Читать книгу More Than Just a Game: Football v Apartheid - Marvin Close - Страница 10

‘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.