A way of saying ‘we shall overcome’: Playing football on Robben Island

The Makana Football Association was another way to resist apartheid by political prisoners in the South African jail.

Cape Town, South Africa – One morning in December 1967, prison warders strode into Robben Island’s Cell Block 4 with a football and randomly chose two teams of 11.

While walking to the grassless pitch they had cleared themselves, the prisoners hastily discussed tactics and came up with names for their teams: Bucks would play Rangers in the maximum-security prison’s first-ever organised football match.

The players were rusty, malnourished and exhausted from their backbreaking work in the island’s slate quarry. Barefoot, and wearing their khaki prison uniforms, they also had to contend with a vicious summer southeaster that whipped across Cape Town’s Table 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 More Than Just a Game: 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.”

None of the 22 players involved that morning could have imagined that hundreds of Robben Island prisoners would go on to participate in organised football leagues for the next 23 years.

Anti-apartheid leader and former South African President Nelson Mandela – who died 10 years ago on Tuesday – stressed that the triumph over apartheid was a collective one. And the role of the Makana Football Association (MFA) is a story of such perseverance and unity that still resounds today.

In 1961, a year after white policemen massacred at least 69 Black protesters at Sharpeville, apartheid Prime Minister Verwoerd began sending political prisoners to Robben Island, a small outcrop surrounded by shark-infested waters and in the shadow of Table Mountain.

Verwoerd’s government saw to it that conditions were abominable. Just getting to the island was an ordeal: prisoners were shackled together and tossed into the hold of the boat which would take them the 10km (6 miles) from Cape Town harbour. By the time they arrived on the island, they were stumbling and covered in one another’s vomit.