Soccer Against the Enemy

by Simon Kuper

  We talked about Africa—South African whites discuss it as if they live in a different continent entirely. “The guys tell me that in Lagos they only got out of the stadium thanks to the Nigerian players. George Dearnaley says that when he was sitting in the bus, fans were shouting, ‘De Klerk! Come here!’ And I’ve got a bit of a temper, I’m worried that if I got into something like that I’d get angry.” The Bafana Bafana had an away match coming up in Congo. “Is it worth it?” De Sa asked, without meaning it. “Who does Mandela support anyway?” he asked me. I knew, because the general manager of the Orlando Pirates had told me. “Mandela is a card-carrying Pirates supporter,” Irvin Khoza had said, “and he has stayed at my house many times. Bishop Desmond Tutu is also a card-carrying Pirate.” I told De Sa, who said, “Then I definitely won’t be voting for him.” De Sa plays for Moroka Swallows.

  Half an hour late, and looking as ever like a Chinese giant, Mandela appeared. He chatted and joked, and when a terrified Steve Crowley, another white keeper, came racing up minutes late, he got a kindly headmaster’s smile from Mandela. Palacios had reassuring words for the ANC President (“No worry. We win.” ) and then Mandela reached the journalists. He shook hands with the black reporters, and then, as these things still happen in South Africa, turned round to see us three white journalists standing together. Stricken with nerves, we had our hands by our sides, and he was thrown by finding nothing to shake.

  All the time I was wondering whether I would dare ask a question. Even professional soccer players like De Sa scared me, and this was Nelson Mandela. Perhaps he was the most famous politician on earth, though Willem, my photographer, had said not. (We had debated the question.) He had certainly had his own Wembley concert. So when I asked, “Mr. Mandela, we hear that you are an Orlando Pirates supporter. Is that correct?” I was delighted. I had spoken fluently, he had heard me and the question had not annoyed him.

  He said: “Noooo! I was asked this question many times during my long years in jail, and each time I answered, ‘I support all the teams equally!’ ” It was an election-year reply.

  I was passing the players’ table when De Sa called me over. “So who does he support?” he asked, and the whole squad looked up eagerly. I said, “He supports all the teams equally.” “I told you he was a Swallows fan,” shouted De Sa.

  Mandela then gave a speech. “Comrades!” he began, told some set-piece anecdotes that proved he was a regular guy, and moved on to soccer. “Tomorrow,” he said, “the entire South Africa will be at the stadium.” (This was surprising if true, for the match was scheduled for two days later.) He was not sure which side to support, he confessed, “because you will be playing against Nigeria, a country that has been highly supportive of the anti-apartheid struggle.” This neutrality, noble in its way, must have disappointed Palacios, who had invited Mandela to Helderfontein. Palacios had played for Peru, and believed that politicians’ visits inspired players.

  “Soccer”—Mandela pronounced it “sucker”—“is one of the most unifying activities amongst us.”

  At Helderfontein that day, the claim rang particularly true. The players before him—blacks, whites, Coloreds, and Indians—had only soccer in common. Ten years before, the blacks among them could only have entered the estate as servants, and just three years before Mandela had been a prisoner on Robben Island. Quite near Helderfontein that day, other South Africans were enthusiastically shooting one another. “South Africans are sports-mad,” Morewa has said. Apartheid aside, the country is a sleepy one-time colony at the bottom of the world, and besides sport there is not much else to do there. Johannesburg is built around golf courses, and in Soweto the crime rate dropped to unprecedented levels during the Italian World Cup. The idea that sport might help build the nation is less wishful than it sounds.

  The cricket World Cup of 1992 had been a revelation. The 20-year sports boycott had ended just a couple of months before, and the nation—the whole nation—watched the tournament in rapture. When South Africa beat Australia by seven wickets, Steve Tshwete, the ANC man for sport and a former political prisoner, jumped into the arms of Kepler Wessels, captain of the team and an Afrikaner. “I never had tears on Robben Island, but I cried tonight,” Tshwete said later. It was during that World Cup that South Africa’s whites had to vote “Yes” or “No” to further reform of apartheid. The team let it be known that if the Nos won they would abandon the World Cup. The “Yes” vote was overwhelming, and the pundits said that you could do anything to white South Africans as long as you gave them international sport.

  The doubters asked how sport could unite the nation when even in sport the races are separated. The Afrikaners play rugby, the English cricket, and the blacks most of the soccer. (We know South Africa for its rugby and cricket, but of course soccer is the most popular sport in the country.) I put this divide to the senior South African civil servant responsible for sport, a round man with glasses named Bodenstein. “Well, yes,” he said. “But that’s not really a result of ethnicity. I would rather say its preferences. Look, the black man is a ball player. He’s got tremendous flair to play with the ball, and he grows up with a soccer ball in the back yard, and not so much with a rugby ball in the back yard.” Many black South Africans live in back yards, and I suggested to Bodenstein that the “preferences” also had to do with income. You can only play rugby on grassy fields, and cricket requires perfect pitches and coaches who can teach complex techniques. “Yes, that is partly true,” agreed Bodenstein, but he added that sports clubs were now open to all races.

  But it would be wrong to be too gloomy: there is one sport that all the races at least like (only the local Chinese are not so keen) and that is soccer. South Africa is a country that could do with winning the World Cup, or at least qualifying for it, and the Nigeria match was crucial. President De Klerk thought so too, one of his advisers told me.

  A few days before the Nigeria game, I was standing on a sidewalk in the center of Johannesburg reading the soccer news in the Sowetan, a black tabloid. A black stranger approached me. Was I going to the match? Who did I think would win? Did I not agree that the Bafana had improved? Whites and blacks would love to be able to talk to one another—almost everyone wants the new South Africa to work—but what else do they have to talk about? Soccer matters.

  As you know,” Mandela continued, “I have been on holiday for 27 years, but from that famous resort I have been able to watch the progress of the sucker game of this country. But there was a period when the standard began to drop, for reasons which we all know.” I imagined the players hanging their heads: Mandela knew about their failure! By “reasons,” he meant the sports boycott. But now Palacios, South Africa’s fourth coach in six months in the world game, was promising better days.

  “The African continent has come closer together,” concluded Mandela, “because of this particular activity, in which you are our best ambassadors.” It made me think back to Roger Milla in Cameroon: “Not just the success of Africa, but of the whole Third World.”

  Palacios handed Mandela a “present:” a baseball cap with the Kappa logo on it. A woman from the sponsor immediately jammed the cap on top of the ANC president, but Kappa had underestimated the size of the great man’s head and the cap rode high above it. The photographers tried not to laugh, while Mandela showed the players the scars from the witch doctor’s knife on his wrists and face. “You see, this muti is nothing new,” he said. He posed for a team photograph, and the photographers begged him to shake hands with Doctor Khumalo, the second most famous man in South Africa, a master trickster who had had a trial with Aston Villa. Tall, light-skinned, and with the faintest moustache, Doctor looked more like a painter than a soccer player. Clasping his hand, Mandela boasted: “Now at last I can say to my grandchildren that for one day I was famous.” Doctor blushed.

  Later I had lunch with Palacios. The players sat at two long tables, but we ate alone. I was flattered by the attention, until I grasped that this man will hold forth to anyo
ne. Nothing stops him, not even when my knife slipped and I scattered rice all over the table. (I had never dined with a national team manager before.) Palacios finished eating half an hour after me, and ended up drinking his ice cream.

  Like his father and his two uncles before him, Palacios had played for Peru, though the number of caps he won depends on which interview you read. He claims that he missed the World Cup of 1978 through injury, but all coaches in South Africa who never played a World Cup tell the same story. Soon after that, an Argentine named Marcelo Houseman had turned his career into a whistle-stop tour of the world. Houseman had entered Palacios’ life in 1979 in Costa Rica, where the Argentinian was a striker and the Peruvian a player-manager. Inflation hit Costa Rica, and Houseman moved to Hong Kong, from where he rang Palacios. “ ‘Negro,’ said Marcelo—he does not mean it offensive, he calls me Negro for love—come to Hong Kong! I thought he was joking but then I came.” From Hong Kong, Houseman took Palacios to Finland and later to Germany, and he once sent him to Australia when he himself could not take a job there. Then in 1985 Houseman rang his friend again to invite him to South Africa.

  Palacios is a black man, and in South Africa he had to defy the law just to live with his white wife, but by his own account he prospered. He managed various clubs, and in 1992 he became manager of the Bafana Bafana. Houseman, now an agent in Johannesburg, told me he had got his friend the job. Palacios thought he deserved it. “There are too many English coaches here,” he told me. “Maybe they are not the best English coaches. Sometimes the white coaches—because of apartheid—will swear and shout at the black players, so that the player thinks, ‘I will do nothing.’ ”

  When I managed to interrupt him I said, “Journalists tell me that the white and the black players in your squad don’t mix much,” and expected a flat denial. “A very good question,” he replied. “When I started, you could see this everywhere. When we went to Durban, we went in four cars, and when the first one turned up all the whites climbed in. We ate at small tables and the whites would sit at one table. So I put them all at a long table, I made the room list to stop whites rooming with whites and blacks with blacks, and when the players form pairs to pass the ball, I stop two whites from pairing up.” And did the whites and blacks play differently? “Yes, but the white players are learning.”

  Johannesburg. It was strange to watch a free Nelson Mandela meeting a mixed South African soccer team playing in the World Cup, and it was strange to visit the offices of the South African Communist Party in the business district of Johannesburg. The SACP was banned until recently, but is now probably the only growing Communist Party in the world.

  The security guard unlocked the bars in front of the door, and I was admitted to meet Essop Pahad. Pahad is a member of the SACP central committee and of the ANC executive, and a soccer nut. He had just returned home from his years in exile at Sussex University and in Communist Prague. His elder brother, Aziz, is an even bigger fish in the SACP and the ANC, and the third brother, Ismail, runs a soccer club.

  With South Africa changing day by day, I thought Essop might be busy, but three hours later it was I who had to end the conversation to get home. Mandela at Helderfontein was the end of the road; Pahad remembered the early days.

  Pahad is an Indian (a very tall Indian) which in the 1950s meant that he played in the Indian league. “Everything was separate,” he recalled, “the teams, the spectators. For example, next to Natalspruit, where the Indians played, separated from it only by a fence, was the Colored ground—they had a slightly bigger ground—and it was, ‘Never the twain shall meet,’ ”

  But there were impostors. A Turkish friend of Pahad’s, registered as a Colored, had such light skin that he was signed by a white team. “He had to pretend to be white, and if you went to support him you didn’t shout ‘Mustapha!’—you called him by his nickname. Only in South Africa could this happen.” Even then, the color bars were breaking down. Pahad and another Indian decided to move to the Colored league. First they had to go before the Colored league committee. “I gave my name as Gerald Francis, a beautiful Colored soccer player of the time, and the other guy said he was Baker Adams. The committee members laughed—a lot of them knew us—but they let us in no problem.” He laughed too: “It sounds funny when we talk about it now, but I tell you, it was bloody tragic then.”

  Late in the 1950s, Pahad helped found the first ever mixed league—mixed that is, except for the whites. “It never even occurred to us to ask them,” he admitted. “They were on the other side of the world.”

  Pretoria. The whites continued to play in their own league, until on February 18, 1977, in a match at the Caledonian Ground in Pretoria, the Arcadia Shepherds took the field with Vincent “Tanti” Julius in their side. Julius was first a top-class goalkeeper, later a top-class striker, and always a black man.

  Saul Sacks, a Pretoria businessman and no great radical, was the Arcadia chairman then, and still is today. I visited him at his home, where he gave me stacks of scrapbooks and told me: “Kai Johannsen, the former Glasgow Rangers player, was our manager. He and I decided to defy the law and field a black man, and we’d see if the sky fell down. On the day of the match, we hid Julius in the club office, and at seven-thirty that evening, half an hour before kickoff, I phoned Michael Rapp of the NFL.” Rapp later moved to England and became a Spurs director. “I said, ‘Listen Michael, as a matter of courtesy I would like to tell you that we will be fielding a black man this evening.’ He said, ‘That’s fine,’ but ten minutes later he phoned back and said, ‘I’ve called around some other clubs and I have to warn you that if you go ahead and play him you’ll be expelled from the league.’ I said, ‘So be it,’ and that was that.

  “Ten minutes before kickoff—it was the best-kept secret in South African soccer—we introduced Julius to the rest of the team and said, ‘This is Vincent Julius, he’s playing striker today.’ When we ran onto the field the crowd rose as one man, even the whites—you see, the whites who came to soccer weren’t like the Afrikaners.” The next day the papers went wild, but the government did nothing. Other white clubs began to play blacks. Julius was the Arcs’ leading scorer for three seasons running, though it was muttered that he never did his best against black teams. Later he joined the San Diego Sockers, on the fattest contract ever offered a black South African.

  By playing for the Arcs, he made mixed soccer inevitable. When this became clear, the government acted. “The sports minister Piet Koornhof called me and one or two other white club chairmen to his office here in Pretoria and spoke to us for two hours without stopping,” Sacks recounted. “Soccer to the government was an orphan, a black game with a few colonial whites involved. But Koornhof knew everything about soccer: the players, the organization, foreign soccer. I don’t know whether he’d read up on it for our meeting or whether he just knew.”

  Koornhof told the chairmen, “Merge with the blacks. The future of the country is with the blacks. Blacks and whites must learn to play together.” It was an accurate vision of the future, but in the 1970s cabinet ministers never talked like that. “I was totally surprised,” Sacks agreed. But Koornhof added, “Don’t touch the Federation”—the league run by radical Indians and Coloreds. “Those people are Communists and politicians.”

  The chairmen took his advice. “Partly, I must admit, for commercial reasons,” said Sacks, “because the blacks were crowd pullers, but for me it was also an idealistic step.”

  Today all teams are mixed, but some are still thought of as white and others as black. Wits University and Cape Town Hellenic have mostly white players and an almost all-white support, while the biggest clubs in the country, Orlando Pirates and Kaizer Chiefs, come from Soweto and have black fans.

  When soccer went mixed South African whites were still going to matches. “There was a soccer culture like the one in England,” I was told by Mark Gleeson, who at 30 is just old enough to remember. “My old lady and old man and us kids used to watch Arcadia, and we’d even ta
ke the bus to some away matches.” Clubs like Highlands Park regularly drew 20,000, and even Kaizer Chiefs had lots of white fans.

  As soon as soccer went mixed, black fans outnumbered the whites, even at white clubs like Arcadia. Roy Matthews, a former Charlton Athletic player who became manager of the Arcs, complained in 1979: “Even when we run onto the field, we get no support. I have even heard jeering, and that is no way to start a game. The only thing it does do is make the players play harder to show the crowd who is boss.”

  Later that year, the Chiefs visited the tiny Caledonian Ground, and around 30,000 fans were locked out. The “Callies” is in a white area, and the locals were unamused when the excluded fans threw stones and fought with police. The Pretoria city council immediately barred blacks from the ground, later banned soccer from it altogether, and Arcadia have never played at the Callies since. “Soccer had gone mixed,” Lerman of the Sunday Times told me, “but it was mixed only in the sense that whites could play against blacks in stadium that were also segregated. So you would have 20,000 whites in one section facing 20,000 blacks in the other. It was virtually an invitation to have a race war. Naturally, there were incidents.”