Moralising Magic? A Brief History of Football Potions in a South African Homeland Area, 1958–2010[*]
Isak Niehaus
(Brunel University, London)
In this article I show how a brief history of the use of an exceptionally wide variety of potions with assumed mystical effects by football teams in the Bushbuckridge area of South Africa provides a unique vantage point for understanding men’s experiences of political and economic transformations associated with the homeland system. Historically, the advent of football coincided with the establishment of the Lebowa and Gazankulu homelands in the area. Teachers and ministers founded the first football teams during the 1960s, and treated the sport pedagogically, as preparation for labour migration. During this era, teams felt compelled to use prescriptions by the Holy Spirit to protect themselves against the potions of their opponents, which they associated with the malevolent practice of witchcraft. However, in the mid-1970s, football was commercialised and businessmen became the prime patrons of football teams. Coaches now started using offensive potions to attain favourable results. Players themselves began to use potions more extensively during the insecure economic environment of the 1990s, when football became a means of reconfirming masculine status. My analysis points to the salience of labour and patronage in men’s life worlds, and shows how magic became moralised in desperate times.
South Africa’s hosting of the 2010 World Cup focused international attention on the particularities of football in the country. Media reports highlighted the aspirations of impoverished communities surrounding ostentatious stadia, and showed raucous fans loudly blowing plastic trumpets, called vuvuzela, for the entire duration of matches. There were also widespread reports of potions – known locally as muti. Before the games commenced, 300 diviners assembled at Soccer City stadium. They burnt imphepo herbs, sacrificed an ox, and invoked their ancestors to bless their team and the tournament.[1] One website informed visitors that they might be surprised to find players urinating on the pitch or even slaughtering a goat, but advised them not to comment about such sensitive matters.[2]
In this article I suggest that, far from being a traditional practice, the use of potions in South African football is a product of a dynamic history, shaped by forces and institutional forms, stretching well beyond playing fields. In particular, I show how the history of football potions in the Bushbuckridge area of the South African lowveld provides a unique vantage point for understanding men’s experiences of political and economic transformations associated with the homeland system. Theoretically, I build on previous works by Scotch, Leseth and Schatzberg,[3] which investigate how football potions create confidence. I reflect upon the symbolic meanings of items used, and consider how beliefs about their use serve as a theory of causation to explain unexpected events, such as an implausible save by a goalkeeper. Their focus on the esoteric does not negate recognition of more mundane aspects of football, such as the value of speed, skill and training. I also draw on recent studies that consider less visible aspects of the sport, such as patronage of teams by powerful persons and institutions,[4] and show how football provides a space for enacting deeply felt notions of morality,[5] particularly masculine virtue, honour and shame.[6]
I note that the introduction of football to Bushbuckridge, during 1958, coincided with the passage of the Bantu Authorities Act and with the subsequent establishment of the Lebowa and Gazankulu homelands. The history of the sport was moulded by the economies, institutional forms, and ideologies that characterised the emerging political field. Football was first played at a time when population removals destroyed the last remnants of subsistence agriculture, and households came to rely upon the remittances of young men working as migrant labourers in South Africa’s mining and industrial heartlands. Initially, coaches saw the sport as a means of inculcating discipline and teamwork, which would prepare young men for wage-labour. The history of the sport also points to shifts in the kinds of elites within the homelands capable of providing patronage to football teams. Whereas church leaders and teachers founded the first football teams, they were replaced by independent businessmen during the mid-1970s and by business corporations and local government officials in the period after apartheid. Third, accounts by players about the manner in which they and their opponents used potions for defensive and offensive purposes give insights into broader anxieties. As institutions, like native reserves elsewhere,[7] the homelands have had an encapsulating effect, and struggles for scarce resources in concentrated village settlements give rise to incidents of interpersonal tensions and violence that might include suspicions and accusations of witchcraft.[8] This comes to the fore in intimate domains of social interaction, such as kinship and sexuality, and also in competitive enterprises, such as the pursuit of money and quest for status.[9]
To write a brief history of football potions, I draw on multi-temporal fieldwork in Impalahoek, a village in Bushbuckridge. During the era of apartheid, the village formed part of the Lebowa ‘homeland’, but is now administered by the Bushbuckridge municipality of Mpumalanga province, and has a population of nearly 24,000 Northern Sotho- and Tsonga-(Shangaan) speakers. I have visited Impalahoek each year since 1990, and regularly watched local teams compete on sandy pitches at weekends. In addition, during the winter of 2009, I interviewed 15 research participants about the intricacies of the local football. For this work, I relied greatly on the help of my research assistant, Eric Thobela. Thobela was a renowned midfielder, who played for several local clubs, and also for the Premier Division team Witbank Black Aces during the 1980s. He kindly introduced me to former and current players, managers, coaches and referees. My interviewees were generally confident, outspoken men, who displayed both passion and nostalgia. They spoke most eagerly about their careers in football, and were unrestrained in referring to the use of potions, both by their own teams and by opponents. Their accounts referred to events that stretched well beyond the place and period of fieldwork. These were generally cast in a genre of episodic melodramas, which highlighted extraordinary incidents that interrupted the expected flow of games. All research participants believed that potions were potentially effective, but debated the appropriateness of their use.
In the three sections that follow, I show how, through time, the use of potions by football players in Bushbuckridge has become moralised, and how this pertains to transformations within homeland politics. In the first section I describe how teachers and Christian ministers introduced football as a less violent alternative to boxing, and used the sport pedagogically, as a means of preparing men for their future as wage labourers. During this era, coaches associated the use of potions in football with the diabolical practice of witchcraft, but urged players to use prescriptions from the Holy Spirit to protect themselves from the malevolent substances of rival teams. In section two I show how this situation changed after 1976, when independent businessmen who asserted themselves in homeland politics became the patrons of football teams, as the sport became thoroughly commercialised. Now coaches used potions for offensive purposes and for securing victories. In the final section, I contend that ordinary players used potions more regularly in the post-apartheid era of the 1990s. This was a time not merely of high expectations, but also of economic insecurity. Having lost their business patrons, and facing bleak prospects of finding work, men experienced winning at football as a desperate means of reconfirming a status otherwise denied.
Football and the ‘Homelands’, 1961–1975
Profound transformations occurred in South Africa’s rural hinterland since the 1930s. This was certainly true of the Bushbuckridge Native Reserve, where Africans lived as rent tenants in dispersed hamlets, paying taxes to landholding companies for residential, cultivation and stock-keeping rights. Although cultivation and cattle-keeping were the most valued form of subsistence, men did occasionally work on the Pilgrim’s Rest and Witwatersrand gold mines. But government periodically re-ordered land use in the reserve to accommodate outsiders, displaced from nearby white-owned farms by the mechanisation of production operations.[10] In 1960, officials of the South African Native Trust implemented an intensive ‘agricultural betterment’ scheme. They sub-divided all land into residential, arable and grazing areas, and relocated households into the new, concentrated, village settlements.[11] These removals destroyed the last remnants of subsistence agriculture, and rendered households completely dependent upon the remittances of male labour migrants working in South Africa’s centres of mining and industry. During the mid-1960s, the South African government divided the Native Reserve into two ethnic zones: Mapulaneng, in the west, was incorporated into the Northern Sotho ‘homeland’, Lebowa; and Mahla, in the east, was made part of the Shangaan ‘homeland’, Gazankulu. These changes diminished rather than enhanced local autonomy, as proponents of apartheid had envisaged.
Alongside these economic and political changes, football gradually replaced earlier games of herd-boys such as kgopi (in which teams used hooked sticks to beat a wooden disk), javelin-tossing and calf-racing; and contests such as stick-fighting and bare-knuckled boxing. Before the relocations, boxing generated the greatest excitement. Nearly all elderly male research participants could recall watching contestants fight at the cattle dip tanks at weekends. Onlookers formed a wide circle, and fighters praised their own finesse as they entered. The organisers sometimes buried the legs of both contestants in soil, to ensure that they were of equal height, and could not clutch or turn their backs on each other. Boxing was an important avenue for attaining masculine status, and, after 50 years, elderly men could still recall the champions of different locations.
Potions[12] were an integral aspect of boxing, reportedly because of the high stakes and risks of injury involved. As elsewhere in southern Africa, serious fighters wore leather belts called mokemis (derived from the English word ‘chemist’), containing substances obtained from diviners, on the right arm.[13] The potions were believed to enhance the fighter’s chance of victory by conferring confidence and aggression, confusing his opponents, and weakening their defences. The cornucopia of boxing potions was well known, and demonstrates the principle of analogy between their properties and desired effects.[14] Diviners usually mixed herbs called sewisa with dry leaves called seoma: the former allegedly gave strength; the latter made the opponent wither, lose balance and fall. Slime from fish scales conferred slipperiness; pork fat the ability to see through one’s opponent’s tricks; ash from burnt swallow feathers the capacity to evade his blows. Uses of the latter substances were based, possibly, on the perceptions that pigs unearth hidden roots and bulbs, and that swallows are incredibly agile and swift. Spectators recognised the potential of potions, and would pour water on unconscious fighters, or wash them with urine, to nullify their effects.[15]
The emergence of football in Bushbuckridge[16] was intimately connected with the growth of Christian churches, the introduction of Bantu education, more complete proletarianisation, and the concomitant ‘moralisation of leisure time’.[17] Victor Makafola, a teacher from Zimbabwe, started coaching football at the Impalahoek primary school in 1961, following the demise of the Boy Scout movement. Makafola challenged other school teams to play his squad on Saturdays. The teachers whom I interviewed in 2009 told me that football had a clear pedagogical purpose, inculcating new skills and dispositions for changing times.[18] They said that football built the bodies of young men, instilled sharpness, discipline, teamwork and respect for rules. Football also kept boys off the streets and drained their sexual energy. According to the teachers:
Football is important. Kids cannot just go to school and look at the blackboard all day. They must know how to play [football] because it trains their minds. You need discipline.
Football is very good. The players must listen to the instructions of the coach, the referees and elders. When they return from hard work they don’t trouble their parents. They only sleep. There is no time for mischief, to look for girls, or to steal.
Football rapidly became serious. Boys initially played barefoot and in white cotton shirts. But school committees and wealthier parents soon donated money for boots, team jerseys, and transport. Teachers forced the tougher and faster boys to play, and headmasters lashed players who disobeyed their coaches. Hundreds of spectators now arrived on sports days, and silver trophies were soon on display in staff rooms.
Village-based football teams emerged later. Labour migrants, who had encountered football in the townships, started listening to radio broadcasts of matches between urban teams, such as Orlando Pirates and AmaZulu, at home. The first local football grounds were constructed near Christian missions, and Roman Rangers, comprising Catholic players, was one of the first teams.[19] In 1969, Exom Khosa, who worked as a petrol pump attendant in Johannesburg, founded the team ‘Impalahoek Fast Eleven’, and in 1974 three prominent Zion Christian Church (ZCC) members established ‘Home Stars’ (the ZCC’s emblem is a silver star.) Two years later, Benson Zetha, a worker at the Iscor steel foundry in van der Bijl Park, founded ‘Scorrangers’. He saved nine months’ wages to purchase football kit, and a clerk at the magistrate’s office helped him to pay for nets.
Football was compatible with Christian ethics, and the solidarities established by village-based teams met the demands of neighbourliness in the new residential settlements. Nelson Segodi, a boxing champion, said that he abandoned fighting soon after he married the daughter of a Zionist minister. ‘We stopped [boxing] because of the churches’, he said. ‘The word of God says that you must not cause blood to flow’.
As in the schools, village-based football followed a pedagogical approach, and coaches saw the social skills and attributes created on football pitches as transferable to urban workplaces.[20] Features of football – such as rules, the division of labour, the time-frame of the sport[21] – mirrored those of urban work. The official logo of the Impalahoek Fast Eleven featured a man in graduation gear. When I asked Aaron Mahlaole, a ZCC member who was a former player and coach of Moholeng Home Stars, about the team’s achievements, I received the following, unexpected, response:
When I look back to the players, I can be proud. Some are policemen, some are teachers and some are businessmen. Today they can live on their own. This is because we groomed them during football. We taught them respect and we taught them to go to school. Each day after we had completed our practice we would tell them to sit down, and we would preach to them. We would tell them how they had to conduct themselves.
Such insignia and statements suggest that the aspirations of football players transcended being mine labourers, and included pursuing more prestigious careers in the urban labour markets and emerging homeland bureaucracies.