Revolve Magazine

DIVINE BALL: It’s early morning. Owami Nolutsgungu, 11, rubs his eyes and looks at his father, Sonwabi, puttering around the modest lodgings in the shantytown of Langa on the outskirts of Cape Town. Breakfast today is porridge and water. Owami takes his tin cup and sits on the ground and laces up his football boots. In the courtyard, his teammates from the junior football team are waiting to play against their rivals from the neighbouring township of Guguletu. Owami is growing up in savage poverty. His divorced parents are both out of work. During the week, he lives with his mother, an ex-schoolteacher. On weekends, he stays with his father, Ziggy, a retired footballer and a not so retired rastafarian. “Langa is one of the poorest black townships around here,” Ziggy tells us on our way to the pitch: “Our lives are a mix of destitution, crime, hunger, disease, violence, humiliation, comradeship and football. Ever since I can remember, the game was our only major source of joy. This was the case during apartheid, and it’s still the case now.”

Ziggy ekes out a living with odd jobs, but demand has shrunk alarmingly. “I’m used to living in shit,” he tells us: “It doesn’t bother me, but I don’t want Owami to live like this. At least now there’s more opportunity to make it big in football. During apartheid, football was only played in black townships. There was no money to be made.” Ziggy spends the weekends in his township, refereeing junior matches. During the week, he teaches first-graders basic footballing skills. Ziggy epitomises the fate of millions of black South Africans. His childhood and adolescence were spent under apartheid – the African brand of national socialism. He was a third-class citizen then, condemned to a disgraceful primitive educational system that kept the black population down. Schooling usually stopped at age 15. In 1994, the white man’s dominion crumbled, but the African National Congress (ANC) immediately found itself in dire straits. The white minority did everything to thwart the black majority’s ability to face social and political upheavals properly. Sixteen years after apartheid’s demise, the educational system is still limping along. Classrooms are half-full and teachers badly-paid.

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