More Than Just a Game. Soccer vs. Apartheid: The Most Important Soccer Story Ever Told by Chuck Korr and Marvin Close (review)

More Than Just a Game persuasively shows how organized sport, and the very practice of organizing sport, can have significant and potentially lasting consequences for individuals and a nation. South Africa’s Robben Island was a notorious symbol of the apartheid regime—a place where political opponents were imprisoned, made to labor and suffer in isolation. It was a place where warders welcomed new prisoners with the words, “This is the Island. Here you will die!” But it was also where prisoners built a soccer league that provided them escape, stimulation, and a political training ground for post-apartheid South Africa.

Soccer on the island began as late-night impromptu games amongst prisoner bunks, played with a ball of bundled shirts. Prisoners petitioned authorities for an outdoor Saturday game for three years and were finally granted that right in 1967, in the wake of increasing scrutiny of prison conditions from the International Red Cross. By 1969, the prisoners had formed a full-blown football league that adhered to Fédération Internationale de Football Association, or FIFA, regulations; the constitution alone had taken three months of debating, writing, and revising. The Makana Football Association (MFA)—named after a Xhosa warrior who had been banished to Robben Island by the British in 1819—began play in December of 1969 with twenty-seven teams in three divisions. There was a “Protest and Misconduct Committee” to process and mediate disagreements and a Referee’s Union to train officials. Though paper was scarce, rules and regulations were meticulously codified, as prisoners constructed an alternative society with a transparent justice system—something denied to them by the apartheid regime. Nearly half of the prisoners on the island participated in the MFA in some way. The league endured disagreements among prisoners and conflicts with the prison regime. It persisted through player attrition, as prisoners aged or were released from the island. It wavered but then strengthened in the mid 1970s with a new wave of prisoners from the Soweto uprisings; soccer would play a key role in drawing these younger militants together with older, less volatile prisoners.

There is an easy, often cinematic, readability to this narrative history. At times, the story gets a bit claustrophobic as the authors focus on the procedural specifics of the league—necessary, perhaps, to illustrate league democracy “in action.” The book’s best moments come when it connects life on the island to that on the mainland—for example, in dramatizing some of the prisoners’ arrests and transportation to the island or in introducing the arrival of new prisoners inspired by the Black Consciousness Movement. Korr’s concluding essay pulls back the curtain on the tidy narrative, outlining how messy, laborious, and contingent the research process was—beginning in 1993 when a South African colleague introduced him to nearly seventy archival boxes full of handwritten league documents and through nine years of interviews with often suspicious ex-prisoners.

The authors show that soccer was much more than a diversion from the grinding realities of the granite quarry and warder cruelties. The league kept prisoners’ minds sharp. It drew together dissidents of different political stripes and ages. It functioned as a democratic structure within a totalitarian space. Through soccer, prisoners unified and preserved a united front against their warders. The league played a central role in prisoners’ intellectual and physical development, complementing political leaders’ goals of turning the prison into a “university of struggle” where prisoners partook in a political education stressing self-control and self-respect. Many future leaders of a post-apartheid South Africa participated in the MFA, including President Jacob Zuma; Steve Tshwete, the first Minister of Sport; Terror Lekota, a Minister of Defence; and Dikgang Moseneke, a Deputy Chief Justice of South Africa’s Constitutional Court.

Sport can...