Ken Vairy – Peter Hughes, Danny le Roux
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8 Many first names and initials were not available.
9 Tom Jack was both a player and coach.
From as early as the 1920s, South Africa’s segregation policies were internationally known and despised, but despite this, international sporting relations remained friendly. Within the country’s corridors of sports’ power there was already talk, albeit fairly quiet talk, about the non-inclusiveness of the national football team. Meanwhile South Africa went about its “friendlies” as usual.
In 1921 the Melbourne Argus reported that the South African Football Association had proposed a European tour. The report indicated that the team was to tour Great Britain, France, the Netherlands and Belgium. If accepted, the report went on, “the tour should begin in November 1922.” At university level, sporting exchanges were also unchallenged as indicated in the same report: “[I]t is also proposed to invite a team of athletes from Oxford and Cambridge universities to visit South Africa.”
It is not clear if the national team’s European tour did take place, for there had been opposition even then. Two years later however, in 1924, (as detailed in Chapter 1) the South African Springboks toured Great Britain, Ireland and the Netherlands. Despite the fact that football in this period of history was not well developed in South Africa, it should be noted that the game was widely played. On January 4, 1897, the Bristol Times and Mirror10 ran an article titled “Football Phases” in which it mentioned that the game had been played in South Africa since about 1888. It indicates that even before the British began to take the game elsewhere around the world, in South Africa football not only “blossomed forth everywhere, but all clubs, whether European, Cape Dutch, Malay, or Kaffir, began to appreciate and exhibit the nuances of the game.”
The article describes the July 1891 tour by an English team, which was a “revelation to the semi-continent over which they marched easily victorious, despite efforts to get at them with refreshments and with collapse of coaches.” The touring English team played against “local sides in Somerset, Western Province, the Cape, Rand and Kimberly.” Commenting on locals’ strategy, the report says: “rough-game tactics were thrown” and that the tourists had to endure a “brace of snarling Afrikanders.” On January 13, 1907, in its preview of the American team’s tour of England, the New York Times was optimistic that the tour would help the growth of football in America and “make a new departure in Association football, placing America in the same class as England, Ireland, Australia and South Africa as a soccer centre.”
It was decades later, in 1957, however, that South Africa would play an important role in the formation of the Confederation of African Football (CAF) – only to be expelled immediately thereafter. Prior to this, there had been campaigns from various quarters to have South Africa expelled from international sports bodies. In the beginning of a very long battle, which would last almost half a century, the South African Soccer Federation led a campaign against segregated sport. This received its first major boost in Paris in 1955, when the International Olympic Committee (IOC) acknowledged and recorded that “non-white” athletes were being discriminated against in South Africa.
In 1956, at the FIFA Congress in Lisbon, South Africa was to play a role that would later define football in Africa. It was at this congress that initial plans for the establishment of the Confederation of African Football, a new FIFA-affiliated body, were first proposed. The seeds of the idea had already been sown at the 1954 FIFA Congress. On June 7 and 8, 1956, African delegates met at the Avenida Hotel in Lisbon and discussed the possible formation of the Continental football governing body. The delegates were Abdelaziz Abdallah Salem, Youssef Mohamed and Mohamed Latif from Egypt; Dr Abdel Halim Mohamed, Abdel Rahim Shaddaad and Bedawi Mohamed Ali from Sudan; and Fred Fell from South Africa.
Despite the fact that Ghana was to gain independence only the following year (in 1957) the Confederation of African Football has consistently indicated that the Ghanaian Ohene Djan also played a part. However, CAF minutes of that meeting and the FIFA attendance roll of the 1956 congress show only seven African representatives: three from Egypt, three from Sudan, and one from South Africa.11 The new body was formed in Khartoum, Sudan, on February 8, 1957.
South Africa had, along with Egypt and Sudan, been a FIFA member and attended previous world governing body gatherings, including the historical 1954 congress in Berne, Switzerland, where Africa was recognised as a FIFA continental zone. South Africa, for its part, had been a FIFA member since 1910. In a letter dated February 16, 1910, FIFA stated: “The Emergency Committee, making use of its power given by Article 5, has sanctioned the provisional affiliation of the South African Football Association.”
The missive, addressed to SAFA secretary JH Weaver in Cape Town, was sent by Carl Anton Wilhelm Hirschman, the FIFA secretary general in Amsterdam. Then three months later at the 7th FIFA Annual Congress held in Milan, Italy, on May 15-16, 1910, South Africa and two other European associations were formally admitted: the Liga Portuguesa de Football (Portugal) and the Fédération des Sociétés Luxembourgeoises des Sports Athlétiques (Luxemburg). Forty-six years later, at the 1956 Lisbon Conference, the idea of an all-Africa tournament – an African Cup of Nations – was first proposed by Egypt. Two Egyptian nationals, Abdel Aziz Abdallah Salem and General Abdel Aziz Mostafa, were the first two presidents of CAF. Egypt had initially been earmarked to host the first African Cup of Nations. However, Egypt had troubles of its own to deal with, and could not host a football tournament at the time.
It is a mystery why the African delegates to the 1956 Lisbon Conference invited a representative from South Africa, a country whose policies they disapproved of, to discuss what was a turning point not only in the history of the continent’s sport, but of Africa as such. However, researcher and historian Dr Peter Alegi explains it this way: “Not many African nations were FIFA members as they were not independent then. [The] African voice was not taken seriously, so Africans didn’t have much of a choice but to include anyone who will push the continent’s agenda.”12
What the rest of the world did not know was that on June 27, 1956, nineteen days after that historical meeting at Lisbon, the South African press quoted the then Minister of the Interior, Dr Theophilus Ebenhaezer Dönges, as saying that sport within the borders of South Africa had to be practised according to the principle of “separate development” and that, while the government was “most sympathetic towards and anxious to help legitimate Non-European sporting activities,” these must be within the laws of the country.
Fred Fell, the South African delegate to the formal launch of CAF and the African Nations cup in Sudan in 1957, was asked to confirm or deny the existence of apartheid in sports. He told the Khartoum congress that the country’s constitution prohibited mixed-race sport. According to Yidnekatchew Tessema, who was CAF president at the time, Fred Fell “without defending apartheid” had declared that he would be jailed if the South African government knew his true position on the issue. As recounted by Tessema, Fell explained that South Africa had both an all-white and an all-black team on standby to fly to Khartoum for the first African Cup of Nations.
The CAF executive argued that a national team should not be constituted of only a single race. As a result, South Africa was compelled to withdraw from the first African Cup of Nations, held in 1957. Two years later, with Egypt now ready to host the tournament and South Africa firmly out of the picture, the tournament was again contested by only three countries – Egypt, Ethiopia and Sudan. As FIFA had promised, the South African issue was again part of the agenda at the 1958 congress in Sweden. CAF also held its congress in Stockholm, during the FIFA World Cup in 1958, and a major decision was made to terminate South Africa’s membership from the continental body it had helped form. This was also the year that the World Cup introduced the skinny Brazilian football genius – Edison Arantes do Nascimento, known to the world as Pelé.
Interestingly, while 1958 saw the rise of this black football genius, South Africa was being condemned