Chuck Korr

5. It was no surprise to me that almost all of the former prisoners who were involved with football on Robben Island are enthusiastic supporters for South Africa's efforts to attract the World Cup. Part of their feelings about 2010 stems from the knowledge that football means something to the vast majority of the South African population as well as their own belief that football embodies a whole set of values that they know were important to them on the Island and which they think are just as important to South African society. Hosting the world's most important international sporting event also means that South Africa has taken its rightful position on the world stage. It is a visible sign of the maturity of this relatively new nation, new in terms of a free and democratic nation. As far as the former prisoners are concerned, South Africa's hosting of other international sports events (for instance, the 1995 Rugby World Cup) were only a prelude to hosting an event that will focus the attention of the world on South Africa and features THE sport that is important to the vast majority of the population. When the men organized their FA on the Island they made sure that it followed all the guidelines to be a FIFA organization. The fact that FIFA chose to make the Makana FA (in 2007) the first organization ever to become an honorary member of FIFA meant a great deal to the men who were involved with football on the Island. Hosting the World Cup is the next natural step in the progression of football in the struggle for freedom. As one prisoner said in 1970, "first we will have a FIFA worthy organization on the island, someday the world of football will come to a free South Africa. I share their hope that the organizing committee will find ways to include recognition of the Makana FA and what football meant on Robben Island as part of the ceremonies surrounding FIFA World Cup 2010 6. Football is a central focus of the book, but the real story deals with how the men believed that football had important qualities that would enable them to use it as a way to continue their struggle against apartheid, to retain their sense of personal and communal dignity, to create their own community within the repressive structure of the island, and to prepare themselves for the day when freedom would come to their nation. The book shows why football mattered, but most of all it shows why football was much more (and still is) than just a game to these men and to the society in which they lived.

One point has to be made clear at the start of any discussion of Robben Island prison. All the men in the maximum security section were political prisoners. That term did not exist in South African jurisprudence. Technically, all of the men were sentenced for some kind of criminal offenses, but each of their supposed "crimes" were carried out as part of an effort to change the apartheid government. Tony Suze and Mark Shinners were both young members of the Pan-Africanist Congress. They were convicted of a variety of charges including conspiracy to overthrow the government, and sabotage. Tony was sentenced with a number of other youths. One of the main charges against him shows the Alice in Wonderland (or Orwellian) nature of South African justice. He was charged with conspiracy with persons unknown to the prosecution, at a time and place unknown to the prosecution, to attempt to overthrow the government. The only defense was to dis-prove these charges. He was sentenced to fifteen years. Mark was sentenced to ten years. There was no chance of commutation of sentence for any political prisoner. Shinners served a second ten year term on the Island. Two years after his initial release he was arrested by the police after he had been seen entering Soweto during the 1976 uprising. What he was attempting to do was to convince students to draw back from their confrontation with the police since he saw no chance for them to survive in a pitched battle where the authorities had orders to "shoot to kill". Lizo Sitoto was an ANC member, convicted of sedition, conspiracy, leaving the country without proper documents, and various other crimes. He served sixteen years, six months. Sedick Isaacs was part of a small Muslim political group. He was convicted of possession of explosives and various acts of conspiracy. He was sentenced to twelve years and served an extra year due to his efforts to smuggle out information about treatment in the prison. He served almost a year in solitary confinement, by far the longest such sentence and was beaten severely many times. Marcus Solomon was involved with the Yu Chi Chan Club (named after a book written by Chairman Mao), an organization that was dedicated to ending apartheid and bringing about a socialist state. It was much more a discussion group than it was involved in direct action. He was convicted of conspiracy, sedition, and attempting to overthrow the government and sentenced to ten years. Upon their releases, all of the men had to try to construct new lives under the harshest conditions. They were under banning orders for a number of years and that restricted their movement, their ability to get jobs, and even how many people they could see socially. Sitoto went into exile in Sweden with his girl friend. They were married there and were trained as pre-school teachers. They returned after freedom came to South Africa. They started a pre-school in the township where Lizo was raised. To this day, they support the school by raising funds from charities and private donations. It serves hundreds of children in a poor area of the Eastern Cape. Isaacs had a B.A. and was a mathematics teacher when he was sentenced to the Island. He acquired two masters degree during his imprisonment. Upon his release, he had a number of menial jobs until he finally was allowed to study for a doctorate in mathematics. He could not obtain the kind of position his training warranted until the late-1980's. He became a professor of medical informatics at the University of Cape Town Medical School and has an international reputation in his field. After his recent retirement, he has become a consultant for a number of governmental organizations. Suze became a teacher upon his release, but was sacked when the security officials threatened to close the school if he remained there. He gained qualifications in personnel management and other business activities. Since the late-1980's he has been involved in a number of businesses including the development of commercial properties. Solomon had a number of jobs and was able to resume a career as a teacher. He recognized that the problem facing so many children in apartheid South Africa was the absence of hope. A few years later, he started a small organization in the Western Cape that emphasized the ability of children to have a positive influence on one another and the need of adults (as well as the state) to encourage children to take some control of their lives and to plan their futures. The lack of resources provided by the apartheid state and the constant humiliation inflicted upon "non-whites" made Solomon's goals both important and difficult. He raised funding for the organization (much og it from foreign charities and governments), set up the structure and has seen it grow into the nation-wide Children's Resource Centre. Shinners was released shortly before the apartheid state crumbled. He involved himself with the PAC and was one of its representatives in the deliberations that wrote the new constitution for South Africa. He appeared before a number of international organizations to make the case for the struggle against apartheid. In addition to their post-apartheid careers, all five are involved with groups that attempt to aid former political prisoners, many of whose lives were ruined (financially and personally) by what was done to them during the detention and imprisonment Robben Island became a kind of testing ground to see if the regime could neutralize the opposition to apartheid. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission has shown the world that the South African security forces and the government at its highest levels sanctioned the killing of political opponents. But even if the government had the ability to kill larger numbers, it did have some restraints. The most important was its standing in the international community. The purposes of the Island were to ensure that the most dangerous opponents of apartheid were not free to work against it. It also served as a warning to other people not to involve themselves in political struggle. If the Island was the sign of the power of the stare, it also became the symbol of resistance to it. The fact that some men came off the Island and continued in the struggle showed that there might be hope for the future. The physical presence of the Island also provided a visible symbol that the opponents of apartheid turned into a world wide cause. It was an offense in South Africa to talk or write about what happened on the Island, a policy which provided the world wide anti-apartheid movement with a useful way to discredit claims by South Africa to share the values of western democratic society. After the end of apartheid, the Island achieved almost mythic stature. For years before 1989, it had become identified with one prisoner, Nelson Mandela. After then, it was transformed into a kind of pilgrimage site for people to understand the hardships that men suffered to bring an wend to apartheid. Thanks to the efforts of many former prisoners and the involvement of the new government, the newly closed prison has been turned into a museum which is also a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Thousands of tourists visit the Island every year and when they tour the prison, their guide is always a former political prisoner. The Robben island Museum runs a number of courses for youth. The purpose of the Island is to ensure that the history of apartheid and the struggle against it is not forgotten, as well as ensuring that people from around the world come to understand that peaceful change can be accomplished. One of the purposes for writing the book is to show the Island in its fullest context. The men who shared the isolation section with Mr. Mandela were known to the world outside of South Africa, but they represented a very small fraction of the prison population. The vast majority of men were housed in communal cells and suffered extreme condition while working in the stone quarry. These men might be described as the "foot soldiers" of the struggle and little has been told about their lives. The confronted sadistic guards on a daily basis and were the victims of a concerted effort to break their will to resist. One important purpose of the book is to present a more complete story of what happened on the Island and to show what life was like for the thousands who were imprisoned there. The cover is the only known photo of the men playing football on the Island. It was a propaganda photo taken by the prison authorities to show how well the treated the prisons. As we said in the introduction to the book - "the faces of the players have all been blacked out and obscured. The apartheid authorities steadfastly refused to view the prisoners as human beuings or individuals. They were faceless terrorists, without names, known only by theire prison numbers. We hope that this book puts faces back onto these players."

1. Why was sports so important to the prisoners and what was unique about how they ran it? The men on Robben Island were not criminals. They were political prisoners. They felt they had an obligation to find ways to continue the struggle against apartheid, even in prison. They had to resist the efforts of the prison authorities to break them, emotionally, as well as physically. They had to educate themselves in preparation for the free South Africa they intended to create. They had to find ways to divert themselves from the harshness of the prison life. They had to create their own sense of community within the Island, preferably one that would minimize the political divisions that existed between members of the two important political factions. Sports, particularly football, served all these purposes. It also was something that they had done before they were sentenced to prison and playing football reminded them of the life they had left behind as a result of the involvement in the struggle. Football also gave them something to enjoy. Simply put, "It was fun, something that gave us something to look forward to and to talk about." Their struggle to obtain the right to play football (see below) gave them a renewed sense that they could resist the authorities. Football was important to these men. Indeed it was too important, just to be a game. They felt they had to organize it. No matches were played before they organized a league, wrote a constitution, formed clubs, and created a number of committees to run the organization. Everything had to meet FIFA standards, including the referees who took written examinations. The men had a compulsion "to do things properly and to organize them", whether it was education, protest, or sports. There also was a practical reason to organize the league - there were hundreds of men who wanted to play and only one day and one field available for the sport. It's not an exaggeration to say that many of the Robben Island prisoners had n attitude towards sports that was similar to that of Victorian middle class men - they believed that sports could build character and could be an important asset to insure that the men would strengthen their resolve to emerge from the prisoner stronger than they had been when they entered it. One former prisoner summed it up in an interview to me, "you know that we were a British colony and that meant we understood that sports was much too important just to be a game." 2 Since Robben Island was a place known for cruel punishment, how did the prisoners secure the right to play football? The South African government had an almost schizophrenic approach about how to handle the opposition. It had no compunctions about murdering people in detention, sending letter bombs to opponents or operating some of the most brutal prisons seen anywhere. At the same time, it engaged in a long running propaganda campaign to convince people in the West that South Africa was a liberal, enlightened, Western style democracy operating on Christian principles. Its prison authorities had a detailed set of seemingly enlightened rules by which to treat prisoners. The Robben Island prisoners used these contradictions against their captors. The prisoners pointed to the regulations that mandated that prisoners had the right to exercise. It took them almost four years of weekly protests (all of which carried punishment) to get the authorities to grant them the right to play football. They were insistent that this was a right, not a privilege.Two allies of the prisoners were the International Red Cross (IRC) and Helen Suzman, the only member of Parliament who spoke out against apartheid. The prison allowed the IRC to visit as part of a propaganda campaign and then were forced to let the prisoners tell the IRC about problems in the prison. Since Suzman was an MP, the prison had to grant her the right to visit and talk with the prisoners. Once the prisoners gained the right to play football, they insisted on the need to run it themselves. Any time the authorities interfered, the prisoners closed down their sports and found ways to get news of these actions to the IRC. The logical (illogical?) conclusion of this struggle was an incident in the 1970's when the commanding officer demanded that the prisoners resume playing sports before he would talk with them about some of their other grievances. He did not want his bosses in Pretoria to think he was sabotaging their efforts to look klike they were running a humane prison system.

I grew up in Philadelphia and Los Angeles and attended the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) for all three degrees. My Ph.D, in 1969, was in English history and the topic of my dissertation was the foreign policy of Oliver Cromwell. In 1966-67, I was a research student at the University of London’s Institute of Historical Research. During that year, I was lucky enough to be a student of S. T. Bindoff (the author of Tudor England) and Robert Latham ( the editor of the definitive edition of The Diary of Samuel Pepys). They not only trained me as a historian, they also allowed me to develop a deep appreciation for England and to have a very special feeling about London. Since 1970, I have been able to return to London almost once a year and I think of it as a second home. Something that I learned to appreciate during the first year was that football was more than a game to people . I grew up as a sports fan – playing basketball and I’m still a Phillies baseball fan even though we left Philadelphia in 1953. I have been interested for decades in the connection between sports and American social life and politics. . My father had taken me to see the first game played in Philadelphia by Jackie Robinson, the man who broke the color barrier in major league baseball. In the turmoil of the 1960’s it was clear that a boxer, Muhammed Ali, played an important role and two sprinters, Tommie Smith and John Carlos had become the symbols of the efforts to end racism in this country. In 1970, I became an assistant professor of history at the University of Missouri, an institution that was only seven years old at that time. My teaching responsibilities included advanced level and M. A. courses in Tudor-Stuart England and 17th century Europe. One of the many advantages of being in a new, and growing, department was the chance to develop new courses and get away from the traditional syllabus. In 1972, I organized a very successful conference dealing with the role that sports played in contemporary American society. Two things about it stand out in my mind – the range of serious non-sports issues that were discussed and that I got to be Jackie Robinson’s host for two days. It’s a great thrill to see that the heroes of one’s youth can be even better people that one imagines. Three years later, I started teaching a social history of sports course, one of the first taught in any department of history at an American university. As a result of the conference, I tried to do some serious reading about sports (especially football) in English society and was very disappointed to see how little there was at that time. That’s when I decided to see if I could start research of my own on the subject. I was returning to England in the summer, 1973 and wrote the secretaries of all the London League clubs to ask if I could talk with them about a possible subject for my research. I got invitations to visit all but two clubs and I met with the secretaries of seven of them My original plan was to do a social history of football in London after 1945. When I realized that was too big a subject, I decided to focus on one club. Since I wanted a club that had a distinctive, recognizable community, I limited the final choice to West Ham United and Charlton. It’s no exaggeration to say that my career and my life were changed by an afternoon I spent at Upton Park in July, 1973. I was with Eddie Chapman, the club secretary for a couple of hours. The club had a history that would make it a perfect study for me. Eddie was enthusiastic about the idea and convinced Reg Pratt, the chairman, to help me. I ended up with a historian’s treasure trove. I got free access to all of the club’s financial records and the minute books of meetings from 1895 to 1970. When I began the research in 1974, it was the start of a new career, an involvement for me with both the club and football, and the beginning of friendships that last to this day. I have to emphasize that I did not choose West Ham because I was a fan. The dynamic was just the opposite. I became a fan because I got involved with the club and the people around it. I worked at the club for months over three summers before I saw my first match there in 1976. Over the years, I got to know remarkable people like Eddie, John Lyall, Ron Greenwood, Frank O’Farrell, other former players and a number of long time supporters. I interviewed scores of former players, club officials, and journalists. Over the years, the club has offered me hospitality and I get to a few matches each autumn. One thrill was to attend the 1980 Cup Final and to be able to buy a ticket for my friend and mentor, S. T. Bindoff. It was his second Cup Final, the first one being in 1923. At that match, I sat behind Jimmy Ruffell, the West Ham winger in 1923. From the time I got involved with the research in football, I had a couple of things that marked me as unusual in the minds of Englishmen and women who learned of my work – I had no background in football and I had an accent that made clear I was “that Yank who wants to write about West Ham.” I’m sure those peculiarities brought me to the attention of other academics who did research in football and other aspects of British and European sports. When I decided to do all my academic research in the field of sport history, there were very few academics involved in it. Thirty years later, the field has a solid academic base, even though some of the academic snobbery towards “it’s only sports” remains. My West Ham United book was published in 1986 and went through four editions. I had a wonderful publisher in Colin Haycroft at Duckworth, but he made one small mistake. They let the book go out of print in 1994, the year before the centenary of the club when it was boasting that it was the “club with a special history”. After the book, I continued to be involved with issues in football, but found a different research topic for my main research interest. In 2002, I published a history of the major League Baseball Players Association, the union that won freedom of contract and changed the economic and legal structure of all professional sports in America. The book was based on almost ten years of research. The union allowed me unfettered access to all of their documents (except individual player contracts) for the fifteen years during which they made all the changes in the sport. In the midst of the baseball research, I wrote a newspaper article that made me feel as good as either of the books. It was about Peter Norman, the Australian sprinter who is the “third man” on the victory stand with Smith and Carlos in Mexico City, 1968. The article helped to bring attention to the courageous stand Norman took in supporting the two American sprinters and reminded people of the principles that were involved in what happened on that victory stand. Since 1993, my career has taken an even more unexpected change. In that summer, I was a visiting professor at the University of Western Cape in Cape Town. It was an exciting time to be in South Africa, a chance to be there as the nation was emerging from apartheid and moving towards a free and democratic society. I had been involved a bit in the anti-apartheid sports movement and other protests and it was special to be there when change was happening. A colleague showed me a set of archival boxes that contained a collection of documents that seemed almost beyond imagination. They all concerned sports, much of it football. There were thousands of pages of correspondence, match reports, referees reports, minutes of committee meetings, and miscellany. What was amazing is that all of the documents had been written by political prisoners on Robben Island, the place to which the apartheid regime sentenced the most dangerous opponents, a prison famous for its brutality and its mission to destroy the will of men to resist. Even reading the first few of the documents convinced me that the men had created something very special for themselves on the Island and they had used organized sports as the vehicle to retain their dignity and build a community of their own. It took me a few lengthy research trips to go through the documents and that set me up for the most exciting work I’ve ever done as a historian. I began a series of interviews with the former prisoners. For my other books, I had interviewed world famous footballers, Hall of Fame baseball players, celebrities in a number of fields, and numerous politicians. None of this compared with the feeling of sitting across the kitchen table from a man who had spent more than twenty years on the Island, talking with another who was in exile for fifteen years after being released from the Island, or walking into a room to be greeted by fourteen men who, between them had served more than two hundred forty years on the Island. The product of this research was a film, “More Than Just a Game” which premiered in South Africa in 2007 and will be released in the UK shortly and a book More Than Just a Game, published last year by Collins. It’s the most important subject that I’ve ever work on and I feel proud that the former prisoners have told me that it does justice to their story. I retired from the University of Missouri – St. Louis in 2003. Retirement allows my wife, Anne, and I to do a lot of traveling and I have the perfect retirement “job”. The FIFA MA program is an advanced degree that combines sports history, business, and law. The student body is international (this year there are twenty eight students from twenty one countries) and each term is taught at a different university – in Leicester, Milan, and Neuchatel. Each autumn, I return to England to teach at De Montfort University and to live in London. What better way to spend “retirement” than lecturing to good students interested in the subject, to live in London to see friends and enjoy the theatre, and to spend days at Upton Park.