A recently published book by Chuck Korr and Marvin Close, entitled More Than Just a Game, tells the story of how the political prisoners of South Africa’s infamous Robben Island turned football into an active force in their struggle for freedom.

Despite torture, regular beatings and backbreaking labour, these men defied all odds and played organised league football on one of the ugliest and most brutal hell-holes on earth. Even more astonishingly, they played the game for nearly 20 years with strict adherence to FIFA rules.

When the commanding officer first granted the right to play football, the prisoners held a series of meetings among themselves to decide how to accept the offer.

The majority of the prisoners thought that sports would be enjoyable and could reduce the immense tension that was part of the atmosphere in prison. Others thought that it was a propaganda stunt by the authorities; it had been allowed not to benefit the prisoners but the regime, and therefore should be rejected.

It became a matter of great importance to the prisoners to make sure that they controlled the sport and used it for their purposes.

The passion for football went far beyond the men who played it, or even those who organised and ran it. To these young men it was time to have some fun. But football on the island was serious fun. On Saturday mornings these men were transformed into ‘soccer magicians’.

Saturdays had always been special, because it signified the end of the work week in the quarry. However, before football, the day had also brought depression. The prisoners were confined to their cells, where the gloom and cold reminded them of how much their lives had changed.

Saturday meant the absence of the quarry, but it also meant the absence of the noise of the work gangs, the songs the men sang, the sense of movement, and the open sky above them. Four walls and a concrete roof replaced that on Saturdays.

Thus did Saturday football become the great escape from the routine of the prison. It was a way to counteract prison unlike any other. Football was definitely more than a one-day or, later, two-day a week event.

The excitement started on Saturday night or Sunday morning when the fixture list was announced for the following week. Throughout the week, an informed schedule revolved around it, the men talking about past games and predicting events in future matches.

Some supporters became particularly well known for their humour and passion, and there was always plenty of banter and teasing among the men. There were, however, a couple of aspects of being a football supporter on Robben Island that did not apply in the outside world: there was never any question of travelling to a match, and there was never any physical confrontation between rival supporters.

So much of what happened on the island was part of an enforced routine. The times the prisoners woke up, washed, ate, worked, and slept was laid down by the authorities. Work quotas were established for them. Even the time they spent studying was set by the prison, and the subjects they studied for degrees had to be approved.

There was almost nothing in the lives of the prisoners that was not set in stone, except for what happened on the pitch at the weekends. Competitive sport shares many of the attributes of theatre, but has one significant difference: the outcome is unknown, and the final act plays itself out among the various elements present – the players, the officials, and the spectators.

The sheer unpredictability of sport provided an excitement for the prisoners unlike anything else.

Playing a hard sport did a lot to lessen the overall level of tension in individual prisoners. They could fight out their battles on the field or on the touchline.

Some of the prisoners even began to wonder whether, if they could work together to get a football league moving in the same direction against entrenched opposition, maybe they could work together to get the country moving in the same direction.

Football also contributed to improved relationships between the prisoner and the wardens. When the prisoners started agitating for sports, most of the wardens thought it was nothing more than the prisoners making silly complaints to annoy the guards, who were simply trying to protect South Africa from communists and terrorists.

Why should these hardened criminals expect to have such privileges when they were on the island to be punished?

Wardens might dismiss the matches as nothing more than a bunch of Africans running around after the ball. After all, it wasn’t as if they were playing rugby, a game for real men, which required intelligence and planning.

After a while, though, it was difficult to ignore the fact that the prisoners were not just playing at football. They had created an organised league. They were scheduling matches and they seemed to know what they were doing.

Eventually many of the wardens came to look forward to the weekly football matches as a welcome diversion from the harshness of their service on the island.

Above and beyond the struggle by the prisoners to obtain the basic necessities of life, their fundamental battle was to retain their self-respect and remain true to the reason they had chosen to become a part of the struggle against apartheid. They were men with an agenda based on their hope for a new South Africa.

The goal of their struggle within the prison was to survive to continue the fight, and to survive with their dignity intact or even enhanced. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the way they created, organised, and maintained their football league and the other sporting bodies that came into existence in its wake.

The reasons why sport was so important varied hugely from one man to another, but all of them agreed that it mattered.

For all those prisoners, life in Robben Island would have been unimaginable without sport. This story celebrates bravery and heroism and shows how sport has the power to unite and overcome adversity.

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