THE LEAGUE ON THE ISLAND

LONG READ · POLITICS

The League on the Island

On Robben Island, political prisoners under apartheid built a football league with a written constitution, formal appeals, and disciplinary hearings. The men who ran it went on to run South Africa.

Robben Island sits seven miles off the coast of Cape Town in the cold waters of Table Bay. On a clear day you can see it from the waterfront. On a clear day from the island, you can see the mountain. For twenty-seven years, Nelson Mandela could see Table Mountain from his cell. He could not come closer to it than the bars on his window. The island was a place designed to make men feel the distance between where they were and where the rest of the world was going on without them — a piece of rock chosen for its isolation, its cold, and its capacity to reduce a person to nothing.

It did not work in the way the apartheid government intended. What happened on Robben Island instead — and what this story is about — was one of the most remarkable acts of collective self-governance in the history of sport, and possibly in the history of political imprisonment. The men held there built a football league. They gave it a written constitution. They trained referees. They held formal hearings and appeals. They recorded minutes. And the habits of democratic governance they rehearsed on that pitch, season after season, decade after decade, travelled with them when they finally walked free.

BACKGROUND

What Apartheid Was

Apartheid — the word means “separateness” in Afrikaans — was the system of institutionalised racial segregation enforced by South Africa’s National Party government from 1948 until the early 1990s. It was not simply discrimination or social prejudice of the kind that existed in many countries. It was a comprehensive legal architecture, built statute by statute, designed to classify every person in South Africa by race and to assign their life — where they could live, work, study, move, love, and be buried — according to that classification.

Under apartheid, the country’s population was divided into four official racial categories: White, Coloured, Indian, and Black African. These categories determined everything. Black South Africans — the majority of the population in their own country — were stripped of citizenship and assigned to nominally independent “homelands,” impoverished territories that had no real sovereignty and existed primarily to provide cheap labour to white-owned farms and industries while keeping Black people legally classified as foreigners on their own soil. They required passes to move between areas. They were barred from most skilled professions, from owning property in designated white areas, from attending white schools, white hospitals, white beaches. Interracial marriage was criminalised. Political organisation was suppressed with increasing violence as resistance grew.

The African National Congress — the ANC — had existed since 1912, initially as a moderate political organisation petitioning for rights through legal channels. Decades of non-violent protest met decades of repression. After the Sharpeville massacre of 1960, in which police opened fire on unarmed protesters and killed sixty-nine people, the ANC was banned outright. Its leadership, concluding that non-violent resistance alone could no longer work, formed an armed wing. In 1964, following the Rivonia Trial — in which several ANC leaders were prosecuted for sabotage — Nelson Mandela and seven others were sentenced to life imprisonment. Mandela would not be released until 1990. He was forty-five years old when he was sentenced. He was seventy-one when he walked free.

Robben Island was where the apartheid state sent the people it considered most dangerous. Not dangerous in the sense of violent — dangerous in the sense of organised, articulate, and capable of building the kind of movements that threatened the system’s survival. Understanding that is essential to understanding what happened there. The men sent to Robben Island were not broken by imprisonment. They were, in ways the government did not anticipate, sharpened by it.

CONTEXT

The Island and the Men Sent There

Robben Island had served as a place of banishment and imprisonment for centuries — a leper colony, a mental asylum, a naval base — before the apartheid government converted it into a maximum security prison in the early 1960s. From 1964 onwards, it became the primary destination for political prisoners: members of the ANC, the PAC, and other liberation movements sentenced under laws designed to extinguish organised resistance to white minority rule.

The men sent there were not, for the most part, ordinary criminals. They were lawyers, teachers, trade unionists, organisers, intellectuals — people who had spent their lives building structures, writing arguments, leading movements. Dikgang Moseneke had been sentenced at the age of fifteen for anti-apartheid activities as a PAC activist, and would go on to become Deputy Chief Justice of South Africa. Steve Tshwete, who became Minister of Sport after 1994, was there. Jacob Zuma, who became President, was there. Sedick Isaacs, a schoolteacher from the Cape, arrived at fifteen. The authorities, by concentrating the leadership of the liberation movement in one place, had inadvertently created a university of resistance.

Football on the island was initially forbidden. A ball was contraband. The first years were defined by brutal labour in the lime quarry — breaking rocks in conditions that permanently damaged eyesight, including Mandela’s — and by the systematic denial of ordinary human activity. It was not until years of sustained pressure and negotiation that recreational time was granted, and not until further years of further pressure that football was permitted at all.

27

YEARS MANDELA WAS IMPRISONED

1966

YEAR MAKANA FA WAS FOUNDED

9

CLUBS IN THE MAKANA FA LEAGUE

THE LEAGUE

A Constitution Written in a Prison Cell

The Makana Football Association — named after the nineteenth-century Xhosa warrior-prophet Makana, who had drowned attempting to escape from Robben Island in 1820 — was formally constituted in 1966, with its constitution ratified in 1969. What followed was not informal kickabouts in a yard. It was a structured, administered, documented football league, run with a seriousness of purpose that reflected exactly who these men were and what they understood about organisation.

The association had a written constitution. It had elected officers. It had a disciplinary committee that heard formal complaints and issued rulings. It had an appeals process through which players could contest decisions they believed to be unjust — and those appeals were heard, deliberated on, and resolved according to established procedure. There were referees who were trained and assessed. There were minutes taken at meetings. When disputes arose — about rough play, about eligibility, about the behaviour of officials — they were settled not by whoever shouted loudest, but by due process.

The two most borrowed books in the Robben Island prison library were Das Kapital and a refereeing manual.

At its peak, the Makana FA had nine clubs, each representing different sections of the prison population. Teams had names — Rangers, Bucks, Manong — and genuine, competitive rivalries. Matches were contested hard. The football was real. But underneath the football was something else: a generation of men practising, in conditions of extreme confinement, the mechanics of running an institution. Hearing a witness. Writing a decision. Accepting a verdict. Administering without corruption. These were not abstract principles to them. They were daily drills.

“The biggest mistake the authorities made was to put us all together. I was 15 — I would have been smashed and abused. Instead, I was put in a warm environment of learning and revolution.”

— Sedick Isaacs, Makana FA founding member

MANDELA’S ROLE

The Man Who Could Not Play

It is important to be precise about Nelson Mandela’s relationship to the Makana FA, because the popular account of this story has a habit of placing him at its centre in ways that are not quite accurate. Mandela was in the single cells section of the prison — isolated from the general population held in the communal cells where the league was primarily based and played. He could not participate in the league. He could not play. He could not, for much of the time, even watch.

When the authorities discovered that Mandela had a partial sightline to a pitch from a certain position in the exercise yard, they built a wall to remove it.

He knew the league existed. It mattered to him — both as evidence that the men around him were maintaining their humanity and their organisational capacities, and as a source of quiet pride in what his comrades were building. But the Makana FA was not his creation and was not his to run. The central figures were Moseneke, Tshwete, Isaacs, and others whose names are less famous but whose contribution to the league — and through it, to what came after — was direct and sustained.

This is not a diminishment of Mandela. It is a correction that restores credit to the men who actually built the thing. The story of the Makana FA is, in some ways, more interesting for not having Mandela at its heart — because it shows that the culture of discipline, governance, and democratic process that would eventually shape post-apartheid South Africa was not the product of one extraordinary individual. It was collective. It was institutional. It was practised in a football league on a rock in the South Atlantic.

WHAT IT MEANT

Practising Democracy Under Apartheid

The apartheid state’s theory of political imprisonment was straightforward: remove people from society long enough, under conditions brutal enough, and you will break the movement they belonged to. You will break them individually — their sense of purpose, their sense of self — and you will break them collectively, by severing the ties of organisation and shared endeavour that made a movement out of individuals.

The Makana FA was a direct refutation of this theory. Not a symbolic one — a practical one. The men on Robben Island were not merely enduring. They were governing. Every disciplinary hearing held according to proper procedure, every appeal adjudicated on its merits, every meeting minuted and filed, was a demonstration that the capacities the apartheid state wanted to destroy were not only intact but being actively developed. They were getting better at this. They were going to need to be.

When Steve Tshwete became Minister of Sport after 1994, he carried with him the experience of having administered a competitive sporting body under conditions that made administration genuinely difficult. When Dikgang Moseneke sat on the Constitutional Court, he brought a constitutional sensibility that had been sharpened in a prison exercise yard. The connection between the Makana FA and what these men became is not metaphorical. It is procedural. It is institutional. It is direct.

The league was also, in a more immediate sense, simply necessary. Sedick Isaacs — who arrived on the island at fifteen, among the youngest political prisoners held there — described later what the environment of the prison had meant to him as a teenager. Without the structures of solidarity that the prisoners built around him, including the football league, he said, he would have been destroyed by what he found there. What he found instead was a community that was teaching itself how to build something durable out of almost nothing.

THE END & AFTER

What the Island Became

The Makana Football Association continued operating until the political prisoners were released — a process that happened gradually through the late 1980s, culminating in Mandela’s release in February 1990 and the unbanning of the ANC. The last political prisoners left Robben Island in 1991. The prison closed to that use entirely in 1996. It was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1999.

The pitch where the league had been played still exists. For a period after the prison’s closure, before the site became a museum, Rangers — one of the Makana FA clubs — played a match against Bucks on the same ground where they had competed as prisoners. The symbolism was not lost on anyone who had been there for both games.

Three years after the prison closed, South Africa hosted the FIFA World Cup. The Cape Town Stadium was constructed on the foreshore of the city, oriented so that its main axis looks directly out across Table Bay. On a clear day, from the stands, you can see Robben Island in the distance — the same island, the same water, the same seven miles.

South Africa won the right to host the 2010 World Cup in 2004, fourteen years after Mandela walked free. The bid was led, in part, by men whose political formation had taken place in a prison that contained a football league run according to a written constitution.

Football didn’t free them. But it kept alive in them the knowledge that they were capable of something more than surviving. And when the time came, they were ready.

FURTHER READING

Chuck Korr & Marvin Close — More Than Just a Game: Soccer vs. Apartheid (2008)

Makana F.A. — Wikipedia · en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Makana_F.A.

How football beat apartheid on Robben Island — Mail & Guardian · mg.co.za

A way of saying “we shall overcome” — Al Jazeera · aljazeera.com