More Than Just A Game
Football v Apartheid
Chuck Korr and Marvin Close

To the men of Robben Island and the free South Africa they helped to create.

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Dedication

Preface by Sepp Blatter

Introduction

1 The Apartheid State

2 The Price of Resistance

3 The Struggle for Prisoners’ Rights

4 The Need to Organize Football

5 Football Establishes Itself

6 The Atlantic Raiders Affair

7 Growing Older with Football

8 Two Football Codes on One Island

9 Something More than Football

10 Football Struggles to Survive

11 The Arrival of the Soweto Generation

Epilogue Life After the Island

The Story Behind

Index

Acknowledgements

Copyright

About the Publisher

Preface by Sepp Blatter

This book strives to preserve and convey the amazing history of the Makana Football Association, founded on Robben Island. Following FIFA rules, principles and statutes, the association used football to create a space of dignity, respect, and democracy on this infamous island, symbol of apartheid.

More Than Just a Game is about those who played football on Robben Island and who have since become South Africa’s leaders: Jeff Radebe, Jacob Zuma, Mark Shinners, Anthony Suze, Marcus Solomon, Tokyo Sexwale, and Dikgang Moseneke, the first chairman of the Makana FA who was democratically elected in 1969. Above all, it is the story of the thousands of relatively unknown prisoners whose lives were enriched by football and whose sacrifices made possible the eventual creation of a free South Africa.

Expelled from FIFA in 1976, South Africa was finally readmitted in 1992, thanks to the efforts of my predecessor, Dr João Havelange. It was an emotional day on Saturday 15 May 2004, when I had the privilege to open the envelope and announce South Africa as organizers of the FIFA World Cup 2010, the first one ever to take place on the African continent.

This book celebrates football, the universal game, and the passion of millions of fans. But it is more than just a game, since it unites us in a world which is becoming increasingly divided.

Football is indebted to the footballers of Robben Island.

For the game! For the world!

Joseph S. Blatter

Introduction

18 July 2007. Robben Island

It was an unlikely sight: football legends Pelé, Samuel Eto’o, Ruud Gullit, George Weah, and many other of the world’s top players gathered behind razor-wire prison fences and sentry towers on a tiny, windswept island 12 kilometres off the coast of Cape Town. They lined up on a bumpy, rutted pitch and took it in turns to shoot eighty-nine footballs into a set of rusting goal posts, one for each of Nelson Mandela’s years on his birthday.

They were there, along with FIFA officials, South African World Cup 2010 organizers, and prominent South African politicians to honour Mandela at the place with which he is most identified – Robben Island Prison: the high security jail that for three decades housed Mandela and thousands of other political prisoners.

But there was another reason that FIFA had chosen to stage this unorthodox birthday celebration on the ex-prison’s football pitch. Once the mighty band of football greats had finished striking the balls into the goal, five former prisoners, Anthony Suze, Sedick Isaacs, Lizo Sitoto, Mark Shinners, and Sipho Tshabalala, stepped out onto the grass and took centre stage. These men knew the pitch well, for they had laid, rolled, and irrigated it many years previously, and they had made the goal posts and nets with their own hands, from debris washed up on the shingle beach around Robben Island.

The five were unknown outside South Africa and scarcely known to anyone in their own country. They had survived long-term imprisonment on Robben Island by never losing faith that one day their fight would lead to a free South Africa, and football had played a major role in their battle. Though much has been written about how prisoners organized themselves politically on the island, the outside world knows little about how vitally important the game of football was to helping keep the men sane and focussed despite their cruel surroundings. Against all the odds, this dedicated bunch of prisoners spent four long years trying to persuade the prison authorities that they should be allowed to play organized football. Even more incredibly, they then kept the league, which they named the Makana Football Association, running for over twenty years, in accordance with strict FIFA rules, playing in weekly league fixtures, cup competitions, and friendly matches. This simple, universally popular sport became an impassioned symbol of resistance against apartheid.

FIFA’s top officials then strode out onto the pitch to formally welcome the men and to conduct a remarkable ceremony. For the first time in its history, football’s ruling body conferred membership on an organization, rather than a country or an individual. The recipient was the Makana Football Association. This public event was a measure of just how far the nation had come since the end of apartheid in 1990 and the subsequent declaration of a multi-racial South Africa. In a message read out at the Robben Island ceremony from FIFA President Sepp Blatter, he observed that what happened on Robben Island decades earlier showed just how football could give hope and make a difference in people’s lives.

Out on the pitch, a FIFA spokesman recounted that in 1971 when Tshabalala was released from Robben Island, he had written to his comrades telling them how proud he was they had mastered football, and that he hoped that someday they would meet ‘the giants of the game’. This dream had come true, for there they were, surrounded by some of the world’s best footballers. The ceremony brought together players in a dramatic reunion across generations and circumstance.

Before arriving on Robben Island, Nelson Mandela was hardly a keen football fan, but as he became increasingly interested in what the game meant to the men in the prison, it began to teach him important lessons about the unifying nature of sport. He became acutely aware, through smuggled information, just how much sports-obsessed Afrikaners were wounded by a succession of sports boycotts that effectively isolated South Africa from the rest of the world.

Throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, the country was globally banned from taking part in all team sports, plus many tournaments for individual sportsmen and women. It opened Mandela’s eyes to how important sport was to people across the world – and how important it was to their politics and sense of right and wrong. When South Africa staged the Rugby World Cup in 1995, Mandela famously posed for the world’s cameras, wearing the shirt of the team’s white captain Francois Pienaar. It was a highly symbolic act and demonstrated once again how the then president used sports as a way to forge national unity across racial lines.

This helps explain the significance of South Africa’s future hosting of the 2010 FIFA World Cup and why it is time to tell the extraordinary story of the Makana Football League. What follows is the incredible account of how this determined group of prisoners and freedom fighters used what Pelé called ‘the beautiful game’ to bring a sense of dignity to one of the ugliest hellholes on Earth. How against all odds, they turned football into an active force in their struggle for freedom.

The cover of this book shows the only known photograph in existence of the prisoners playing organized football on the island. This image was taken by a member of the South African security services in the 1960s, and subsequently passed on to the international press as part of a carefully orchestrated propaganda exercise to reassure the world just how well prisoners were being treated on Robben Island at the time.

Notice that the faces of the players have all been blacked out and obscured. The apartheid authorities steadfastly refused to view the prisoners as human beings or individuals. They were faceless terrorists, without names, known only by their prison numbers. We hope that this book puts the faces back onto these players.

1 The Apartheid State

‘The goal is that eventually there will be no black South Africans.’

Cornelius Mulder, Republic of South Africa Cabinet Minister

Cape Town, 1964. Sedick Isaacs stood on a downtown street corner reading a newspaper and trying to look nonchalant. The unassuming, bespectacled young high-school teacher contemplated the enormity of what he was about to do. He gazed at the front page in his hands, which informed him that Nelson Mandela had been taken into custody. He was not a sports fan, but if he had flicked to the back page, he would have read that football’s world governing body, FIFA, had banned the all-white apartheid South African team from playing international soccer. But Sedick wasn’t really taking in much of what he read. He glanced up and down the street, decided that the coast was clear, and disappeared into a chemist’s shop.

Minutes later, he stepped back out on to the street carrying a large parcel wrapped in brown paper. His heart skipped a beat when he spotted an armoured police van draw to a halt on the other side of the road. Sedick pressed himself into the shadows of a doorway and watched carefully as police officers jumped out on to the pavement and proceeded to ask a couple of black pedestrians for their passbooks.

The apartheid government had brought in the Pass Laws in the Fifties and, since then, black men and women had been restricted as to the areas in which they were allowed to live, work, and move around. Passbooks, known as dompas, had to be carried at all times, effectively turning black men and women into foreign guestworkers in their own country. The passbook contained all their personal details, their photograph, and fingerprints, and had to be shown on request to any white civil servant, police officer, or government official. Not surprisingly, the dompas were much hated.

Sedick was of Asian descent and therefore not strictly required to carry a passbook, but he knew that, having a non-white face and being in such a white area of the city, he was bound to attract attention. If the policemen spotted him, they might want to body-search him and, more worryingly, demand to look inside the parcel he was carrying.

What he had just purchased from the chemist’s was perfectly legal – a number of different household products and chemicals that anyone could buy over the counter – but, once mixed together, they formed the basis of an explosive. A trained chemist, Sedick had bought the ingredients in order to manufacture bombs.

A softly spoken intellectual, Sedick had grown up in the Bo Kaap district of the city, where he attended Trafalgar High, one of the best non-white schools in South Africa. It was there that his teachers had taught him about the way in which democracy was practised in other parts of the world and how various revolutions had been necessary to bring about justice and change. These lessons made a lasting impression upon Sedick, who had grown up in a South Africa torn apart by the inequalities of apartheid.

When he was at university studying chemistry, he had become involved in various political discussion groups. However, the thought of demonstrations and armed struggle was alien to Sedick and his friends. It was only when a friend of his father introduced him to people living in the black township of Langa that he became acquainted with brutal oppression at first hand. His father’s friend was a tailor and would send his salesmen out into the black townships to tout for business. As a teenager, Sedick would accompany them into the corrugated huts and breezeblock sheds that were home to the black people of Langa.

There, he met young, politicized radicals who were talking about taking direct action to overthrow the apartheid regime. At first, their angry commitment shocked him rigid but, the more he came to know the impoverished day-to-day lives they were forced to live under apartheid, the more he came to understand.

He became a member of the Muslim Youth Movement and met other people who wanted to take protest politics that little bit further. Some members of his group had got hold of small arms while others spoke about the possibility of sabotaging government-run buildings and installations. Sedick’s contribution had been to use his skills as a chemist to test gold, and then to help smuggle it to help raise funds for the group but, recently, he’d been learning how to make explosives – and teaching other members of the movement to do the same.

Now, pulling back into the shadows, trying to keep out of sight of the police, he pondered the irony of possible capture. If the police called him over, he could be arrested without having set off a single bomb. His own personal battle against apartheid would be nipped in the bud. This time, however, he was lucky. The passbookswere clearly in order, the black workers were waved on, and the police van disappeared down the road. Sedick drew a silent sigh of relief and began cautiously to make his way home with his explosive ingredients.

Introduced by the racist National Party in a whites-only election in 1948 when Sedick was just a child, apartheid forced a system of total racial segregation on South Africa in order to ensure white domination over all aspects of the country.

During the Second World War, hundreds of new factories and workshops had opened in urban areas across the nation, making everything from munitions and military equipment to uniforms, army boots, and tents. To drive this rapid economic growth, industry had needed labour and, attracted by the promise of better wages and jobs, thousands of poor black and Asian workers migrated to the towns and cities. Cumulatively, this caused massive overcrowding. The authorities couldn’t cope. Housing was hopelessly inadequate, and shanty towns and squatter camps began to spring up in places like Johannesburg, Pretoria, and Port Elizabeth – and in Sedick’s home city of Cape Town.

By the end of the war, for the first time in South Africa’s history, there were more blacks than whites living in the cities. Many whites, particularly those aligned to the Afrikaner Right, saw this as a dangerous development and feared that blacks would come to dominate these urban areas. They came up with apartheid – in Afrikaans, ‘separateness’ – to counter what they described as ‘black danger’.

In practice, what it meant for black people and non-whites such as Sedick was a life choked and constricted by the injustices of discrimination. The belief underlying the system was that all white people were superior to blacks and coloureds, and their ‘uniqueness’ needed to be protected with all the power of the state. There had been a lot of racial discrimination and separation between the races in South Africa before 1948 but, from that year onwards, it was legally sanctioned.

As Sedick grew into childhood, the regime officially classified every individual in the country by race – white, Asian, coloured, and black. Members of the same family who did not share exactly the same skin colouring or even had a different hair texture could be classified as racially different. Individual government officials could and did enforce the rules selectively and arbitrarily. Many families were split up as a consequence, children being taken into care. Such measures were justified by the claim that they were necessary in order to maintain the system and to avoid the inevitable catastrophe that would be caused by racial mixing.

The government passed laws making interracial sex illegal and prohibiting mixed marriages. Police went to extraordinary lengths to impose these laws, even raiding houses and breaking into bedrooms to photograph couples as evidence.

New signs and hoardings went up all over South Africa: ‘Whites Only’. To separate the races further, racially divided schools, universities, and hospitals were created. All public amenities, from swimming pools and beaches to public toilets and parks, were split into white and non-white areas. Restaurants, cinemas, hotels, and cafés were segregated. Whites rode on white-only buses, waited at ‘white’ bus stops. Naturally, it was the whites who got the very best of everything, especially when it came to economic benefits such as jobs and land. More than 80 per cent of the land, including any that was rich in valuable minerals, was reserved for 12 per cent of the population.

The apartheid government then introduced laws that would effectively make black people foreigners in their own country. These laws created bantustans (homelands) – impoverished rural territories akin to reserves for Native Americans in the US and Aboriginal peoples in Australia. They covered less than a tenth of South Africa’s land mass. The plan was to herd the entire black population into them, effectively partitioning the whole country into white and non-white districts and thereby alleviating apartheid fears of black domination in the towns and cities. Administratively, the homelands were to be run by puppet chiefs hand-picked by the government. They had little power and had to defer to their white masters on all aspects of local governance.

More than three million people were forcibly evicted from their homes and banished to areas too small and lacking in resources to support the numbers living in them. Vibrant, thriving multiracial districts such as Sophiatown in Johannesburg and District Six, near Cape Town, were demolished and destroyed. Sophiatown was one of the oldest black areas in Johannesburg, with a population of over fifty thousand. Famous throughout black South Africa and beyond for its jazz music, its thriving art and culture, it was cleared virtually overnight. During the hours of darkness, gun-toting soldiers and police arrived in scores of flat-bed trucks to remove its population by force, taking them against their will to rough, undeveloped land 15 miles from the city centre. The government dubbed the area Meadowlands; black Africans called it Soweto, a corruption of Southwest Township.

Once the forced evacuation of Sophiatown was complete, its homes were bulldozed and all evidence of its previous occupants airbrushed from history. A new town was built for blue-collar whites. The government planners named the new suburb Triumf – ‘triumph’ in Afrikaans.

This pattern of enforced repatriation was to repeat itself across South Africa as Sedick grew into his teens. It soon came to include Asians, coloureds, and Chinese. Over three hundred thousand people were forcibly exiled from the towns and cities and banished to the poorer rural areas of South Africa.

However, without the largely manual, semi-manual, and domestic labour provided by blacks, Asians, and coloureds, the white districts would have ceased to operate. They were so reliant on non-white labour that the government had to find a means to allow other races to continue working in the towns and cities but at the same time strictly control their movement – hence, the introduction of the Pass Laws for blacks. The government did, however, keep a cold, vigilant eye on other non-whites – particularly men such as Sedick, already known to be a member of an organization critical of apartheid. As Sedick had come to understand, the tentacles of South Africa’s secret police stretched out into every area of life in the country. Desperately poor blacks and non-whites were paid and blackmailed into informing on their more militant friends and neighbours. Security agents infiltrated most, if not all, of the organizations committed to opposing apartheid and exerted an increasingly iron grip on dissent.

To a degree, Sedick sensed that it would be only a matter of time before he was arrested for his activities. For the moment, however, he was still in the game. He walked nervously back home from the chemist’s shop, desperate not to attract attention to himself as an Asian face in a white area of the city. He passed further police patrols but, that day, luck was on his side. He reached his home without being stopped, and began his experiments.

One evening some days later, Sedick drove out with three comrades to test his newly made explosives in the Strandfontein beach area of Cape Town. A long expanse of white sand that ran for many miles along the west coast at its furthest point away from the city, it was remote and secluded. Out here, Sedick and his colleagues hoped to be far from the attention of the security forces. They set off a couple of devices in the sand and then, on the drive back home, stopped outside a power sub-station, pondering whether to blow it up with their last remaining bomb. However, Sedick’s luck had run out: the police were waiting for them.

It soon became clear that the security police had been watching Sedick for weeks. He guessed that the reason had little to do with his nascent bomb-making activities. Sedick had become friendly with a local white girl, something that both violated the ‘immorality laws’ and offended the deeply held prejudices of most white South African policemen.

Along with his three comrades, he was taken at gunpoint to Woodstock police station. They were questioned overnight and the following day transferred to Cape Town’s notorious Caledon Square police HQ.

There was not enough room for him in the block used for prisoners detained for security reasons so he was placed in a cell with a man charged with common-law criminal acts. Staring at the peeling, grey-painted walls and trying hard not to despair about what the future might hold, Sedick started to chat with the man, asking what he was in for. The answer turned out to be multiple counts of murder, rape, and attempted murder. The man then returned the question and, when Sedick said he had been charged with political offences, the prisoner, several inches taller and a hundred pounds heavier than Isaacs, let out a long, slow whistle. ‘Wow, that’s dangerous stuff, man!’ he said. Sedick was soon to discover precisely how dangerous.

Many of Sedick’s interrogators were hard-line right-wingers who positively despised black and coloured political agitators and reserved their most savage and sadistic interrogation techniques for them. In their eyes, Sedick was a terrorist, incapable of understanding that he was challenging a system that had been created by the racially superior whites to build a better, happier, more prosperous South Africa. The only thing holding the country back was men like this Sedick Isaacs trying to take the law into their own hands. He threatened the security of the state and therefore had to be punished.

Flouting every international agreement on human rights and the treatment of prisoners, a team of interrogators worked in shifts from eight o’clock in the morning until midnight, taking it in turns to work Sedick over, both mentally and physically. First, he was threatened with torture. Members of the security police described in graphic detail and with great relish what they intended to do to him if he refused to co-operate. They wanted information – about Sedick’s comrades, about the plans his group had for future sabotage, where and when it would happen.

When Sedick didn’t give them the information they wanted he was subjected to long bouts of sleep deprivation, to soften him up for future beatings and punishment. Used as a weapon by torturers the world over, depriving a prisoner of their sleep leads to disorientation, reduces a body’s tolerance to physical pain, and makes them highly suggestible to cutting a deal or volunteering information.

Then his interrogators made good their earlier, graphic promises and set about Sedick with fists, rifle butts, and feet, following up the beatings by attaching electrodes to various parts of Sedick’s body. The torture lasted for days. Sedick learned really to ‘expect hell’ if the guards stepped unsteadily into an interrogation session smelling of alcohol. Fortified by ‘Dutch courage’, the torturers would launch brutal physical attacks on the prisoners, any last inhibitions spirited away by drink.

His interrogators continually informed Sedick that his comrades had told them everything, there was no reason for him to hold back, but to Sedick that made no sense. Why would his torturers continue to beat him and give him electric shocks in order to extract information if they already knew everything?

For many prisoners, as with Sedick, the torture would continue throughout the hours of darkness. Inmates in another section of the police HQ cells were woken one night and subjected to an insidious form of psychological torture. A prison guard crept sinisterly up and down the corridors whispering through the grilles in each of the doors that one of the men was going to be killed that night.

Prisoners were also set against each other. Common-law inmates were paid with extra rations and privileges to attack, beat, and sexually assault political prisoners. The torturers thoroughly explored every single possibility to destabilize, disorient, and put the fear of God into the reviled politicos.

Torture, however, in Sedick’s case, served only to harden his resolve, to make him determined to survive the ordeal of detention and continue the fight against apartheid, whether in prison or on the outside. Inevitably, it would be the former. South Africa’s security services had arrested Sedick as part of a much wider ‘anti-terrorist’ project with the object of rounding up as many active anti-apartheid resistance fighters as possible, either to make them disappear or to lock them away. The government increased the security forces’ budget and gave them almost unlimited powers to track down anti-apartheid activists – not just in South Africa but abroad, too.

While Sedick awaited trial, a group of men who, in the future, he would count among his closest friends in prison, was also being targeted by the South African security services.

Lizo Sitoto was a bear of a man. He was unusual among the majority of black South Africans in that he revelled in playing a sport that many regarded as ‘the white man’s game’ – rugby. In the Eastern Cape, however, black sportsmen had long played top-quality rugby and saw the game as their own. Indeed, they took pride in claiming that, if they had been given a fair chance to compete, many blacks would be representing South Africa internationally as members of the Springboks. For Lizo and his soon-to-be fellow prisoners, Marcus Solomon and Steve Tshwete, as for many blacks, culture in the Eastern Cape revolved around the twin pillars of church and club rugby.

Big, strong, and physically powerful, Lizo volunteered to join the African National Congress’s armed military wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), ‘The Spear of the Nation’. The MK never presented a great threat to the stability of white South Africa, but the government exaggerated its importance for reasons of propaganda and exploited its existence as a means of justifying further repressive policies. The MK was sufficiently well organized and funded to run military training camps over the borders in neighbouring countries such as Zambia and Botswana. Lizo was sent to Northern Rhodesia to undergo training.

The African National Congress (ANC) had originally been formed as a multi-racial national organization, its aim the end of all racial discrimination, and universal suffrage irrespective of colour, race, or creed. It based its beliefs on Gandhi’s principles of peaceful protest. This, however, was to change in response to a series of shocking events in 1960 which convinced the leadership of both the ANC and the new movement formed from it, the Pan African Congress (PAC), of the need to take up armed struggle.

In 1960 Lizo was eighteen years old and already politically mature. Growing up in the Eastern Cape, he had been heavily influenced by his mother, who was a member of the black Women’s League political movement. As with many thousands of non-whites across South Africa, the events of 1960 shocked him into pursuing armed, direct action as a response to the evils of apartheid.

It began in a place called Sharpeville, a suburb of Johannesburg. At around ten o’clock on the morning of 21 March 1960, a crowd of over five thousand black people gathered outside the local police station to take part in a peaceful demonstration which formed part of a five-day-long non-violent campaign calling for an end to the Pass Laws. Protesters were asked by the organizers to leave their passbooks at home and then formally and peaceably present themselves at police stations across the country for arrest.

The demonstrators anticipated that they would be imprisoned, that prison and police cells would be filled to overflowing, and that the resultant shortage of labour would deal a major blow to the South African economy. They also assumed that, since the government was trying to convince its allies in the West that it was reasonable and had been elected as a result of a free vote, it would not resort to wholesale violence, at least not in such a public arena. Tragically, the opposition had misread the government’s position. They had no idea just how far government officials would be willing to go.

As the crowd began to swell in number throughout the morning, the military sent in low-flying jets to intimidate the demonstrators into dispersing. The crowd stood its ground. Police then set up a line of Saracen armoured cars between the station and the protesters, who, according to reports at the time, sat down in front of the police and sang hymns.

At 1.15 p.m., just over three hours into the hitherto peaceful demonstration, local police commander D. H. Pienaar claimed that a rock had been thrown at his car. His men trained their guns on the unarmed crowd and shot indiscriminately at men, women, and children, even as they turned and ran. Eyewitnesses said those in the crowd fled like rabbits and fell like stones. Sixty-nine people were killed, 180 injured. Scores of people were ferried in the backs of cars and lorries to the Bagawanath Hospital near Johannesburg, suffering from gunshot wounds. Many of the wounded were later put under arrest in their hospital beds, bundled into police vans to be taken away for questioning.

The massacre led to a storm of international protest, including an official condemnation from the United Nations, who called upon South Africa to abandon apartheid and racial discrimination. The apartheid government resolutely turned its back on the world’s protests and cracked down even harder on its non-white population.

The response from the ANC and PAC was to target government buildings for sabotage. Explosives were made, arms purchased, and volunteers trained in combat. Thousands of young men such as Lizo Sitoto were driven to make a conscious decision to go into active opposition against the regime. These new recruits to what became known as ‘the struggle’ came from every region of the country, had very different ethnic, racial, and cultural backgrounds – and often disagreed on both political goals and the tactics to achieve them. What they did have in common was their renewed determination to smash apartheid and their willingness to accept the risks involved in trying to change their society.

Shortly after the Sharpeville massacre, Lizo found himself in the back of a car with a group of young ANC comrades, being driven through Northern Rhodesia to join a secret MK military training camp – but the men were soon to discover that the existence of the camp and their journey to it was a fairly open secret. White Rhodesian policemen had been tipped off by South African security agents that Lizo and his compatriots were arriving upon their soil to be trained in terrorism. The young men were arrested and sent back into South Africa – into the less than welcoming arms of the security police, who subjected Lizo to the same regime of interrogation that Sedick had suffered.

One of the charges levelled against Lizo was that he had left South Africa without permission. Ironically, though at the time being transported back to the country in the custody of security agents, he was also charged with returning to South Africa without proper permission.

Marcus Solomon never even made it over the border. A few years older than Sedick Isaacs, he had also attended Trafalgar High. Like Sedick, the studious and intellectual Solomon was planning to become a teacher. The secret police, however, knew all about his extracurricular activities. Throughout 1964, white Cape Town newspapers had run scare stories about a particularly dangerous bunch of subversives, the Yu Chi Chan Club (the name came from a book on guerrilla warfare written by Chairman Mao), also known as the National Liberation Front.

In truth, the club’s numbers were small and its members more interested in discussing theories of resistance and how to build a socialist society than in training for armed struggle. However, given the fervent, almost paranoid anti-communism of the government and their fears of a militant communist China, it was easy for the press to portray the Yu Chi Chan Club as a genuine threat to a ‘free’ Christian capitalist South Africa. Security operatives put its members under constant surveillance.

Solomon and one of his comrades in the club were leaving the country to help raise support for their cause. They had established a connection with some members of the ANC, who had set up their departure, and were now in a car with Winnie Mandela and her driver, being taken to a rendezvous that would be the next step on their journey. They were stopped by security forces, who demanded that Marcus and his friend go with them. Mrs Mandela and her driver were allowed to go on their way.

By 1963, much of the leadership of the ANC and PAC were in detention or in exile but, as more men became actively involved in trying to bring down apartheid, so the security forces redoubled their efforts to sweep up the very youngest members of the ANC and PAC, to make sure they would not supply new forces for the struggle. The government mass-produced laws that allowed it to detain and imprison opponents for any number of new ‘offences’, which went well beyond the legally enshrined crimes of treason and sabotage. Due process no longer mattered to a government claiming to protect society from a communist revolution – even if the suspects were little more than children.

Across South Africa, in a Pretoria township, a young student called Tony Suze was playing football in his school playground. By his own admission, Tony was football mad. Abundantly skilled and very athletic, his schoolmates knew never to go into a game against him half-heartedly. He played hard and always to win, even if it was just a kickabout during break.

Tony was good enough to harbour hopes of making it into the top ranks of black South African football but, like Lizo the rugby player, he knew that, under apartheid, he would never stand a chance of playing for his country, or in a racially mixed team. South Africans played football as they lived – apart. White teams and leagues were given the best playing facilities and by far the most funding. Black and coloured teams had to battle hard just to win the right to gain land for their own football pitches.

Tony’s township school was tidy, if not pretty. The staff tried hard to make the students’ lives there as enriching as possible, but the truth was that Tony’s school, like all the other black township educational establishments across South Africa, was starved of cash and even the most basic resources, such as books and writing materials. In 1964, the apartheid government spent one-sixth of the amount it spent on each white child on a black child’s education. The state saw no sense in educating blacks: it would only give them knowledge and skills for employment they would never obtain, and might give them designs above their station.

Cruel first-hand experiences of injustices such as this inspired Tony to become an active youth member of the PAC – an organization which the apartheid government had banned in 1960, along with the ANC, as part of its clampdown on opposition.

That day, as Tony and his mates pretended to be Bobby Charlton, Pelé, and Di Stefano on their school pitch, an unmarked car cruised slowly to a stop outside the school fence. Two men in suits eased themselves out of the front seats and shaded their eyes from the hot sun. Tony spotted them walking towards the school gates and knew that the inevitable was about to happen.

Some days earlier, Tony had been off school, unwell. In the late afternoon, a classmate had come to his house, not to see how he was feeling but to warn him that the secret police had come into the school and had been asking about him. Maybe he should stay off for a few days. With typical defiance, Tony told his friend, ‘If they want me, they can have me.’

He went back to school, full of youthful bravado – and more than a little naïve. To his way of thinking, what did a couple of years behind bars matter when you were only a teenager, at the start of your life? When the security police came to take him away, Tony handed the football over to a friend, laughed, and followed them defiantly to the car.

Once the security services had extracted what information they could from the political prisoners, Sedick, Tony, Marcus, and Lizo were transferred to prisons around the country to await trial. For almost all of them, their trials were a formality. However good their lawyers were, however weak the government’s case, conviction was virtually guaranteed. After all, in the logic of apartheid, the men wouldn’t have been charged if they hadn’t been opponents of the state. Security officials did not make mistakes. The only important questions were: what would the prison sentence be and where would it be served?

From Caledon Square police HQ, Sedick was transferred to Pollsmoor Prison to await trial. Later to become home to Nelson Mandela after his transfer from Robben Island, this massive correctional facility was built to house as many as six thousand common-law prisoners. Its grey maze of corridors and barrel-shaped cells stood incongruously in the plush white Cape Town suburb of Tokai – not that Sedick could see any of its manicured lawns and swimming pools from his cell deep within the prison’s bowels.

There, Sedick took his mind off the pain and loneliness of detention by applying his curiosity and scientific knowledge to figuring out ways to dismantle the bars and escape. In conjunction with a fellow prisoner, Eddie Daniels, they bribed a guard to get a hacksaw and set up transportation for when they broke out of the cell.

To work on the bars undiscovered, they had to rely on the co-operation or at least silence of fellow activists. Dullah Omar frequently risked his personal safety and his career to act as attorney for many political prisoners, including Sedick. On one of his visits to Sedick, it became clear that the men in neighbouring cells were singing in order to mask the noise of the hacksaws at work on the bars. Dullah Omar was shocked and, when he recovered his composure, warned Sedick that the guards positively relished the opportunity to shoot escaping prisoners.

At no time did he ever suggest he would no longer act as Sedick’s attorney, even though he knew he could be accused of conspiracy if the escape plan were discovered. Dullah Omar continued to champion the politically oppressed and in 1994 was chosen by President Mandela to be the Minister of Justice in the first democratically elected government in South African history.

After weeks of work, Sedick and Eddie Daniels managed to loosen the grille but, a few days before the intended escape, a group of warders came through the cells banging on the bars to test them, and the loose grille was discovered. Allegedly, the search was the result of a common-law prisoner informing the warders that a hacksaw blade had been sold to a fellow common-law prisoner, and that the same prisoner had been seen talking to the political prisoners. However, the warders were as keen to avoid embarrassment as the prisoners were to avoid punishment. They concocted a story that the bars were faulty as a way of diverting blame from themselves and on to the contractors, who must have installed sub-standard equipment. The story may have precluded any direct reprisals on the would-be escapees but, from now on, as far as the guards were concerned, Sedick was a marked man.

When the trial of Sedick and his three co-defendants came up it was heard by two ‘assessors’ rather than a jury. The basis of the case against them was simply that, since explosives had been found in the car in which they were travelling, they were all guilty of conspiracy. Sedick decided not to take the stand, but his brother was called to testify and was asked to identify handwriting found on documents in the car. He pretended not to be certain whether it was Sedick’s writing, but the judge ruled that, if his own brother could not definitively deny that it was Sedick’s handwriting, then this failure must be construed as positive identification. As Sedick would discover on many occasions over the next couple of decades, surreally skewed logic was lodged at the heart of the apartheid sense of justice.

Sedick was sentenced to twelve years, and given a long lecture about letting down staff and students, past and present, at Trafalgar High School. He had to smile at the irony – it was staff at Trafalgar who had helped to stir his political awareness in the first place.

When Tony Suze’s case came to trial in Pretoria, he was astonished to be handed down a fifteen-year sentence for treason, sabotage, and crimes against the state rather than the couple of years he had been expecting. Despite his age, the courts had decided to make an example of him. Back in Cape Town, Marcus Solomon was given ten years for sedition and conspiracy, and Lizo Sitoto was given the longest sentence of all: a whole raft of charges levied against him resulted in a sentence of sixteen and a half years.

These four men – Sedick, Lizo, Tony, and Marcus – from different backgrounds and of different political affiliations, were soon to discover that they would serve their sentences in a place that was to be the site for a new security-service experiment. Concerned that the militants would turn other, common-law prisoners and make them sympathetic to the terrorist cause, the government had decided to behead the resistance movement and isolate its senior leaders, active members, and – potentially the most dangerous to the regime – its foot soldiers. They would all be sent to a place where they could no longer pose a threat: Robben Island.

A windswept lump of rock 7 miles off the coast of Cape Town, Robben Island was known as South Africa’s Alcatraz (the infamous island prison off San Francisco), and had for hundreds of years been the place where successive regimes banished the unwanted. The island was battered by harsh Atlantic currents, and the seabed nearby was littered with shipwrecks. Over the centuries, many sailors had lost their lives in the turbulent, shark-infested waters.

The Dutch used the island as a makeshift prison for army deserters and criminals until 1795, when the British seized the tip of Africa. For the next century, Robben Island was a hell hole. Lepers, the mentally ill, and prostitutes suffering from syphilis were all forcibly extradited to the island to live in squalor.

The British set a precedent for the island by using it as a prison for political opponents. It was here that the great African general Makana was incarcerated. His tribe, the Xhosa, went to war with the British after the colonial power stole their cattle, and Makana was captured and banished to Robben Island. He died attempting to escape. Almost a hundred and fifty years later, in 1964, another prominent member of the Xhosa tribe was imprisoned on Robben Island – Nelson Mandela.

The island was cleared of its inhabitants in the Thirties, all dispersed to prisons and hospitals on the South African mainland. The military took possession of the island, burned down the ramshackle old buildings, and began to turn it into a fortified sea defence, complete with gun emplacements and underground workings. In the early Sixties Cape Town’s first line of wartime defence was to become South Africa’s first line of attack on the men who opposed its apartheid regime. The security forces requisitioned the island from the military and erected 20-foot-high razor wire fences to mark out the perimeters of a new high-security prison, a vast institution that would house well over two thousand men. Those men would in a couple of years include Sedick, Tony, Lizo, and Marcus.

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