FORMER INMATES of South Africa’s famous Robben Island prison who established a football league as a way to survive incarceration were honoured by Fifa yesterday, when it officially recognised their association.
International football’s governing body ratified the league’s constitution during a Fifa executive committee meeting on the island prison in Cape Town, where Nelson Mandela and many African National Congress (ANC) leaders spent decades doing hard labour.
The Makana Football Association was set up by inmates on Robben Island in 1966 to provide rules and structures for anti-apartheid activists who wanted to play matches.
Fifa president Sepp Blatter, in Cape Town for today’s World Cup draw, told a press conference on Wednesday that the move was a symbolic gesture to these former political prisoners.
“Those who have followed the history of the new republic of South Africa know what this means. Men like president Jacob Zuma have spent years and years on Robben Island.
“On Robben Island since 1964 they have had a football federation, organised with referees and a disciplinary committee – it’s all written down. It’s something absolutely historical. They organised football exactly according to the statutes of Fifa,” he said.
Shortly after addressing the Fifa meeting yesterday, former inmate and current minister of human settlements Tokyo Sexwale said prisoners broke the laws of apartheid, but they never broke the rules of football’s world governing body.
“We are not just a defiant nation. There’s one thing that we never defied here, which was sacrosanct . . . Even if Maradona does something strange, even if [Thierry] Henry does something with his hand, here we defy apartheid, but not Fifa rules,” he said.
Aside from Mr Zuma, South African deputy president Kgalema Motlanthe and deputy chief justice Dikgang Moseneke were also keen participants in the league.
Inmates banned from playing football but who secretly followed the matches from the prison’s isolation wing included Mr Mandela and Govan Mbeki, father of former president Thabo Mbeki.
Former prisoners who participated have said the discipline of playing competitive games helped them cope with years of living in tiny cells as it was a means of escaping reality.
Originally they were not allowed to play sports but, according to Mr Sexwale, they fought back by bundling rags together to make footballs.
“Men had to stand together just for rights to have a football,” he said.
In 2007 a film More Than Just a Game was released to celebrate the players, who went on to become some of South Africa’s most influential people.