Islj 2009 3-4 - TMC Asser Instituut

H I S T O RY
The Atlantic Raiders Affair*
by Chuck Korr and Marvin Close**
This is the true story of how the political prisoners of South Africa’s infamous
Robben Island turned football into an active force in their struggle
for freedom. Despite torture, regular beatings and backbreaking
labour, these extraordinary men defied all odds and played organized
league football in one of the ugliest and most brutal hellholes on earth.
Even more astonishingly, they played the game for nearly 20 years with
strict adherence to FIFA rules.
Told through the eyes of former prisoners, this factual account chronicles
their arrival on the island, their years of ceaseless campaigning to
be allowed to play on an abandoned patch of land, the creation and success
of the Makana Football Association and their triumph over the
prison authorities every time their right to play the beautiful game was
threatened. But as the football league grew in popularity, so did the
challenges, forcing the prisoners to not only wrestle with the apartheid
establishment, but also to manage themselves.
This incredible story celebrates bravery and heroism and shows how
sport has the power to unite and overcome adversity.
‘We lost to a hopeless side and we had to get some
concessions for the sake of our pride.’
Benny Ntoele, Prisoner 287/63
In the prison kitchens, Freddie Simon was on the look-out for food
to smuggle out. Now that the daily diet had improved a little on the
island, thanks to pressure from prisoners and the International Red
Cross, the men were occasionally given eggs and vegetables, and more
of the fish and chicken that went into the drums of maize porridge
was proper meat rather than fat, bone, and gristle, so the pickings
were a lot richer.
They needed to be. Manong FC was holding a clandestine victory
party, an extraordinary and unheard of event in the prison. It was to
celebrate its triumph in the championship. Other prisoners had
helped out with supplies too. A couple of guinea fowl had been
caught, and a dozen or so sea gull’s eggs had been foraged from the
beach, but Freddie and his friends in the kitchens, sympathetic common-law
prisoners, had been charged with providing the lion’s share.
On the evening of the party, in June 1970, the smuggled food was
distributed to the team and their guests across the various cell blocks,
and there was a great deal of backslapping. How loud the celebrations
became depended on which of the guards were on duty: some enjoyed
supporting football on the island and turned a blind eye, but others
were far less sympathetic, and would come down on the party like a
ton of bricks. In the cell blocks they patrolled that night, the inmates
kept the noise levels down.
The Manong players had made a point of inviting fellow prisoners
to join in with their celebrations, and most took it in good humour -
there were certainly few enough reasons to celebrate in Robben Island
Prison. Some, however, saw the invitation as nothing more than a
chance for Manong to show off. In their eyes, the club was getting
above itself, and its arrogance was beginning to extend well beyond
the pitch. Manong FC was taling itself up, the players saying just how
much they themselves rated their skills and how far ahead they were
of any other team on the island. They had a point: the statistics
proved it, as did the consistently expansive style they’d employed
throughout the season.
As they chattered and congratulated themselves and each other, the
* Chapter 6 of More Than Just a Game:
Football v. Apartheid. HarperCollins
Publishers, London, United Kingdom,
pp. 117-143 (authors’ permission).
** Chuck Korr is Research Professor at the
International Centre for Sport History
and Culture, De Montfort University,
United Kingdom and Professor Emeritus
of History at the University of Missouri-
St. Louis, United States of America.
Mrvin Close is a dramatist and
scriptwriter.
seed of an idea began to develop. Manong’s players decided they
weren’t being given the competition that their talents deserved. The
solution they came up with would indirectly trigger a chain of events
that would come close to destroying everything that the Makana
Football Association was trying to create and cause disharmony
among those in the prison community that would continue to rankle
for thirty years.
One evening soon after the victory party, Tony Suze and a handful
of fellow Manong club members sat down to compose a letter to the
football association. They wrote that the team had been thinking for
a long time about the quality of football on the island; it had
improved, but the club wanted to encourage an even greater performance
at the top level and suggested that a team be selected specifically
to play against Manong. The implication was clear only a group of
the best players chosen from across all the other teams would be fit to
compete against Manong Football Club.
The MFA responded in measured tones, letting Manong know
that, if any special match were to be played, the offer would come
from the MFA. Privately, senior MFA officials such as Dikgang
Moseneke and Indress Naidoo were disconcerted by the condescending
attitude of some of the Manong club’s members.
The letter sent by Manong didn’t achieve the result it was aiming
for, but it did focus attention on one thing that was becoming difficult
to ignore: Manong’s dominance was indeed becoming a problem.
It was head and shoulders above the other teams, and this was not
only making a mockery of the association’s desire to offer meaningful
sport at all levels of ability but was also, in some quarters, affecting the
general level of enthusiasm for football.
By November 1970, the fight to win the A division’s second championship
seemed like an extended instance of déjà vu. Seven games
into the season, six wins on the board, Manong was once again streets
ahead at the top of the table - and this despite the absence of their star
player, Tony Suze, out of the game due to a damaged knee, an injury
sustained in a collision with the Ditsitsiri goalkeeper in an A- division
match almost two months earlier.
The tone of the letter from Manong had annoyed the executives of
the MFA, but they took the point that interest in football was lower
than in the past. The MFA decided to take a dramatic step to revive
enthusiasm by introducing a new knock-out cup competition. Players
were to form their own teams from within their own cell blocks.
Rather than creating a more level playing field, however, this decision
was to have the unintended consequence of highlighting even more
starkly the players’ differences in ability and creating a situation that
threatened the existence of the MFA.
As well as the Manong players, some of the best footballers from
the other clubs lived in cell block C4. These players came together
and formed a club, the Atlantic Raiders, for the new cup competition.
It was made up of the cream of the island’s players, all from the top
five clubs in the league table, including Tony Suze, Freddie Simons,
Benny Ntoele, Moses Masemola, and Ernest Malgas. It was never
clear if the Atlantic Raiders represented cell block C4 or if they were
a group of footballers who just happened to be sparing a cell together.
This seemingly trivial distinction would cause a huge amount of
distress for both the MFA and the island community over the next
few months.
The Atlantic Raiders took it for granted that they would win the
new competition. They had a greater ambition: they wanted to show
the rest of the island how good they were as individual players and
how spectacular they were as a team. Their intention was not just to
win, but to win with flair.
There may have been a degree of hubris in their intent, but these
were committed footballers playing matches behind razor wire after a
week of punishing hard labour in a stone quarry. They had few opportunities
to express themselves or to experience a sense of achievement.
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