Football
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The Makana Football Association was far from the ramshackle set-up one might expect to exist under such circumstances. The equipment was primitive but painstakingly prepared, with boots fashioned out of women’s shoes with the heels removed and old tyres used as a hardwearing sole. The kits were in vibrant colours, as is the tradition in African football, with the complex and much-loved team badges drawn on each individual shirt. The league was well-organised, holding monthly meetings complete with minute-taking. There is a display dedicated to these details at the port where visitors board ferries to Robben Island. The port itself is named after one of the island’s most famous residents: the Nelson Mandela Gateway.
Mandela, however, was unable to participate in the Makana football leagues. Incarcerated in an isolation wing, his only experience of football on Robben Island was the glimpses of games he saw through the bars of his cell window. Nevertheless, he had been active in the initial campaign, selflessly contributing to a cause he was never likely to benefit from. That said, every prisoner did benefit; so did South Africa as a whole. In an environment devoid of morality and justice, the prisoners of Robben Island were able to wrestle back some semblance of a human right, sending a powerful message to the rest of the nation.
When considering the brutal hardship of life on Robben Island, it is easy to jump to the conclusion that football was replaceable. Any light-hearted release in such surroundings would surely have been appreciated by prisoners. However, it was essential that the recreational focus was a sporting one; nothing else would have provided an outlet for the physical strength the prisoners had gained from their gruelling manual labour. As the nation’s most popular sport, football united the prisoners, even those like Mandela who were barred from participating.
The only ‘crime’ most of the prisoners had committed was to oppose the apartheid regime. These weren’t untrustworthy individuals, nor were they feckless or outcasts. Back home they had been community leaders, fighting bitterly against oppression. The apartheid government were certainly right to think that removing these individuals from South African society would lessen the threat they posed to the regime, but they did not realise that storing all such individuals together on one island would lead to their own eventual downfall. Tony Suze, a youth member of the Pan Africanist Congress and a one-time Robben Island inmate, later told of the mobilising power of football at the prison: ‘As long as it had to do with football, we were able to tell the authorities how we wanted it, why we wanted it and so on and they would listen. That was an expression of some kind of freedom for us.’ Although football mattered a great deal to the prisoners – indeed some results were so hotly disputed that they risked causing acrimony – it was the accompanying discourse that made it the springboard for revolution.
With football alive on the island, requests for additional sports were consequently made, considered and in many cases accepted. Special allowances were granted so that football schedules would not be disrupted. The Makana Football Association was nothing to do with the prison warders; it was the brainchild of the politically minded prisoners. Once they had been granted their wish, they knew that forming a governing body would make it easier for them to discuss other issues with their jailors. It satisfied the needs of the authorities and empowered inmates all at the same time, something that could not be achieved in any other aspect of prison life. Without it, the present political landscape of South Africa would be vastly different.
The higher echelons of South African politics have been filled with ex-Robben Islanders since 1990. They have not all followed the same political path, being divided primarily by the split between the African National Congress (ANC) and Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) parties. Nelson Mandela’s legacy is obvious. Less well known is the fact that Jacob Zuma, the nation’s president from 2009, also resided on the island, along with former defence minister Terror Lekota and the charismatic business leader and host of South Africa’s 2005 version of The Apprentice, Tokyo Sexwale. Except for Mandela, they were all keen participants in the Makana football league. These are just a famous handful of the league’s successful political exports; many lesser-known members have played a hugely influential role in South Africa’s post-apartheid resurgence. Robben Island, once a prison for the country’s most powerful activists, has since been the uniting experience of the ANC and PAC parties’ leaders. The result of this shared hardship has been a far more harmonious relationship between the two, something that simply would not have been possible without football. Arguments that threatened to spill over in the cells and quarries were instead settled on the field.
Sport’s influence on the South African government did not end with the Makana league. Many of the proudest moments of South Africa’s post-apartheid history have been sporting ones. In 1995, a pivotal time for the nation, South Africa hosted the Rugby World Cup. Although apartheid regulations and segregation had been abolished five years earlier, the government of F.W. de Klerk did not leave office until 1994 when it was replaced by Nelson Mandela and the ANC. As president during the Rugby World Cup, Mandela exerted a powerful influence upon the country’s approach to the tournament. The national rugby team, known as the Springboks, had long been a whites-only setup and the focus of much ire from black South Africans. However, rather than shun the team as an icon of apartheid values, Mandela saw an opportunity to reconcile. He arranged to meet the Springboks’ team captain Francois Pienaar and set about rehabilitating the national team in the whole nation’s eyes.
The public obeyed Mandela’s call and provided the overwhelming home support that powered the Springboks to victory. The competition was heralded as the birth of the Rainbow Nation, black and white South Africans united in the most unlikely of contexts. It was a feat that reverberated around the world. Since the transition out of apartheid had been gradual and blurred, the World Cup introduced the new South Africa to the watching world. A government that had been mobilised by sport reaped its benefits once more. The values of sport and its power to unite have dominated South Africa’s post-apartheid mentality. The 1995 Rugby World Cup was just one example of sport being used to improve South Africa’s image in the eyes of the world. This was particularly necessary because of the depths to which it had sunk. In the late 1950s, football in South Africa had been consigned to the doldrums. After it emerged that the nation’s law would prevent it from selecting a mixed-race team to take part in international competitions, FIFA banned them until the law was changed.
The ban stood for three decades and left the sport to the amateurs, allowing an internationally recognised Springbok side to move to the forefront of the nation’s sporting consciousness unopposed.
When another World Cup visited the country in 2010, this time in football, it provided a timely reminder of how far the nation had come in two decades. It was by no means settled, still trying to address the deeply ingrained problems caused by years of the apartheid regime, but it was on the way up. South Africa became the first African nation to host a football World Cup, a feat that would have been almost unthinkable eighteen years earlier when their apartheid-related ban from international football came to an end. Sport could so easily have slipped down the list of priorities for a country emerging from the depths of an apartheid regime. Few people would have blamed Mandela for ignoring the Rugby World Cup so soon after his inauguration, and many would have understood if the nation had stepped aside in 2004 as the bidding to host the 2010 football World Cup reached its climax.
The divides created by apartheid run deep, and remain part of the nation’s consciousness. Effort and patience will be required to fully eradicate them, but South Africa’s progress would have been much slower without football. On Robben Island it helped prisoners from warring factions to find a middle ground. It stopped the two leading political parties of today from separating further, and the mutual cooperation of these polarised groups has allowed the country to avoid additional and unnecessary obstacles. The apartheid regime would have fallen with or without th
e Makana league, but the nation would not have been able to stand again as quickly in its absence.
Sport has been central in the country’s rehabilitation. Fostering widespread and, more importantly, interracial support in 1995 for rugby, which had for so long been an exclusively white sport, ranks among Mandela’s greatest achievements. The achievement of football’s former outcasts in hosting the 2010 football World Cup so impeccably rebranded South Africa as a forward-thinking nation. Both tournaments have renewed the country internally as well as externally. The legacy of the Makana football league is wide-reaching; without football, South Africa would be a shadow of its present self.
Other books in the series:
If you enjoyed this book, here’s a sample from Imagine That … Music
Imagine that …
MTV flops as music fans side with the radio star … and hip-hop never reaches the mainstream
The legacy of Music Television divides opinion. For many, MTV breathed life into the music business. TV music show Top of the Pops was already a long-established institution in the UK before television producers in New York dreamt up round-the-clock music television. It made sense, there was demand – so why not supply? By adding a visual element to the music it challenged musicians to become more rounded performers. People already knew what the stars of the music business looked like, but now there was a chance for breakthrough acts to get their face known. For others MTV is merely a synonym for the prioritisation of image over musical content.
It’s important to establish what MTV is. ‘Music Television’ is the obvious answer, but it’s also now the wrong answer. Officially, at least from a branding point of view, Music Television no longer exists, since the name was permanently abbreviated to ‘MTV’ in 2010. The television channel that launched on 1 August 1981 is no more, but the brand has developed into an empire. It has had arguably the biggest cultural impact of any television channel in history.
The argument goes that MTV was merely a vehicle to fame for the pretty people. Actually it became a test-ground for daring new looks. From Madonna’s cropped wedding dress in her ‘Like a Virgin’ video to Michael Jackson’s red leather jacket in ‘Thriller’, the videos helped to inspire fashion lines and fancy dress for years to come. Madonna and Michael Jackson were also two of the leading proponents of eye-catching videos, revelling in the chance to act out their lyrics.
It should be noted that music videos existed long before MTV and had received exposure through shows like Top of the Pops. MTV simply gave them a bigger platform. By the Nineties the varying genres of music video had become as well defined as the music. There were mini-epics like Guns N’ Roses’ wedding saga ‘November Rain’, animated adventures such as A-ha’s pencil-sketched ‘Take On Me’ and even a Mad Hatter’s tea party in Tom Petty’s surreal ‘Don’t Come Around Here No More’. It has become increasingly easy for people in recent years to refer to MTV as a superficial music revolution – it was, after all, one based around image – but in the early days there was far greater creative content than people care to remember. There was also a defiant self-awareness that has been forgotten, perhaps even by the producers. The first track ever to air on MTV was a cover song by a band called The Buggles: ‘Video Killed the Radio Star’.
In 1990 a new media giant entered the scene and brought with it a revolutionary expansion of MTV’s market. Sky TV changed the way people accessed television. Launched on a small scale, it went on to transform itself into a monopolising subscription service. For the first time viewers found themselves paying monthly to view the television that everyone was talking about. As the number of channels hosted by Sky grew, it started to sell subscriptions on a package basis. This meant that customers would purchase access to channels in blocks, i.e. sports, movies, and music. Forming the basis of the most desired packages, music channels boomed. There was a call for more channels and MTV was only too happy to oblige, dividing its output between numerous stations by genre. It was at this time that MTV changed irreversibly. It was soon joined by rival music channels. The phasing was seamless as MTV morphed from a one-channel brand into a multi-channel genre, signalling the beginning of the end for Music Television.
But after around a decade of continued growth, the music video became outdated. Or at least the means of viewing it did. As YouTube rose unstoppably to the top of the entertainment tree, artists were able to offer their music videos to fans on an unstoppable loop. It might not have spelled the end of music channels, but it certainly monopolised the market. Entertainment is an ever-changing business though, as MTV knew only too well, and so a rebrand was in order.
Suddenly music was bumped from the prime slots to be replaced by partially scripted reality-television shows, the antithesis of the original output of MTV. Channels dedicated to music videos still exist, but they have lost the commanding power they carried until the mid-Nineties. They no longer have the power to dictate which artists will be hits. Instead this power has been divided. Internet-based social networks and YouTube are driving the music business more than ever now. The power lies in the hands of the public. Editorial policy has been replaced by word of mouth. Whereas MTV offered budding stars the chance to get noticed by the public once they had a recording contract, YouTube allows users to gain exposure without backing, either financially or from the music business. The immediacy of the internet means that singers and songwriters can rise to fame in next to no time once they ‘go viral’. The prime example of this is teen-sensation Justin Bieber. Gaining a large YouTube following after his mother had uploaded videos of him singing, the Canadian R&B star was spotted by talent scout Scooter Braun in 2007 aged just thirteen. His first album went multi-platinum, and by the age of eighteen Bieber was commanding enough power in the music business to sign fellow Canadian Carly Rae Jepson to his label. Naturally, Jepson soon started to top the charts herself. Stars that were once made on MTV no longer need to impress television bosses to get known. Music has taken matters into its own hands.
The music business is an incredibly fluid one and most developments are temporary. MTV had more impact on it more than most, enjoying a heyday lasting nearly two decades. The changes it brought about shook the world of music, but what if the viewing public had shunned it when it debuted in the summer of 1981?
The MTV revolution brought a daring new element to the works of pop acts. Suddenly they needed to present themselves creatively through film as well song and dress. This limited many artists and liberated many others. Madonna, as we’ve seen, flourished amid the broadening of music media. There appeared to be good reason for this. Madonna already had an interest in cinema and her film career actually predates her music career by four years. She also developed a strong interest in fashion, reinventing her image on a number of occasions. These two elements combined with her musical talents to make her a more eclectic prospect than many of the acts she was up against. Rather than just watching a musician in a video, viewers would see a video-star in Madonna, someone who had tailored her act to suit the medium.
Without MTV and the music video, Madonna would have been deprived of the edge she had over many of her peers. MTV played to her strengths and cemented her place in the public eye to a greater degree than her music and live performances alone would have done. Equally, middling artists of years gone by might have been propelled into the upper echelons of showbiz had MTV been in its pomp when they were recording.
It wasn’t just those who embraced the cinematic element of MTV who prospered. The medium also promoted many exciting new genres of music, most notably rap and hip-hop. Two years before the birth of MTV, the now legendary Sugarhill Gang released a record featuring a brand-new sound. With their song ‘Rappers Delight’ they became the first band to achieve chart success with a rap single. It belonged to a much broader style of music known as hip-hop, originating in the New York suburb of the Bronx. Despite being considered very much a novelty act at the time, the Sugarhill Gang were pioneering the most important genre of the next tw
o decades – and just in time for MTV. Indeed, the rise of hip-hop coincided with the huge upturn in music videos on television. Originally hip-hop was predominantly the work of black performers – although some high-profile white performers have found success in the genre since, the Beastie Boys and Eminem for example. At the outset, it faced strong opposition from black-oriented radio stations, since much of the content of hip-hop was seen to present a negative image of black people. As such, without MTV to provide exposure for its stars, hip-hop would have faced an ongoing struggle to reach mainstream audiences.