More Than Just a Game: Football v Apartheid

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.