Prison Held Their Bodies, Soccer Freed Their Minds

The soccer/rugby field at Robben Island

ROBBEN ISLAND, South Africa -- All that still suggested what took place on the rocky field outside heavily barred windows of what they called A Section here, on a chunk of an island eight miles off the Cape Town coast, was a long row of white-washed wooden benches buckled by weather and history. But this was where thousands of indigenous South Africans manufactured a little dignity in the form of Saturday soccer games to steel themselves for decades against multitudes of indignities.

This was the famous soccer pitch at infamous Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela spent 18 of his 27 years behind bars for taking up arms against the now-defunct -- but by less than a generation – brutally racist South African regime run by Dutch and English colonists. Grant Shezi was banished there in 1980 at age 23 for the same offense, fighting for his people's freedom, and released in 1990 when South Africa's repressive so-called apartheid system was finally defeated and the prison was abandoned.

"Sport was something that sustained us very much," Shezi, who played soccer there and learned tennis at the prison's courts, told me Wednesday aboard the ferry Sikhululekite as I returned from a morning tour of Robben Island Prison.
Blackistone in S.A.

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National Columnist Kevin Blackistone is on the scene in the home of World Cup 2010.
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Shezi said that by the time he was shipped to the island, like a slave in the hull of a ship called Susan Kruger that sometimes still makes the trip, the games were sophisticated. They used real soccer balls rather than tightly bound newspapers or blankets the prisoners first booted around in defiance of the guards. Driftwood and old fishing net still made up the goals.

But a league the prisoners named Makana, after a Xhosa tribe leader held captive on the island by the British a century before, was formed with teams organized from each cellblock. South Africa president Jacob Zuma was a prisoner-player. The prisoners followed the rules of FIFA, the world governing body of soccer which awarded the 2010 World Cup that kicked off in South Africa two weeks ago, and crowned champions.

"The rise of this kind of collective sport was a struggle of many years for the prisoners back into the '60s," explained Shezi, who was part of the African National Congress's armed wing, the Umkhonto we Sizwe, which means "Spear of the Nation" in Zulu, Shezi's mother tongue.

It was the same type of coordinated effort they formed to demand better food, mattresses to sleep on rather than mats on concrete floors and some modicum of medical care. Shezi said prisoners often got only one bowl of gruel per day, which they were left to eat with their hands despite it being scalding hot. They organized a campaign to force their jailers to give them spoons (That went a long way in explaining Shezi's anger with a waiter we suffered through at dinner later Wednesday, who failed to bring Shezi a spoon for his curry dish.)

Nelson Mandela's former prison cell at Robben Island

It was the same kind of discipline and focus they exercised as guerrillas before getting captured that eventually brought one of the most well-heeled and oiled government-run police states to its knees.

The prisoners, all black, choose soccer, Shezi said, because that was the preferred sport of black South Africans. They added rugby and tennis, the sports of choice of the white minority, mostly to demonstrate their sameness to white guards.

"We never liked tennis because it was the sport of the elite," said Shezi, who was born and reared in the Eastern coastal city Durban. "But by the time I left prison, my concentration was on tennis. I taught myself from the book. I realized the only reason I hadn't played it was because I was deprived."

When the scorching summer months descended on the island, Shezi said the prisoners ended the soccer league and opened an Olympics-style competition of running and jumping. It was replete with opening ceremonies featuring a torch made out of paraffin.

Shezi was also among a group of prisoners who used song as sustenance. Shezi, Muntu Nxumalo and Thembinkosi Sithole have kept that tradition alive as the Robben Island Singers (www.robbenislandsingers.com) and are singing and recording songs about their struggle against apartheid.

The only Robben Island prisoners barred from participating in the prison games were Mandela, despite being an accomplished boxer, and other ranking members of the black South African freedom fighting groups -- like the African National Congress and the Pan-African Congress -- who were in maximum security cellblocks or solitary confinement. But Shezi said he recalled those who couldn't play being supportive, which cemented the defiant spirit of the prison's anti-apartheid activists amid the inhumane conditions of the prison, and their struggle to keep their dignity through organizing and playing football.

To say that team building is an important byproduct of playing sports has become little more than cliché, but it is revived when you realize the purpose it served for Robben Island's wrongfully imprisoned. Playing sports gave them a sense of freedom and community against the backbreaking and potentially soul breaking sun-up to sundown days they spent chipping and carting away limestone at a quarry on the island under the close watch of gun-toting shoot-to-kill guards. It was so liberating that when the warden found out Mandela and other isolated prisoners could see the games through their barred windows, the warden ordered prisoners to build a wall to block the view.


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A few times each week, Shezi points all of that out to visitors to Robben Island. He went to work at the prison, some of the only work he could find, as a docent when it was turned into a national heritage site and museum. Shezi even moved to the island to live with about 150 other people, many ex-prisoners working there too, and their families.

As we chatted on the tour ferry headed to Cape Town, Shezi's eight-year-old son Kwame played along side him with a pair of boxing mitts for which he'd become fond. Kwame Shezi was following in his father's footsteps as the latest sporting fighter from Robben Island.