The staff tried hard to make the students’ lives there as enriching as possible, but the truth was that Tony’s school, like all the other black township educational establishments across South Africa, was starved of cash and even the most basic resources, such as books and writing materials. In 1964, the apartheid government spent one-sixth of the amount it spent on each white child on a black child’s education. The state saw no sense in educating blacks: it would only give them knowledge and skills for employment they would never obtain, and might give them designs above their station.

Cruel first-hand experiences of injustices such as this inspired Tony to become an active youth member of the PAC – an organization which the apartheid government had banned in 1960, along with the ANC, as part of its clampdown on opposition.

That day, as Tony and his mates pretended to be Bobby Charlton, Pelé, and Di Stefano on their school pitch, an unmarked car cruised slowly to a stop outside the school fence. Two men in suits eased themselves out of the front seats and shaded their eyes from the hot sun. Tony spotted them walking towards the school gates and knew that the inevitable was about to happen.

Some days earlier, Tony had been off school, unwell. In the late afternoon, a classmate had come to his house, not to see how he was feeling but to warn him that the secret police had come into the school and had been asking about him. Maybe he should stay off for a few days. With typical defiance, Tony told his friend, ‘If they want me, they can have me.’

He went back to school, full of youthful bravado – and more than a little naïve. To his way of thinking, what did a couple of years behind bars matter when you were only a teenager, at the start of your life? When the security police came to take him away, Tony handed the football over to a friend, laughed, and followed them defiantly to the car.

Once the security services had extracted what information they could from the political prisoners, Sedick, Tony, Marcus, and Lizo were transferred to prisons around the country to await trial. For almost all of them, their trials were a formality. However good their lawyers were, however weak the government’s case, conviction was virtually guaranteed. After all, in the logic of apartheid, the men wouldn’t have been charged if they hadn’t been opponents of the state. Security officials did not make mistakes. The only important questions were: what would the prison sentence be and where would it be served?

From Caledon Square police HQ, Sedick was transferred to Pollsmoor Prison to await trial. Later to become home to Nelson Mandela after his transfer from Robben Island, this massive correctional facility was built to house as many as six thousand common-law prisoners. Its grey maze of corridors and barrel-shaped cells stood incongruously in the plush white Cape Town suburb of Tokai – not that Sedick could see any of its manicured lawns and swimming pools from his cell deep within the prison’s bowels.

There, Sedick took his mind off the pain and loneliness of detention by applying his curiosity and scientific knowledge to figuring out ways to dismantle the bars and escape. In conjunction with a fellow prisoner, Eddie Daniels, they bribed a guard to get a hacksaw and set up transportation for when they broke out of the cell.

To work on the bars undiscovered, they had to rely on the co-operation or at least silence of fellow activists. Dullah Omar frequently risked his personal safety and his career to act as attorney for many political prisoners, including Sedick. On one of his visits to Sedick, it became clear that the men in neighbouring cells were singing in order to mask the noise of the hacksaws at work on the bars. Dullah Omar was shocked and, when he recovered his composure, warned Sedick that the guards positively relished the opportunity to shoot escaping prisoners.

At no time did he ever suggest he would no longer act as Sedick’s attorney, even though he knew he could be accused of conspiracy if the escape plan were discovered. Dullah Omar continued to champion the politically oppressed and in 1994 was chosen by President Mandela to be the Minister of Justice in the first democratically elected government in South African history.

After weeks of work, Sedick and Eddie Daniels managed to loosen the grille but, a few days before the intended escape, a group of warders came through the cells banging on the bars to test them, and the loose grille was discovered. Allegedly, the search was the result of a common-law prisoner informing the warders that a hacksaw blade had been sold to a fellow common-law prisoner, and that the same prisoner had been seen talking to the political prisoners. However, the warders were as keen to avoid embarrassment as the prisoners were to avoid punishment. They concocted a story that the bars were faulty as a way of diverting blame from themselves and on to the contractors, who must have installed sub-standard equipment. The story may have precluded any direct reprisals on the would-be escapees but, from now on, as far as the guards were concerned, Sedick was a marked man.

When the trial of Sedick and his three co-defendants came up it was heard by two ‘assessors’ rather than a jury. The basis of the case against them was simply that, since explosives had been found in the car in which they were travelling, they were all guilty of conspiracy. Sedick decided not to take the stand, but his brother was called to testify and was asked to identify handwriting found on documents in the car. He pretended not to be certain whether it was Sedick’s writing, but the judge ruled that, if his own brother could not definitively deny that it was Sedick’s handwriting, then this failure must be construed as positive identification. As Sedick would discover on many occasions over the next couple of decades, surreally skewed logic was lodged at the heart of the apartheid sense of justice.

Sedick was sentenced to twelve years, and given a long lecture about letting down staff and students, past and present, at Trafalgar High School. He had to smile at the irony – it was staff at Trafalgar who had helped to stir his political awareness in the first place.

When Tony Suze’s case came to trial in Pretoria, he was astonished to be handed down a fifteen-year sentence for treason, sabotage, and crimes against the state rather than the couple of years he had been expecting. Despite his age, the courts had decided to make an example of him. Back in Cape Town, Marcus Solomon was given ten years for sedition and conspiracy, and Lizo Sitoto was given the longest sentence of all: a whole raft of charges levied against him resulted in a sentence of sixteen and a half years.

These four men – Sedick, Lizo, Tony, and Marcus – from different backgrounds and of different political affiliations, were soon to discover that they would serve their sentences in a place that was to be the site for a new security-service experiment. Concerned that the militants would turn other, common-law prisoners and make them sympathetic to the terrorist cause, the government had decided to behead the resistance movement and isolate its senior leaders, active members, and – potentially the most dangerous to the regime – its foot soldiers. They would all be sent to a place where they could no longer pose a threat: Robben Island.

A windswept lump of rock 7 miles off the coast of Cape Town, Robben Island was known as South Africa’s Alcatraz (the infamous island prison off San Francisco), and had for hundreds of years been the place where successive regimes banished the unwanted. The island was battered by harsh Atlantic currents, and the seabed nearby was littered with shipwrecks. Over the centuries, many sailors had lost their lives in the turbulent, shark-infested waters.

The Dutch used the island as a makeshift prison for army deserters and criminals until 1795, when the British seized the tip of Africa. For the next century, Robben Island was a hell hole. Lepers, the mentally ill, and prostitutes suffering from syphilis were all forcibly extradited to the island to live in squalor.

The British set a precedent for the island by using it as a prison for political opponents. It was here that the great African general Makana was incarcerated. His tribe, the Xhosa, went to war with the British after the colonial power stole their cattle, and Makana was captured and banished to Robben Island. He died attempting to escape. Almost a hundred and fifty years later, in 1964, another prominent member of the Xhosa tribe was imprisoned on Robben Island – Nelson Mandela.

The island was cleared of its inhabitants in the Thirties, all dispersed to prisons and hospitals on the South African mainland. The military took possession of the island, burned down the ramshackle old buildings, and began to turn it into a fortified sea defence, complete with gun emplacements and underground workings. In the early Sixties Cape Town’s first line of wartime defence was to become South Africa’s first line of attack on the men who opposed its apartheid regime. The security forces requisitioned the island from the military and erected 20-foot-high razor wire fences to mark out the perimeters of a new high-security prison, a vast institution that would house well over two thousand men. Those men would in a couple of years include Sedick, Tony, Lizo, and Marcus.

2 The Price of Resistance (#ulink_2e9d68cf-9ac8-5a7c-9cec-ce288612fe6e)

‘We would be better off fighting the system than trying to live in it.’

Dikgang Moseneke, Prisoner 491/63

It was the middle of December. As the white people of Cape Town packed out the city-centre department stores and shops buying presents and decorations, a group of black, coloured, and Asian Pollsmoor Prison inmates were about to receive the most unwelcome of Christmas surprises.

The prisoners were herded out of their cells, shackled together at the ankles and wrists, and pushed into the back of a truck. Under heavy guard, the lorry drove off from Tokai and into the centre of Cape Town, past the twinkling Christmas trees and decorated shop windows and down along the concrete harbour front to an isolated wharf. It was early evening and there was a chill in the air.

Sedick Isaacs was in an extra set of shackles. He was regarded by the prison guards as a major security risk, thanks to his unsuccessful escape attempt. He and his fellow prisoners were kicked off the back of the truck, made to line up, and then jogged across the dock to a waiting boat. Bound with a chain, the prisoners struggled hard to stay on their feet, steel cuffs biting into wrists and ankles as they staggered, like drunks, towards the boat.

The hold was opened up and the prisoners were ordered to jump off the jetty and inside. Because of the shackles, everyone fell together in a painful heap. It was becoming clear to Sedick that every stage of the journey had been carefully planned to maximize the humiliation of the prisoners.

Crouched in the hold, he looked up and saw a mass of leering faces. One guard gleefully told him that he would never see his family again, another that it would be so long before he managed to get off the island, when he did cars would no longer drive on the roads but across the sky. Then everything went dark, as the doors of the hold closed and the engine was fired up.

Though it took less than an hour, the crossing from Cape Town to Robben Island breached a stretch of water notorious for its unpredictable storms and turbulent crosscurrents. Many of Sedick’s fellow travellers had never been in a boat before and, as the craft heaved its way through the choppy waters, they were badly seasick. The smell of the diesel fumes made it even worse. Still manacled together, the prisoners arrived on the island soaked in one another’s vomit, shaken by the uncertainty of their future.

They had all heard stories and rumours about Robben Island, but none of them had any concrete knowledge of what really awaited them. They had every reason to expect the worst, and more. Back on the mainland, the guards had warned the prisoners of ‘carry-ons’ (a euphemism for beatings) with rubber batons and pickaxe handles, and that they would have to work long shifts in a quarry, sweating out their guts in summer and freezing in the winter.

As the boat made its way into Murray’s Bay Harbour on the south of the island, the prisoners were herded up top. Two dog-legged concrete jetties stretched out from the harbour, drawing the boat into the island like the pincers of a claw. A phalanx of olive-green-uniformed guards was already waiting on the wharf. Judging by the long batons and truncheons they were brandishing, Sedick figured they were unlikely to be the most cordial of welcoming committees.

Gazing beyond, Sedick caught his first sight of the place that was to be his home for the next thirteen years. Many prisoners would share his initial impression, experience the same gut-churning sense of grim foreboding. Flat and barren, the island was crisscrossed with rough tracks and roads bordered with low, scrubby vegetation. It looked roughly oval in shape and was smaller than Sedick had expected. It was just over half a mile wide.

On the western side, a lighthouse blinked out into the Atlantic Ocean, warning vessels of the island’s treacherous offshore reefs. Tucked down a road to the south of the lighthouse was an Anglican church, what looked as if it might be the warders’ barracks, and a small village of houses Sedick would later learn was home to the married guards and their families. The east appeared to be the ‘business end’ of the island. A few hundred yards down a gravel track sat the old prison buildings, ringed by a 20-foot-high double-corridor fence topped with razor wire. At each corner of the compound, brooding watch towers stood sentinel.

Further down the jetty, an army truck waited for the boat to disgorge its convict passengers. Still hobbled together, the men scrambled and struggled off the boat and on to the bare concrete. A row of armed guards jeered and spat, delighting in seeing the prisoners fall over one another, relishing the fact that many had vomited on each other. As the wind swept in off the sea, the Afrikaner warders shouted the chilling words: ‘Dit is die Eiland. Hier gaan julle vrek!’ (‘This is the island. Here you will die!’), then ran at the men without warning, beating them around the head and shoulders with their truncheons and batons, chasing them on to the back of the truck. It was a brutal and unjustified attack, but totally premeditated. It was the regime’s declaration of intent: for prisoners, life on ‘Devil’s Island’ would be savage and unremittingly punishing. They were there to be broken and demoralized – for as long as they survived.

Its human cargo now on board, the truck lurched off down the gravel road towards the prison compound. Drawing closer, the new inmates could see that the cell blocks in which they were to live had been crudely converted from ramshackle old military buildings. They were basic in the extreme.

On arrival, the prisoners were thrown off the back of the lorry as if they were nothing more than sacks of millet and made to queue for their first meal on the island – a porridge of thin maize served up from big metal drums. All of the men had been held in mainland prisons before sentencing and, although rations there had hardly been haute cuisine, they had at least been nourishing and sufficient in quantity.

At Sedick’s first meal, some of the new arrivals were still so sick from the boat ride they were unable to keep their food down and, although they were beyond hungry, they left most of their porridge. It would, however, be the first and last time they would refuse food on the island. The maize gruel tasted dreadful and smelled brackish and sour, but the prisoners soon learned that, for them at least, food on the island would be in short supply. A few months earlier, when Tony Suze arrived on the island, the food had been out, uncovered, in the open for a long time. It was cold and speckled with bird droppings. As he spooned the slop hungrily into his mouth, he remembers, seagulls flapped around his head, screeching. It sounded to him as though the birds were laughing at the new prisoners, mocking them, vowing to return, to scavenge and sabotage each and every meal the men ate.

Each man was identified by his prison number. In the case of Isaacs that was 883/64, signifying he was the 883rd prisoner to be sentenced in 1964. After the meal, the men were forced to strip and change into their prison uniforms. The uniform for coloured and Asian prisoners consisted of a top, long trousers, socks, and shoes. These men were also afforded slightly better conditions across the board. Blacks were issued with shorts, to remind them that, in white supremacist eyes, they were nothing more than boys and, on their feet, they were allowed to wear only rubber sandals roughly fashioned from old car tyres, no socks. Racial distinctions would permeate every area of life on the island.

All the men were ordered to carry four items in their shirt pocket at all times – their identification card, tooth brush, spoon, and towel. The spoon was used for all food, no knives or forks would be needed. The towel was so small that it fitted easily into the pocket.

In fact, when Sedick was kitted out, he fared little better. He was given shoes, but they were hardly a pair: one was a size seven, the other a nine. A fellow new arrival became itchy after having worn his shirt for a few minutes. Looking inside, he discovered it was alive with lice.

Each of the men was then assigned a cell block. Black prisoners were ordered to remove their car-tyre sandals before entering their allotted block and throw them into a pile outside in the yard. All the men’s hearts sank when they were marched inside. Old military dormitories that would once have been home to a maximum of twenty men now housed as many as sixty prisoners, sleeping cheek by jowl on meagre sisal mats. Most of the buildings were poorly maintained, and damp and draughty, and all the inmates had to keep them warm at night were a couple of almost transparently thin blankets. There were no pillows.

Once inside, Sedick swiftly realized that Robben Island Prison was home not only to political prisoners such as himself, but also to some of the most notorious murderers, gang leaders, and violent criminals in South Africa. It was deliberate policy to house the ‘terrorists’ with common-law felons who were bound to give them a tough ride. The political prisoners would be fighting enemies on two fronts.

The principle of divide and rule lay at the heart of everything. Along with virtually all the ‘politicals’, Sedick had been classified as a D-category prisoner. A-category inmates enjoyed the most privileges – newspapers, even radios; B and C progressively fewer; D prisoners were allowed virtually none. Prisoners in this lowest category were not eligible for parole. No matter what his behaviour, Sedick would serve at least every day, every hour, of his twelve-year sentence. His formal complaints and efforts to publicize the abuses in the prison led to a charge of attempting to ‘undermine the good order and reputation’ of the prison service. A year was added to his sentence. When asked today if he was guilty of such offences, Isaacs just nods and says ‘Of course, I was.’