BOOK OF THE DAY: Peter Cunninghamreviews More Than Just A Game - Football v Apartheid: The most important football story ever toldby Chuck Korr and Marvin Close Collins 317pp; £17
THE SEA trip from Cape Town's VA Waterfront to Robben Island, a distance of seven miles, takes about 30 minutes. The former island prison is today one of South Africa's chief tourist attractions, the place where Nelson Mandela spent 27 years in solitary confinement. The ferries run every hour and at least in summer - December to March - are always full.
From the decks of the ferries and from all parts of Robben Island, the shoreline of Cape Town and the majestic shape of Table Mountain are visible. On arrival, each new group of tourists is assigned a guide, many of whom are ex-prisoners.
The gentleman who showed our group around spoke of the harsh regime under which he and others had suffered there. The little stone yard where Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu and other high-profile political prisoners spent the best years of their lives, was unbearably bleak.
Robben Island is a memorial frozen in time to the brutal regime of white supremacy that created apartheid. And yet, at no time during my tour of Robben Island, did anyone mention football.
In 1993, Chuck Korr, an American professor of history teaching at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa, had his attention drawn by a colleague to some 70 cardboard boxes, labelled "Robben Island - Sports".
As Korr says, " was an oxymoron. Robben Island was horror incarnate, not a place where prisoners would play games."
The extraordinary story of how, for a decade from the mid-1960s, the prisoners on the island formed themselves into a functioning football association based on strict Fifa rules has until now remained untold.
Fed with meagre rations and policed by warders who treated the prisoners as non-humans, men such as Jacob Zuma, now president of the ANC, Terror Lekota, up to recently South African minister of defence, and Dikang Moseneke, who is today the Hon Mr Justice Dikang Moseneke, deputy chief justice of the constitutional court of South Africa, put together the Matyeni Football Association. "Matyeni" meant stones.
The association, which numbered hundreds of prisoners jailed for their political beliefs, or just for being black, recognised that their most important strategy was to always present a unified face to their jailers. They became adept at negotiation, slowly establishing soccer on the island as a right, not a privilege. The members of the various soccer committees became sophisticated administrators, as well as gifted players. Robben Island had truly become, as Nelson Mandela put it, the "University of Struggle". (being in solitary confinement, he took no part in football.)
Slowly, extraordinary changes took place on Robben Island, reflecting the changes of attitude affecting the apartheid regime in the outside world.
No fewer than 11 different clubs were formed within the prison. Strict Fifa rules concerning transfers, disciplinary hearings, the appointment of referees, league tables, awards, prizes and pitch maintenance were agreed and implemented. Robben Island became a microcosm of the dreamed-of life in a post-apartheid South Africa.
Prison warders began to see the prisoners as humans. Warders who were renowned for their brutish treatment of prisoners became softened as they watched the weekly sports encounters. Soccer was soon followed by rugby, despite the fact that "many of the guards believed that only a white man could play rugby".
This entertaining book, which is very good for sport, reveals the wisdom, pragmatism and tenacity of the men who shaped the new South Africa, and how the human spirit refuses to be broken.
•Peter Cunningham's new novel, The Sea and the Silence, has just been published by New Island
• More Than Just A Game - Football v Apartheid: The most important football story ever toldby Chuck Korr and Marvin Close Collins 317pp; £17