More than just a Game

While everyone knows of Nelson Mandela's incarceration on Robben Island, what is not so well known is how football helped the players to survive there. Mandela was barred from taking part, but current South African leader Jacob Zuma was involved.

The Makana Football Association, the jail’s league, came into being on Robben Island in 1966. Starting in December 1964, every week a prisoner, a different one every time, as punishments often followed such impunity, would make an official request to be allowed to play football and every week for three years, the prison warder would refuse.

Then, one day the authorities relented, figuring that the prisoners would have little energy after their hard work and would soon tire themselves out.The opposite happened. The inmates threw themselves into football and everything to do with it. Everything was organized; a copy of FIFA’s rule handbook, was, along with Karl Marx’s Das Kapital the most popular book in the prison library. Every result was recorded as were every yellow and red card and every disciplinary action. Referees were examined and players were registered, official letters were exchanged.


Fishing nets became nets of another kind at weekends as a league began to take shape. Most of the teams formed followed membership of the different political organizations in the prison. The Pan- African Congress and the African National Congress had their differences off the pitch but the game of football had them co-operating and working together, a lesson, if one may be so trite, for the future governance of the country as a whole.

But there was one team that was open to anyone and didn’t care which faction you belonged to as long as you had what it took on the dusty pitch - which Mandela could watch through the bars until the authorities blocked the view by building a wall to stop players passing messages to him. Manong FC drew its ranks from all walks of prison life and prospered because of that fact. Manong won eight out of nine titles and even featured current South African President Jacob Zuma.

Robben Island's football association has been written about in the book ‘More than Just a Game’ by Prof. Chuck Korr and Marvin Close, which was also turned into a movie.

So if you are already fed up with the World Cup, forget all the hype around it, all the money spent and wasted around it and for a moment think of the pride of the people of South Africa who, only a few years ago, would have never dreamt to be free to host an international event of this kind and remember that no other sport can bring so many people together as football.

In April 2007, Makana FA was awarded with the honorary FIFA membership. Makana FA was established during the dark years of Apartheid by prisoners incarcerated on Robben Island.