Makana League a beacon of hope

ROBBEN ISLAND, South Africa – Mark Shinners, a former anti-apartheid prisoner on South Africa’s notorious Robben Island penal colony, will forever associate the beautiful game with a bundle of filthy rags.

A team captain in the now FIFA-recognised Makana League, Shinners recalls the games as a beacon of hope on the Atlantic Ocean outcrop, a half-an-hour ferry ride from Cape Town which is now mainly inhabited by penguins and seals. “They cut us off from normal society, they tried to break us,” said Shinners, who served a combined 23 years on the island between 1963 and 1990 for conspiring to overthrow the erstwhile whites-only regime.”Football was a way of saying to yourself: ‘This is what I am capable of doing.’ It was a way of saying in our isolation that we realign ourselves with the world, that we consider ourselves part of a greater universe,” he told AFP.Now, a movie about the league aims to share their inspiring story with a worldwide audience, with Shinners portrayed by Presley Chweneyagae who played the title role in South Africa’s 2005 Oscar-winning ‘Tsotsi.’ Entitled ‘More Than Just a Game,’ the film will premiere in Durban on Friday as part of events to mark the preliminary draw for the qualifying tournament of the 2010 World Cup to be hosted in South Africa.”The lesson from Robben Island and from South Africa is one for all the world,” Jerome Champagne, a senior official with the football governing body FIFA, said on a visit to Robben Island earlier this year with some of Makana’s former players.”It is a story of human strength.”Robben Island inmates first played football secretly in their cells, using balls crafted out of string, paper, cardboard and rags.Following pressure from the International Committee of the Red Cross, the prison authorities were persuaded to give the league the go-ahead in 1966, allowing prisoners to get kits, level their own playing field and erect proper goals.The inmates designed trophies and certificates which the prison authorities confiscated immediately after every awards ceremony.The prisoners named their league the Makana Football Association after a Xhosa prophet who was banished to the island in 1819 for resisting British colonial expansion and drowned while trying to escape by boat.”For us, playing soccer on Robben Island was just another way of survival …in a situation intended to dehumanise us,” said former player Anthony Suze.Robben Island, used as a place of banishment by various South African administrations since the early 1500s and later as a leper colony, opened its doors to political prisoners in 1962 as the apartheid state intensified its clamp-down on opponents and critics in a bid to retain minority privilege.Nampa-AFP”They cut us off from normal society, they tried to break us,” said Shinners, who served a combined 23 years on the island between 1963 and 1990 for conspiring to overthrow the erstwhile whites-only regime.”Football was a way of saying to yourself: ‘This is what I am capable of doing.’ It was a way of saying in our isolation that we realign ourselves with the world, that we consider ourselves part of a greater universe,” he told AFP.Now, a movie about the league aims to share their inspiring story with a worldwide audience, with Shinners portrayed by Presley Chweneyagae who played the title role in South Africa’s 2005 Oscar-winning ‘Tsotsi.’ Entitled ‘More Than Just a Game,’ the film will premiere in Durban on Friday as part of events to mark the preliminary draw for the qualifying tournament of the 2010 World Cup to be hosted in South Africa.”The lesson from Robben Island and from South Africa is one for all the world,” Jerome Champagne, a senior official with the football governing body FIFA, said on a visit to Robben Island earlier this year with some of Makana’s former players.”It is a story of human strength.”Robben Island inmates first played football secretly in their cells, using balls crafted out of string, paper, cardboard and rags.Following pressure from the International Committee of the Red Cross, the prison authorities were persuaded to give the league the go-ahead in 1966, allowing prisoners to get kits, level their own playing field and erect proper goals.The inmates designed trophies and certificates which the prison authorities confiscated immediately after every awards ceremony.The prisoners named their league the Makana Football Association after a Xhosa prophet who was banished to the island in 1819 for resisting British colonial expansion and drowned while trying to escape by boat.”For us, playing soccer on Robben Island was just another way of survival …in a situation intended to dehumanise us,” said former player Anthony Suze.Robben Island, used as a place of banishment by various South African administrations since the early 1500s and later as a leper colony, opened its doors to political prisoners in 1962 as the apartheid state intensified its clamp-down on opponents and critics in a bid to retain minority privilege.Nampa-AFP