New Books In African Studies

Chances are, if you were one of the 700 million people who watched the 2010 World Cup, you likely heard mention of the soccer games that prisoners on Robben Island played during the decades of apartheid rule. The stories of these soccer matches on the barren island, played by political prisoners sentenced to years of hard labor, were cast as evidence of the sport’s power to lift the human spirit, to bring inspiration in the midst of oppression. But the matches on Robben Island were much more than a diversion from the tedium and harshness of prison life. Hundreds of inmates participated in creating a fully organized league, the Makana Football Association, with multiple divisions, clubs governed by constitutions and officers, fixtures and tables, and league administrators. The workings of the association produced hundreds of pages of documents that ended up in 1993, by chance, in the hands of American sports historian Chuck Korr. Drawing from these boxes of materials and from interviews with the men who playe