“Football transformed the lives of everybody on the island. It became an extension of our political activism — from the discipline in how we played and administered the game to the humanising effect it had on prisoners and warders,” says former PAC activist Tony Suze, recalling his days as a striker for Manong Football Club in the Makana Football Association league on Robben Island.
‘By the end these young Afrikaner boys sent from small Free State towns to guard us had become our friends and fellow human beings — they used to open the cells so that we could sneak out and play, they followed our matches with interest and began to see us as human beings,” says Suze.
The formative history of the association, which started on Robben Island in 1966, is the subject of a new film, More than Just a Game, which opens countrywide in cinemas next week.
Shot over a six-week period on the former penal colony and the Cape mainland with a budget of about R15-million, the film’s story started more than 10 years ago when academic André Odendaal, from the now defunct Mayibuye Centre for History and Culture, set up at the University of the Western Cape to collect and archive multimedia on apartheid. He handed more than 80 dusty boxes marked Robben Island Sport to a visiting American sports historian, Professor Chuck Korr.
What Korr uncovered was the untold story and meticulously recorded the history of football on the island: from every match played to every dispute resolved with strict adherence to Fifa regulations. Occasionally in the film one sees 16-year-old PAC activist Dikang Moseneke, now a Constitutional Court judge, poring over a Fifa rulebook as he adjudicates football disputes between clubs. The film, perhaps with one eye on the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, had its world premiere as part of the Fifa World Cup preliminary qualifying draw in Durban last year.
While researching the history of the association — named after Xhosa chief Makana, one of the first political prisoners sent to Robben Island — Korr developed a relationship with five former inmates, protagonists in the league: Suze, Lizo Sitoto, Sedick Isaacs (a league administrator on the island, but a bomb-maker and teacher in the struggle), Marcus Solomon and Mark Shinners, later a PAC negotiator at Codesa.
This relationship bloomed into the beginnings of More than Just a Game once the South African producer, Videovision’s Anant Singh, got a whiff of what he calls ‘this amazing human story of a group of guys who, against all adversity, managed to change their world and subsequently the world outside the prison walls”.
Former Mail & Guardian satirist and sports columnist Tom Eaton was later brought in to work on the script with documentary filmmaker Junaid Ahmed, who directs More Than Just a Game.
With a filmography that includes Iqakamba — Hard Ball, the 1996 best sports documentary winner at the Milan Film Festival, and the 2006 Bafta-nominated short film, Lucky, Ahmed has taken the brave decision to meld documentary style interviews into a feature film narrative form.
Ahmed says this decision was taken in an attempt to retain ‘honesty” and to allow for ‘the power of authenticity by giving voice to these real people and seeing them tell their story”.
‘Their narratives and their presence enabled me as a director to open up new vistas of understanding about our history and in doing that informed and shaped how I was directing — By them participating in the process it made me realise that in terms of my directorial vision, the story must be paramount. So I kept all the camera movements and filmmaking techniques to a minimum. So when you see the film, you realise the camera is hardly moving, unless it’s for a very specific purpose,” says Ahmed.
He felt it was important that More than Just a Game should convey — as its title says — that playing and administering football on the island was a vital part of normalising embattled lives.
Suze says the league, which was finally allowed after prisoners petitioned authorities for four years, became an avenue for imprisoned activists to channel and hone their organistional skills, their discipline as political cadres of various anti-apartheid organisations and to discuss the politics of sport, inclusivity and professionalism. It also later led to other freedoms: prisoners being allowed to perform theatre productions, play rugby matches and even participate in ballroom contests, where ANC president Jacob Zuma is reputed to have ruled the dance floor.
‘What we learned there, including the racial reconciliation, which happened between warders and prisoners, prepared us as people for this dream of a free South Africa. It prepared us for negotiations with the apartheid regime and prepared us for leadership,” says Suze.
Ahmed says another important concern in the filmmaking process was to move away from this collective remembering of Robben Island as the sole preserve of icons such as Nelson Mandela and Walter Sisulu. And the homogenising of the anti-apartheid struggle as that of the battle between the ANC and the National Party government.
‘This league was initially driven by the PAC and it was an example of how people across political affiliations could come together and find common ground,” says Ahmed.
He feels some of the lessons learned on Robben Island that ‘brought us to 1994, like non-racism, non-sexism and empathy for fellow human beings” are being lost in contemporary South Africa and that this story about football may help as a reminder: ‘The message of this film is that how we as ordinary human beings, if we can reclaim our voice we can achieve anything. What these guys have taught me is that politics is about people and if people reclaim that voice, change will happen — There is a culture of fear to speak out in our society. But why? We took on one of the mightiest fucking regimes in the world — and we won! Why this fear now?”
More than Just a Game opens countrywide on April 25
Filmmakers should look East
Anant Singh, head of Videovision Entertainment and arguably South Africa’s foremost producer with more than 60 films made since 1984, knows the industry.
From peddling soft porn in Bantustan casinos in the 1980s to the critically acclaimed Faith’s Corner (scored by Philip Glass) and Mr Bones (the highest-grossing South African film ever with box-office takings of R32-million), he has run through the gamut of cinematic genres.
More than Just a Game, the most recent film to be produced by the 52-year-old, has been signed by Sony Pictures for international distribution. With its mix of politics and football — two South African passions — the film appears set to do well at the local box office too.
Yet, despite a growing local film industry with new voices emerging and enhanced production and technical abilities, South Africans’ patriotism doesn’t appear to extend as far as the cinema, where Hollywood blockbusters — with the exception of films like Mr Bones — appear to rule.
For Singh, looking to the East is the path forward: ‘As an industry we need to spend more time developing local audiences and Korea is the benchmark we should be using,” he says.
‘The Korean market used to be dominated by Hollywood films but they’ve created [tax] incentives for filmmakers and further incentives at the box office for cinemas screening local films — the result is that more than 50% of the films screened are Korean,” says Singh. He also believes that marketing rebates will add an incentive for local houses to place more emphasis on South African films.
Singh believes ‘there is a local audience” whose potential remains untapped for spatial and economic reasons, and that moving cinemas away from ‘malls to which many people have no access” and into townships may see this potential realised. — Niren Tolsi