More Than Just a Game: Football v Apartheid

Though Sedick Isaacs had no real interest in the actual sport of football, he was as excited by what was happening out on the pitch as any of the sports-mad spectators. Rather than the quality of play or the results, he was interested in what being involved in the sport actually meant to the men, the difference it was making to their lives. Not only did they derive enjoyment from playing and watching the game, organizing the physical set-up of the matches tested their ingenuity. Goals were constructed from planks of wood and fishing nets washed up on the shores of the island. An inmate who had worked as a cobbler cut and moulded stud shapes into the soles of the car-tyre sandals. Physically, the men were pushing themselves, and making game plans and establishing a league system honed the prisoners’ organizational and negotiating skills.

The footballers knew they were rusty and not properly match fit. Despite the punishing labour they had to endure daily in the quarry, to improve, they had to train. The more talented took on the responsibility of lifting the standard of play by organizing clandestine coaching sessions in the cells. The one man everyone wanted to train them was Pro Malepe.

Already a handy player, Mark Shinners soon learned what a skilled coach Malepe was, and felt privileged to share a cell with him. Pro led gym exercises in the cell-block bathroom – not in the cell itself, because the players wanted to respect the space of others not involved in the games. To toughen the men up, Pro would start them off with thirty to forty minutes’ worth of running on the spot, squats, splits, toe touches, and press-ups. Then the players would work on specific footballing skills – dribbling, passing, shooting, and tackling – all within the restricted area of the cell blocks.

Even though they’d done a hard day’s labour in the quarry, no concessions were made. Pro would not put up with an unfit player. He would focus his attention on the men who were showing signs of fatigue and be really hard on them – ‘Jump higher! Run faster!’ He wanted to make a point: those who were struggling could always give more. Gradually, the men’s fitness – and the level of competition – grew.

Indres Naidoo acted as a referee in some of the early half-hour matches. Like Sedick, he saw what a huge morale booster playing football was for the men. He too resolved that, now the prisoners had won the right to play the game, they had to force home their advantage by giving it a more formal structure. It was time to seize the moment.

The players negotiated with the warders to let them stay out longer and longer to play and, as they gained more time on the pitch, they began to form bigger and more courageous plans. First, the men tried to take more control over their game by insisting that the teams were no longer randomly chosen according to cells by the warders. They wanted to select their own teams – and, more ambitiously, to form clubs and establish a competitive football league on the island. What was more, they intended to run their football association strictly according to FIFA rules. Plans were already in hand for the most knowledgeable footballers to give referees and match officials rigorous training.

The prisoners lived their lives in such proximity to each other, rules and structure were vital. Passions and tensions could run very high and were exacerbated by enforced intimacy and confinement. Without strict guidelines, everyday life in the cells could be volatile. For the political prisoners, forming a football league was a chance to organize themselves, to practise the skills they would one day need when they had won the right to run their own country – and, if they were going to do it, they were going to do it right. Four days after the inaugural match between Rangers and Bucks, representatives from various cell blocks met surreptitiously in the quarry to draw up their manifesto.

It was an auspicious day. The ground rules were set but, even more importantly, men from different political factions were working together. Before the concerted campaign to win the right to play football, members of the major political groups on the island had been pretty much segregated from each other. They had different work gangs in the quarry, held separate seminars, greeted one another with different phrases and hand signals, and rarely co-operated. This cross-factional meeting was an indication of how far they had already come.

The men established their guidelines. Each club was to elect its own president, secretary, and officials. Committees were formed to oversee the running of each club and of the association itself. Within these structures, some of South Africa’s future leaders would learn how to organize, negotiate with, and inspire the men around them.

These early meetings were not, of course, without their problems. They often became heated and hostile, with suspicions on either side that one political grouping or the other was attempting to wrest control of the association. Each of the seven clubs that were created – Rangers, Bucks, Hotspurs, Dynamos, Ditshitshidi, Black Eagles, and Gunners – were formed along party lines.

This changed quickly when an eighth club, Manong FC, captained by Tony Suze, was admitted to the association before the first season began. It was the first club to select players irrespective of party allegiance and did so in an open manner. On page five of its seven-page handwritten constitution it stated:

1 Membership of Manong Football Club shall be open to all persons. Indiscrimination is therefore herein enshrined.

1 This indiscrimination embodies ordinary membership and membership to any part of the club.

In most non-Robben Island contexts, ‘indiscrimination’ refers to race, gender, religion, or nationality but, in the cells, it had a different meaning. The members of Manong FC would not be chosen along political lines: ANC and PAC members would play together in the same team.

The founders of the club, among them Tony, were adamant that they had taken this step in order to break down the barriers between political factions and ensure the successful launch of the football league. When one of the other prisoners pointed out to Suze that the clause gave the club free rein to recruit players purely on the basis of their skill, he just smiled: ‘Yes, we did benefit by doing something that we thought was the right thing to do.’ The club was living by its motto: ‘A lapile’ – ‘the vulture is hungry.’

The men held meeting after meeting in the quarry and the cell blocks to discuss the aims of the football association. At one gathering, a motion put forward by Tony was adopted unanimously: the association would be called the Matyeni Football Association. ‘Matyeni’ meant stones, a nod to one of the central features of their lives – the quarry.

Indres Naidoo nominated Dikgang Moseneke to be chairman. Dikgang was a PAC member (as were the majority of prisoners) and one of the youngest prisoners sentenced to the island. Indres showed shrewd political skill in making this nomination. Given the tight political organization on the island, Naidoo would not have taken this step before the ANC had a caucus to develop a policy about the new FA. Despite Moseneke’s youth, the men had great respect for him, believing that he was someone who could bring about harmony between occasionally antagonistic factions. Indres was elected secretary, a position he would serve in with great care and diligence.

The aim of the Matyeni FA was to involve as many of the political prisoners as possible, not just as players but as referees and linesmen, club secretaries and officials, first-aid units, coaches, trainers, and groundsmen. Its official philosophy was that football on Robben Island should be all-inclusive, offering sport, exercise, entertainment, or some other kind of enjoyment and involvement to all. To promote this ideal practically, the creators of the football league decided that each club should field three teams.

The A teams would contain the cream of the island’s footballers, skilled players such as Tony Suze, Mark Shinners, Pro Malepe, and Benny Ntoele – all young men who, if they had been free, could have been pressing for places in some of black South Africa’s league teams. The B teams would consist of useful, fairly handy players, and the C teams of footballers of varying abilities, from beginners to older men, who enjoyed a kickabout. This was sport for all.

4 The Need to Organize Football (#ulink_90e93ebc-c584-5188-a5fe-517fdfb4e31a)

‘I taught Tony Suze mathematics and he taught me how to kick a ball.’ Sedick Isaacs, Prisoner 883/64

It was a Saturday morning early in February 1968. Tony Suze, Freddie Simon, and the rest of the footballers in the cell block were limbering up, stretching, and getting in some last-minute training before taking to the pitch for the game they’d been looking forward to all week.

However, as the training session went on, the men’s anticipation took on a different form and they began to exchange troubled looks. Though the men were banned from wearing watches, the rigid routine of their average day meant that they had developed an internal sense of time that was astonishingly accurate. The footballers were released from their cells at 10 a.m. for the first game of the day, but it was now becoming clear that it was past that time. One inmate stepped up to the bars of his cell and called out to the guard, asking when they were going to be allowed out to play. The guard answered dismissively, ‘No football today.’ The men were incensed but, having become skilled at negotiating with the warders, tried to stay calm and gently persuaded the officer to explain why. Casually, he informed them that a couple of warders were off sick. There weren’t enough staff to guard the footballers while they played.

This wasn’t the first time it had happened. The regime had realized from the outset how much football meant to the prisoners and that it could be used as a weapon against them; the men, too, had been aware from the very beginning of their campaign to be allowed to play football that victory could prove to be a double-edged sword. There had always been the danger that the authorities would exploit the opportunity it had granted the prisoners, withdrawing the right at will and thus transforming it into a punishment, and it was the prisoners’ bad luck that they gained permission to play just at the time major changes were about to occur on the island.

In early 1967 a new administration had taken over the running of the prison. It was a tough regime, out to get revenge on the prisoners for revealing so much to the International Red Cross about living conditions on Robben Island. The authorities and the guards were also enraged by ex-prisoners who had served shorter two- and three-year sentences then left the island and gone out of their way to publicize the human-rights violations that regularly occurred there.

One former prisoner who had been released was the black poet Dennis Brutus. He had served an eighteen-month sentence for crimes against the state. On his release he gave testimony to the UN Special Committee on Apartheid about the reality of life on Robben Island. It garnered a lot of attention around the world and drew widespread condemnation of apartheid. The South African regime was attracting more and more negative publicity. This was brought home to the warders on the island when their own Commissioner of Prisons attended an international conference in Stockholm. The purpose of the summit was to discuss standard minimum regulations for prisoners around the world. On arrival, he was met by angry demonstrations and then humiliatingly quizzed by journalists who seemed to know more about conditions on Robben Island than he did.

Football was one way in which the authorities could both take their revenge on the inmates for this negative exposure and reassert their control. It would, however, be hard for them to justify a wholesale withdrawal of the right to play to the Red Cross so, instead, they set out to disrupt and destabilize the prisoners’ weekly programme of matches.

Week after week, the footballers would have their hopes of playing dashed by ‘staff shortages’. When matches did take place, severe limits were placed on the number of spectators allowed to attend. Warders would deliberately wander out on to the pitch and interrupt play, sometimes pretending to take part in the games, mischievously taking pot shots at goal. If a prisoner had annoyed or crossed one of the guards during the week, the warder would make sure that his cell block wasn’t allowed to play that Saturday. Known ‘troublemakers’ had imaginary charges laid against them, too – the penalty: no football.

Guards opened cells late on purpose, allowing the prisoners only to have a few precious minutes out on the football pitch and, instead of allowing the prisoners to send out their club teams, the prison officials disrupted the league programme of matches by picking their own random teams of players from among the men in the cells. Everything the prisoners had organized, the authorities were now trying to sabotage. The prisoners’ response was bravely defiant and totally mystified the guards.

One Saturday morning in April 1968 the warders opened up the cell blocks and informed the prisoners that it was time to play football. The men moved not a muscle. One of the inmates calmly told the guards: ‘No football today.’

The footballers had held a series of meetings in the cell blocks and the quarry and had decided that, if the prison regime was going to use their right to play football as a stick to beat them with, then the prisoners would try to turn the tables and cease playing the game until the administration stopped sabotaging their efforts and allowed them to have control over their sport.

Up until June no matches were played in the prison, apart from some friendlies on 31 May, Republic Day. The following year, July 1968 to June 1969, just a handful took place. Some prisoners may have regarded the action as counter-productive, in that they were denying themselves the very game they so loved to play, but nothing could have been further from the truth. The men had every intention of resuming organized football, but it had to be on their terms.