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South
African Movie Shows How Football Unified Apartheid
Prisoners

By Terry FitzPatrick

Cape Town
12 November 2007

FitzPatrick report - Download MP3 (1.01
MB)
Listen to FitzPatrick report

During South Africa's apartheid era, many of the nation's
black activists were detained in a notorious island prison near Cape
Town. A new film is revealing a bit of hidden history about prison
life. The movie is about football, and how many prisoners feel the
sport saved their lives. For VOA, Terry FitzPatrick
reports.

President Clinton and S. African
President Nelson Mandela peer through cell No. 5, where
Mandela was jailed for 18 years, on Robben Island (File Photo
- 27 Mar 1998)

Sedick Isaacs says the smell
of the ocean makes him think of prison. Walking along Cape Town's
waterfront, Isaacs peers at an island just off shore. Robben Island.
It is a place many regarded as the "Alcatraz of Africa."

"When I look at that island, I almost get a shiver of freezing
cold. And I think that probably is very difficult to get out of a
person's mind," he said.

Isaacs was a scientist, imprisoned as a saboteur for teaching
anti-apartheid activists how to make bombs. He spent 13 years on
Robben Island.

Isaacs is one of five former prisoners whose experiences are
chronicled in a new film, entitled More than Just a Game.
Isaacs helped organize a prison football league. He was worried
about the toll that poor nutrition and harsh conditions were taking
on Robben Island inmates.

"And I knew that there are long term effects of imprisonment. I
can still quote the textbook: like mental vacuity, listlessness. And
I thought we need to keep alive and prevent those things from
happening to us, because there is a revolution taking place in South
Africa. And once we are released we need to be healthy enough to
take our places again in that revolution," he added.

More than Just a Game is part documentary, part dramatic
re-enactment. It is set in the turbulent 1960s and 70s when many
liberation leaders were jailed. They endured brutal punishment and
long days of breaking rocks in a quarry. Soccer brought hope.

It took prisoners three years to get permission to play football
on Saturdays. When authorities relented, inmates organized a formal
league, with eight teams, trained referees, tournament rules and
trophies. They called it the Makana Football Association.

Documents about the league were discovered by an American
professor from the University of Missouri, Chuck Korr.

"The prisoners on Robben Island are of a generation that believe
fervently in the Victorian values of sports builds character. They
used football as a way of reclaiming their dignity. This was
something they ran. Anytime authorities tried to interfere with it
they closed it down and then they threatened to talk to the
International Red Cross, they threatened a hunger strike. Football
was theirs," said Korr.

League activities were meticulously documented, and Korr's
scholarly research led to the making of the movie by Durban-based
Videovision Entertainment. Korr realized how important the project
was for South Africans as he talked with a member of the crew during
filming.

"He said when he went to school all he ever learned was how many
ships the Portuguese sent, and the names of the first Dutch
governors. He said: 'My people were never allowed to have our own
history. And what this film is doing is restoring to us the past
that we were never allowed to learn',"said Korr.

Several of South Africa's current political and business leaders
played soccer as inmates on Robben Island. But Sedick Isaacs says
More than Just a Game is about more than apartheid. He
feels it's a universal story of human spirit overcoming
adversity.

"I feel the message is that there were other people on the island
besides the politicians, and how within this community we had
internal problems and how we actually solved it," said
Isaaacs. "That's what we want the world to look at."

More than Just a Game will premiere later this month
(November 23, 2007) when hundreds of international sports officials
gather in South Africa to organize the 2010 World Cup football
tournament.

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