Football and revolution

A fan displays a portrait of Nelson Mandela, the anti-apartheid leader, during the Human Rainbow concert at Ellis park, Johannesburg, in March 1990 to celebrate the African National Congress leader's release after 27 years of imprisonment on Robben Island as a political prisoner.Show less

The year was 1988, and South Africa was in the grip of violence. At a Johannesburg stadium, defiant players and fans gathered for a football match that sent a revolutionary message: apartheid was dead. Tony Karon reveals how sport changed a nation The black, green and gold flag of Nelson Mandela's African National Congress (ANC) fluttering in the breeze; the crowd rising as one to sing the liberation struggle's anthem Nkoski sikelel i'Afrika (God Bless Africa), while down on the freshly cut grass, a group of football players, black and white, stands proudly at attention despite prematch nerves ?

None of this would seem at all unusual in South Africa today as it gears up to host the 2010 World Cup. But back in 1988, at the BobSave Cup final between the Soweto giants Kaizer Chiefs and Orlando Pirates, the same spectacle was nothing short of revolutionary. Although hindsight might deem it the proverbial darkest hour before dawn, 1988 was a miserable year for those fighting to overthrow apartheid. The regime had unleashed a wave of police violence that had shut down the public activities of the mass opposition movement; thousands of activists were behind bars, and thousands more were hiding from the security police and the regime's death squads. International sanctions were expected to take years to have any effect; while the ANC's efforts at guerrilla warfare presented little threat to the strongest army on the continent. South Africa's road to freedom seemed long, arduous and bloody.

Yet anyone watching the BobSave Cup final could have seen that the apartheid regime, despite its massive capacity for violence, was doomed. Flying the ANC flag, back then, was a criminal offence that carried a seven-year prison term. And the head of the football federation made a speech that might have got a political leader locked up. Clearly, it was no longer only hard-core political activists that were willing to take the consequences of defying the regime.

Despite the vicious crackdown unfolding outside the stadium walls, South Africa's football administrators, players and fans acted that day as if the regime no longer existed. The anti-apartheid forces may have lacked the means to overthrow it, but the regime lacked the means to destroy the ANC. The stage was set for a negotiated solution. It would be six more years before that solution took effect, but on the football field, apartheid had already ended. The Clint Eastwood movie Invictus recently lionised the 1995 Rugby World Cup victory by an almost all-white South African team playing with the blessing of Nelson Mandela - a moment that symbolised the acceptance of black majority rule by the old regime's white Afrikaner base.

The following year, when South Africa's Bafana Bafana national football team - which happened, at that point, to include three white players, two coloured players and six Africans - won the African Cup of Nations on home soil, the country's football fans celebrated wildly, but saw no novelty in the team's diversity. White, coloured and African players had been lining up in the same teams in South Africa's professional league for close on two decades by 1996. Now they were simply taking their rightful place on the world stage.

Indeed, there was a certain sadness over the fact South Africa's "greatest generation" of football stars - legends such as Jomo Sono, Ace Ntsoelengoe and Teenage Dladla - had never had the opportunity to play for their country. They had been double victims of apartheid, first oppressed as black people in a racist society, and then denied the opportunity to shine on the international stage because of an international boycott aimed at forcing political change.

It was not only the overt displays of political symbolism on that cup final day in 1988 that signalled apartheid's failure, however - both Soweto clubs fielded white players that day. This at a time when apartheid laws forbade white people from entering the black townships on the fringes of South African cities. The only white people entering Soweto on any given day that year would have been riot police, journalists, a handful of revolutionaries - and at least a dozen professional football players, most from politically conservative white working-class families, whose love of the game and determination to play on the country's best teams had made them the first white South Africans to have their wages paid by black employers.

Although apartheid had initially enforced racially segregated football leagues, by the mid 1980s, the country's best white players - the likes of Lucky Stylianou, Gary Bailey, Jimmy "Brixton Tower" Joubert, Noel Cousins and Stewart Lilley - were now playing for the Kaizer Chiefs, Orlando Pirates and Moroka Swallows. "They didn't care who you were or where you came from, as long as you played well, were dedicated and wore the club badge with pride," said Mark Tovey, a former Chiefs star.

These men were not politically inclined, but they were hardly unaware of the political and social significance of their choices. "We always had black friends ... visit our house," Joubert recently told an interviewer. "We never saw that as a problem. However, I do admit that our neighbours often did have a problem with it. But we didn't care about that." Apartheid was not simply designed to stop black and white people from mixing socially, of course; its purpose was to keep black people utterly subordinate and in servitude to the white-owned economy. Black people, said HF Verwoerd, apartheid's architect prime minister, could not be allowed to establish a presence in South Africa's cities "above certain forms of labour"; they were he explained, Biblically ordained to be "hewers of wood and drawers of water".

So, apartheid envisaged Africans as temporary migrants in the city, while their "homeland" would be in rural ghettoes known as Bantustans to which they could be arbitrarily dispatched if their services were not required. In reality, however, the urban economy needed a stable population of millions of "hewers of wood and drawers of water", and when their children - the country's first generation of city-born Africans - began to come of age, they refused to swallow the humiliations suffered by their parents. Amid the social and political ferment of Soweto in the early 1970s, nobody epitomised the new spirit of self-confidence and casual defiance as much as the township's football stars.

At black-owned clubs like the Chiefs, Pirates and Swallows, the likes of Ntsoelengoe and Dladla thrilled huge crowds with their dazzling skills, but off the field they also became icons of a new township identity: young, gifted, black and proud, sporting the Afro hairdos, fashions and attitudes of African-American identity politics, they personified not only black permanence in the city, but the possibility of living autonomously from white authority. Even without any overtly political stands, their very lifestyle was subversive of apartheid's grand scheme.

Rugby had been the regime's game, venerated in almost religious terms. Football was largely confined to black people and "politically unreliable" whites. But, under pressure to make some gestures towards reform, the regime started as early as 1973 to allow a few "black v white" football games, and eventually teams from the black and white leagues were able to play in cup competitions. As the skills of the stars of Soweto entertained fans across all divides, it quickly became clear that the epicentre of the game in South Africa was in black townships, and the old white league was gradually eclipsed, as professional football, at least within the confines of the stadium, began to transcend apartheid.

But football was not played in a vacuum, and the players of the Chiefs, Pirates, Swallows and other clubs remained an integral part of a people struggling against vicious odds to free themselves. On June 16, 1976, the tension that had been steadily building between the regime and the first urban African generation finally erupted, and the youth of Soweto, armed only with stones against the guns of the police, launched what became a nationwide uprising signalling that apartheid would never be peacefully accepted by the majority. And as if to underscore the connection between footballers and the wider Soweto community, the Chiefs lost their erstwhile captain, Ariel "Pro" Kgongoane, to a police bullet fired during the opening days of the uprising.

And as the struggle intensified, and the banned ANC began to resurface to take charge of the movement, football was pressed into the service of the struggle. Teenage Dladla, for example, recalls being called to play at certain venues where clandestine meetings had been scheduled, activists using the crowd drawn by a match to camouflage political activity. "If the police arrive, they will just see people playing soccer, whereas there was a very serious meeting taking place," Dladla remembers.

Others recall young men being assembled in football crowds to be sent for guerrilla training, and South Africa's current president, Jacob Zuma, used the matches of Zulu Royals to hold his clandestine meetings while under surveillance by the regime. And players and administrators remember funnelling money to the ANC to fund its insurgency. Even in prison on Robben Island, football had a special place in the liberation effort. A new docudrama More Than Just a Game recounts the heroic tale of the Makana Soccer League created by the convicts on Robben Island, where political prisoners were held. The irrepressible urge to play, first manifest in kicking an improvised ball around their prison cells, eventually evolved - despite the initial resistance of the prison authorities - into a comprehensive football league that represented the prisoners' triumph over their jailers' efforts to break their spirits.

Even if they had been of no direct assistance to the political activities of the liberation movement, however, the footballers of Soweto and other townships made an immeasurable contribution to freeing South Africa. It was their example that established a post-apartheid reality even before the politicians had agreed on its terms. Whether on Robben Island's improvised pitch or at Johannesburg's Ellis Park stadium for the BobSave final, football created for itself the freedom it needed to thrive and in the process, it showed South African society that apartheid could be transcended.