Incoming: The Youthful Revolution of South African Soccer

Several years from now, South African soccer will experience a rejuvenation of talent as the youth of today grow older.

By: Charlie Hatch

Produced & edited by: Alex Lumley

A young fan watches Bafana Bafana take on Mexico in the 2010 World Cup. Photo courtesy of Marcello Casal Jr. of Agência Brasil.

Doubt is clouding over South African soccer, as Bafana Bafana, the national team, has struggled on the international stage.

After hosting the 2010 FIFA World Cup, South Africa has quietly become a byproduct in the international scene.

The latest FIFA world rankings have the country placed 64^th overall, and more alarmingly, 14^th in Africa. With the continent only receiving five places to compete in the upcoming 2018 World Cup in Russia, the latest rankings are a justifiable concern.

But Shawn Bishop said there’s no reason to panic.

“We’ve seen the future,” he said. “It just needed a bit of patience.”

Bishop may be right.

The Future of South African Soccer Is Bright

A heavyweight in South African youth soccer development, Bishop serves as assistant coach for Bafana Bafana’s under-17 national team and is the head of the youth academy of Mamelodi Sundowns — one of the country’s biggest club teams.

Essentially, Bishop oversees the country’s best players currently, as well as future talent to recruit.

“From what I’m seeing on the ground level and grassroots level, there is a massive boom of talent in this county,” he said.

The movement started, ironically, as the international spotlight ended. As the World Cup concluded, more investment in youth player development was injected.

Cape Town Stadium is home to two major Premier Soccer League Clubs. Photo courtesy of Wikipedia user Maryland Pride.

Premier Soccer League clubs- teams in the country’s top domestic league- heavily recruited in players that were born, for the most part, between 1996-2000. In 2010, they were 10-14.

Six years on, the youth development has transformed into a new generation of talent beginning to feature in international competition.

“From what I’m seeing on the ground level and grassroots level, there is a massive boom of talent in this county.”

The u-17 squad, which Bishop coaches, played in the 2015 u-17 FIFA World Cup for the first time in South African history.

The u-20 team has a breath of talent, with 18 of the players currently playing in the PSL. And the u-23 team, which appeared in the 2016 Rio Olympics, played well and tied Brazil, the eventual champions.

Bishop sees the benefits of talent paying off; now it’s critical the rest of the country sees the same.

The problem, though, is success is judged at the senior level, where South Africa still remains 64^th in the world.

“In terms of competitiveness, we are in between,” said Phumzile Andries, a journalist for Soccer Laduma, the country’s largest soccer publication. “We don’t know whether we’re going forwards or backwards.

SAFA — the South African Football Association — has devoted itself to focus on 2022, when this current batch of youth molds into the majority of the Bafana Bafana senior team.

But in recent squads picked for the team, the dedication to youth players isn’t as obvious.

“The way we outsiders understand it, things are not happening the way we think they should happen,” Andries said of a core group of players continually being selected. Selecting youth talent has a complicated process, too.

Youth Talent Often Comes From Poverty

The majority of talent comes from the townships, the pre-dominantly black cities that were previously segregated under Apartheid. There Bishop and other PSL recruiters find communities ripe with gifted players with stunning technical ability.

Soccer provides opportunity for social advancement to impoverished South African youth. Photo from Pixabay.com

Most South Africans understand this.

“It’s easier in the townships,” Godfrey Chauke, a doctor living outside Pretoria, said. “That’s where football comes from. There are a lot of opportunities with soccer.”

With townships being impoverished areas, that does not bode well for middle class families interested in their kids playing soccer.

Ndia Magadela also lives outside Pretoria, and said she’s interested in getting her 3 and 5-year-old sons into soccer. But living in a better community has hurt her chances of finding a youth club.

Soccer remains the most popular sport in South Africa, but rugby remains a predominantly white sport. In schools with higher white student enrollments, such as situation the Magadela children, the emphasis on soccer weakens.

“For the past couple of months, I’ve been trying to get them into a development team,” Magadela said. “There’s not enough at lower levels for them to grow up to be professional soccer players.”

As soccer development in South Africa continues to experience growing pains, younger players have been able to capitalize.

Percy Tau, a 22-year-old winger for Mamelodi Sundowns, said his club’s commitment to youth has allowed him to feature into PSL league matches.

"There are a lot of opportunities with soccer.”

For the club, it’s a chance to use younger talent to gain experience; for Tau, playing experience can enhance reputation and potentially mean offers to play overseas for foreign teams, mostly in Europe.

“There’s interest,” Tau said of playing where opportunities arise. “Circulation and new flesh blood is forever needed and the country is making progress.”

It’s a process that, if Tau and South Africans can abroad, should help the country grow in soccer influence, Bishop said.

While there’s an initiative to keep young talent playing in the domestic league, Bishop said PSL clubs acknowledge the importance of playing gaining experience abroad.

In fact, PSL clubs regularly meet to insure South African soccer will continue to strengthen.

“If we produce players in the national team that can play in Europe, then let’s go to Europe,” Bishop said. “We encourage the boys to go. For them, outside of the white lines of football, it just makes you a worldly person.” 

Empowering South Africa's Youthful Voices

By: Jim Ryan

Produced & Edited by: Andrew Davis

Children’s Radio Foundation sheds light on issues facing South African youth

With a hint of nervousness, a young reporter approaches his subject — a South African author known for her children’s books. The reporter introduces himself, adjusts his microphone and asks his first question: “What did you eat for breakfast today?”

Stifling a giggle about her response — “Is that all?” — the reporter concludes his microphone check and proceeds to the real subject at hand: South African storytelling and youth literacy.

Author Lesley Beake later gushed about the preteen reporter’s professionalism, poise and confidence. His news organization, the Children’s Radio Foundation, aims to instill each of those qualities in its young reporters.

The foundation trains African youth ages nine to 20 to report and produce radio packages that air on radio stations around the continent. It reaches more than seven million listeners each week. More than one million of those listeners hail from South Africa, where the foundation has partnerships with a dozen community radio stations and puts almost 200 youth reporters to work.

Storytelling

They tell the stories of their communities and the issues facing them, such as the HIV/AIDS epidemic that plagues South Africa, international politics, education and health. They cover lighter topics, too. Stories about musicians, dance and childhood dreams are told during recent shows, published weekly on air and the online audio platform Soundcloud.

Children's Radio Foundation reporters interview United States
Ambassador Patrick Gaspard when he visited the Manenberg community
in South Africa. © Children's Radio Foundation

Reporters are not fed stories from a producer sitting behind a keyboard somewhere, either. They pitch the stories themselves, and make their final products reflective of what they are experiencing in their daily lives.

“They take ownership of the show and what it looks like,” said Nelisa Ngqulana, a Children’s Radio Foundation director. “It really gives them confidence that the product that comes out is owned by them.”

Growing up South African

The programs, funded in part by UNICEF, provide a unique glimpse into the lives of South African children. Given South Africa’s diversity, the living conditions and culture that children are born into there vary drastically.

In other words, there is no universal South African childhood. One child might grow up down the street from a Kentucky Fried Chicken, while another might grow up far from the nearest street.

Yoliswa Yolee Dyamara Gege, an avid listener and foundation alumnus, said listeners appreciate how each Children’s Radio Foundation story explains a different wrinkle of South African culture, as seen through the eyes of a child.

“(The Children’s Radio Foundation) is giving youth a great platform to learn more about radio,” she said, “it's really expanding in a very successful way.”

Getting a Head Start

Before reporters hit the streets to work on their first story, they are paired with professional mentors — many of whom have learned the ropes as a youth reporter — and complete a four-step radio training program.

Youth reporter Brighton interviewing Dr. Banda, the chairperson
for the nation of AIDS council, a bishop and advocate on HIV/AIDS
and gender based violence in Zambia. © Children's Radio Foundation

Thabo Leping, a manager for Aganang FM, a community radio station in South Africa’s North West province, said that radio stations jump at the chance to partner with the foundation because it offers them the opportunity to train prospective reporters and create content that interests a young audience.

“It is important to give young people opportunities to express themselves or come up with their own solutions on how to solve the challenges that we are facing as a society,” he said.

Furthermore, foundation officials say that their reporters are less likely to delve into lives filled with crime, drugs and gangs — problems some have chosen to report on — after they have gone through the program.

“Children's Radio Foundation has unlimited opportunities,” said Lee Vilakazi, a director for Emalahleni FM, a partner station in eastern South Africa.

Sydney Shearer, who worked in South Africa for the foundation in 2012, said that in addition to keeping kids out of trouble, the foundation promotes them from a largely unheard demographic to one that has a powerful voice.

“We create spaces for young people to develop into fully participating citizens,” she said.

Shearer said that the foundation informs a global audience about the struggles that South African children face while giving children an opportunity to express themselves in ways they otherwise would not be able to.

Andrea Emberly, a York University professor who has long studied the context that surrounds South African childhood, said that many children are particularly interested in documenting their lives.

During a recent month-long trip to the Limpopo Province with her students, for example, she said that local children were interested in her photographs and video as much as they were her education and philanthropy initiatives. Recording (and sharing) stories of their lives is common, she said, and kids there use cell phones “much more actively there than they do in North America.”

It’s no surprise, then, that the Children’s Radio Foundation attracts interest from a wide range of South African youths. Ngqulana said the foundation has little problem recruiting new reporters.

Once she and her colleagues get new reporters in the door it is not long until they are up to speed and working alongside their new peers. Within weeks, they can be producing packages about their lives; the issues that affect the environment in which they’re growing up.

In some respects, Beake said, the reporters are helping shape that environment as well. “I always feel that children — generally, not just in South Africa — need to be given the chance, more often, to be good at something, to succeed,” Beake said. “Children’s Radio Foundation is doing a very good job of that.”

“Coloreds” and Other South Africans Speak Out Against Affirmative Action

By: Evan Barton
Edited by: Aisha Mohammed

Leslie, a “colored” woman who runs a non-profit outside of Durban, doesn’t think affirmative action is a good thing. “The Equity Act,” she said, “is now in effect to address the wrongs of affirmative action.”

Officially titled the Employment Equity Act, it was put in place in 1998 in order to encourage employment opportunities among all non-white racial groups, which were limited in their economic mobility during apartheid.

All historically disadvantaged non-whites are legally black in South Africa, and colored people – a sort of catchall group made up of people of mixed-race – are included with Indians and Africans as designated “black people,” qualifying for affirmative action and economic empowerment initiatives. In a country where 80 percent of the population is African, however, and white people still control most of the economy, colored people often feel marginalized.

“During the apartheid era, colored people were not white enough. Now, colored people are not black enough,” Leslie said. The Equity Act was established in part to ensure that employers hire people from all the country’s historically disadvantaged groups, including women and people with disabilities. Employers are encouraged to make hiring choices with respect to the percentage of different races in their region. However, Leslie suggests its execution is far from perfect. “The Equity Act is a good plan, but the implementation of it will always be difficult to manage at the local government level,” she said.

In Durban, South Africa, where the majority of people are Zulu and colored people make up only a small percentage of the population, many colored people feel frustrated with the post-apartheid government. “Nothing has changed for us,” notes Zane Scullard, a welding inspector from Kwa-Zulu Natal of Indian and English heritage. “What happened in the apartheid era was that people had to work very hard. We were the builders – the people who did construction work. Now that the government has changed, affirmative action doesn’t apply to us even though initially it meant all different types of people of color. At the moment nothing is happening for us. Affirmative action only applies to black people.”

Leslie also said that colored people are limited in the amount of economic opportunities available to them. “Affirmative action was designed to correct the past mistakes, but it’s working against colored people,” she said. “In the past, there used to be job reservation for white people. Now, it actually seems to be the reverse. Now it’s actually, literally, job reservation for black people. A colored person is at the bottom of the food chain, so to speak.” She suggested that if eight black people – and by black she meant members of an African tribe – were applying for a job, along with two colored people, then the two colored people would almost never get the job over the black applicants.




In many ways, colored people are caught in the middle of the racial history in South Africa. Neither black nor white, they received more privileges during apartheid than the black majority, though still less than the whites who dominated both the government and the economy, and had access to the best educational opportunities.

South Africa on the whole is becoming increasingly disillusioned with affirmative action. Deputy President Kgalema Motlanthe spoke on behalf of President Zuma last February when he said that economic transformation has been “frustratingly slow at times.”

“In the main, the story of black economic empowerment in the last 15 years has been a story of a few individuals benefiting a lot,” he added, speaking to the Broad Based Black Economic Empowerment Council (BBBEE) in Pretoria.

Initially, Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) sought to address the dilemma that, although a majority-black government was in place after the 1994 democratic elections, the economy was still dominated by whites. The government initiated shareholding agreements and well connected ANC members like Patrice Motsabe – now a billionaire mining tycoon – were able to buy ownership into many of the country’s industries, although these deals did little to address the systemic poverty faced by the majority of the country’s black population.

“We are not here suggesting that it is wrong for black people to be wealthy,” Motlanthe asserted, although he hopes Broad Based Black Economic Empowerment will assure prosperity for everyone in the coming years.

Owen Crankshaw, a sociologist specializing in racial inequality at the University of Cape Town, thinks improving the education system will do more to alleviate ongoing racial inequality than affirmative action could.

“Clearly what’s wrong with the system at the moment is that education for people from low-skilled families is just not working,” he said. “The educational system in primary and secondary schools is just hopeless for working-class people. There’s a big school shortage, and that’s putting limits on how many black people from poor backgrounds can be upwardly mobile into middle-class jobs.”

Crankshaw implied that affirmative action may actually push people into jobs that they are not prepared for, although he admits that he has not seen much research on this topic outside of the media, and given the overall skill shortage in South Africa, it is unclear whether white labor could meet the demand.

Jeremy Seekings, a political scientist at the University of Cape Town, was more frank in his denunciation of the program as a South African cure-all. “You could deport every single white person in South Africa and give their jobs to unemployed South Africans and you still wouldn’t have enough jobs left over to give every unemployed person a job.” He suggested that an increase in the demand for unskilled labor would decrease unemployment in South Africa.

Both Seekings and Crankshaw emphasized the black middle-class, which has seen significant growth since the end of apartheid. The middle-class in Johannesburg is 34 percent black, for example, and the number jumps to 50 percent if colored and Indian people are taken into account. This is a substantial increase since 1991, when only 23 percent of the Johannesburg middle-class was black (including Indian and colored people).

Despite the growing black middle class, endemic poverty still persists among many of South Africa’s non-white people. “Not only black people are poor here,” Scullard notes. “Black people, colored people, Indian people are also poor. Only white people are not poor in this country. There’s no poor white people here. No white squatter camps in South Africa.”

Images courtesy of gettyimages.com and Quantec

South Africa: Activist Groups Work to End Violence against Lesbians

Special Report by Evan Barton
Edited by Aisha Mohammed

With the battle for marriage equality taking precedence in the U.S., it’s easy to forget that in many countries, including parts of the United States, gays and lesbians are denied their basic right to life and liberty. In South Africa, where gays and lesbians have been able to marry since 2006, many lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered (LGBT) organizations are mobilizing to curb the tide of “corrective rape” against lesbians. “There’s a very particular motivation around attacks on lesbian women,” said Emily Craven, co-coordinator of the Joint Working Group (JWG), which is a coalition of LGBT organizations across South Africa.

Craven, who is based in Johannesburg, cited testimonial statements by South African sex offenders who felt that by raping lesbians, they could “fix” them and make them realize how sex with men is good. Craven suggests that the motivation for lesbian rape stems from how lesbians upset traditional notions about gender. “All gay and lesbian people undermine patriarchal society, but lesbian women do something quite specific in making a statement that they don’t require men, either for economic support or for sexual pleasure. I think many men find that threatening.”

The South African Constitution protects gays and lesbians from discrimination, yet its ideals are not always enforced by government officials. Deep-seated traditional values remain with many people in the country, and rape charges are often ignored by lesbians living in the South African townships.

Roughly comparable to the banlieues of Paris, the townships are urban residential areas surrounding the city center. During apartheid they were set aside for non-white racial groups, and many of the nation’s poor and working-class blacks still live in them. Craven and others implied that lesbian rape could be ameliorated if township officials took the charges more seriously. “We’ve got this beautiful constitution with beautiful rights, but to be honest with you, they are not implemented,” said Dikeledi Sibanda, a program manager with the Forum for the Empowerment of Women (FEW) in Johannesburg.

The issue of corrective rape in South Africa gained international attention after the rape and murder of Eudy Similane, the former star of South Africa’s female soccer league. Yet corrective rape is only a subset of South Africa’s systemic problems concerning violence against women. According to the NGO ActionAid, for every 25 men accused of rape in South Africa, 24 walk free.
According to Triangle Project, an LGBT organization based in Cape Town, Thato Mphiti’s conviction based on charges of raping and murdering Similane is the first conviction out of 30 lesbian murder cases in the past decade. Every month, dozens of lesbian corrective rapes are reported in Western Cape Province alone.

Sibanda said the non-LGBT community must be informed about LGBT issues in order to curb the rate of lesbian corrective rape. “We must make sure that when we do our workshops, our conferences, our awareness campaigns, that we include the community as well. They want to know, they want to be part of it, but we are not giving them that space to express themselves, or say why they have this hate with the LGBT people.”

Many activists in the South African LGBT rights community suggest violence against lesbians stems in part from South Africa’s patriarchal culture and values, along with its endemic problems with violence. Kamohelo Malinga, an archivist with Gay and Lesbian Memory in Action in the Johannesburg suburb of Braamfontein, said many people think homosexuals arise out of the Western influence in the country. “There’s the thought that homosexuals aren’t African. That they’re a Western decadence.”

Muhsin Hendrix, who directs a Muslim LGBT organization called The Inner Voice in Cape Town, cited cultural differences in explaining his views on the prevalence of lesbian rape in South Africa. Most of the reported violence against lesbians was committed by South Africa’s black majority, who Hendrix feels hold different values about gender than the largely Muslim Cape Malays. “The kind of violence that we experience is more of families ostracizing their kids and disinheriting them. We haven’t had an incident where a family has physically attacked anyone,” he said.

Much of The Inner Voice’s work in Cape Town concerns getting Muslim families to accept their LGBT children, and to encourage mosques and other Islamic organizations to reserve a place for gays and lesbians. Hendrix suggests that anti-LGBT violence is more cultural than religious, however, citing the honor killings of women in the Near East. Many cultures in the Arabian Peninsula, he suggests, hold a pre-Islamic tradition of familial honor, and men from those cultures are more likely to feel justified in “honor killing” female family members who threaten the family’s honor by engaging in any type of relationship deemed inappropriate.

Malinga, however, suggests that gays and lesbians do sometimes have a place in traditional African culture. Sangomas, the female shamans and medicine women of the Xhosa people, may sometimes take a female spouse, based upon the interests of their lead ancestor, for whom they act a conduit. Anthropologists from the early 1900s also found that there were sometimes same-sex marriages in the rural parts of the country.

Carolyn Bowley, a program director at Cape Town-based Gender Dynamix, spoke about transgender/transsexual people in South Africa, citing how they are sometimes the victims of rape and assault due to their visible position outside the gender dichotomy. Gender Dynamix campaigns to create employment opportunities for transgendered people, and also works with schools to keep transgendered students from being kicked out because of disputes about gender-appropriate uniforms and behavior.

In addition to working directly with those affected by LGBT discrimination, Craven suggests that raising awareness is critical to reducing lesbian rape and sexual violence in general. The Triple-7 Campaign, which was started by JWG but includes non-LGBT women and HIV/AIDS organizations, holds the goal of ending hate crime in South Africa. The campaign uses incidents of hate-motivated violence as a platform to engage both communities and the judicial system, and to push their message of tolerance into the media.

Photos from blackchristiannews.net and change.org.