#3 The Makana Football Association of hope
Imprisoned without trials during the apartheid regime, inmates of Robben Island prison spent their days as hope would slip perilously through their fingers. Forced to work in lime quarries and subjected to brutal physical and mental abuse by the white guards, the black inmates were constantly looking up into the sky for a ray of hope.
Well, apparently, God works in mysterious ways and didn’t send them a ray of hope. But send them something he did, and that was a book.
One of the few inhabitants of the shelves in a deficient library was quite interestingly a FIFA rule book. To escape the banality of the humdrum prison life, inmates would beg and plead to be allowed to play football every week. The guards were unrelenting and the requests laughed off and the advocates of the beautiful game would normally end up with a rear-whooping.
Well, perseverance is failing 19 times and succeeding the 20th. And eventually the guards caved in and the Makana Football Association League became a reality.
The prisoners worked with anything they could get; adorning goal posts with nets that washed up on the shore. The league brought together a faction of people who were otherwise divided by their political allegiances and bloc loyalties.
Football helped them empathise and see the humane side in their fellow men who were caught up in awfully unfortunate struggles of their own. The MFA documented all the match details including disciplinary records. The league’s adherence to the FIFA rules was astonishingly uncompromising. The dignified manner in which the players and the managers conducted themselves and subjected themselves to a system showed how they understood ‘due process’ in a place where it was not afforded to them.
Among the association referees was Jacob Zuma who has gone on to become and still is South Africa’s president! Dikgang Moseneke, who was also among the organisers is now a revered judge in the Constitutional Court. Steve Tangana Tshwete, another inmate, served as Sports Minister during Nelson Mandela’s tenure.
Football had given them hope in a place where it was simply put, scanty. Anthony Suze, a political prisoner and one of the founding members of the association, at the Time said, “It is amazing to think a game that people take for granted all around the world was the very same game that gave a group of prisoners sanity and in a way glorified us.”
Another famous inmate of Robben island was none other than Nelson Mandela but he was, unfortunately, was not allowed to play in the league. He, however, returned to Robben Island in 2007 to stand witness as the Makana FA was awarded an honorary FIFA membership for all its contribution not just to football but to humanity itself.
