Township Football #1 - Dumi's Story
It’s amazing where a conversation with an Uber driver can take you... (pun definitely intended).
Upon arrival in Cape Town, I set about attempting to understand the look and feel of local football culture here. Google can only take you so far, and after researching Cape Town City FC and Ajax Cape Town (at the professional end of the scale), my attention turned to the grassroots form of the game.
Although rugby and cricket may grab more headlines when it comes to South Africa’s sporting pedigree, it became clear very quickly that football (or soccer, as it’s referred to here) is incredibly popular around the country.
En route from Franschhoek to Stellenbosch (famous towns in the Cape’s wine region), I was lucky enough to bring up this topic with our driver, Mawande, a fellow football fanatic who took pleasure in talking me through the in’s and out’s of the sport in South Africa.
‘The professional teams have a history and a following for sure’, he shared, ‘but if you want to see the real passion for football here, you need to see a game in the townships’.
Mawande told stories of his upbringing (and fledgling football playing days) in one of the country’s biggest townships, Khayelitsha, a swarming settlement situated on the coastal road between Cape Town and the wine region.
As our journey came to an end, Mawande kindly offered me an introduction to his former coach, hoping he would give me a chance to see township football for myself.
A week later, after exchanging a few Whatsapp messages, I found myself en route to the heart of Khayelitsha to meet with Dumisani, affectionately known as ‘Dumi’, for a tour of the sights and sounds.
A Khayelitsha street - inside Cape Town’s biggest township community.
Arriving at ‘Lookout Hill’, a raised podium at the township’s tip, offering views for miles across its sprawling landscape, Dumi talked me through the history and reality of life in the community.
‘Khayelitsha is one of the biggest and fastest growing townships in the country’, Dumi began.
‘There are millions of people living here, in a mixture of formal and informal homes’.
Even from the top of the lookout tower, the township spread further than the eye could see. Rows of bungalows and gated homes were visible in the foreground, merging into fields full of corrugated metal and makeshift shacks in the sunkissed distance.
The view from the top of Lookout Hill over, the township stretching all the way to the mountains and sea.
‘You’ll hear a lot of stories about Khayelitsha in the media’, Dumi continued, explaining the rough and ready reputation of the township, notorious for gang violence and lawlessness in the eyes of the public.
My only previous experience of Khayelitsha had come from Reggie Yates’ 2014 BBC documentary; ‘Knife Crime - Extreme South Africa’, in which he revealed the criminal underbelly of the community through some fairly graphic, scary stories.
‘It’s not that these stories are false’, he continued, ‘it’s fair to say that these bad things do happen. It’s just that people here are resilient, and just get on with it. It’s a fact of life’.
‘A lot of the problems stem from the young boys and bad influences’, he explained, ‘with lots of them turning to smoking, drinking and drugs, leading them into lives of crime and difficulty’.
Dumi himself admitted to being one of those boys in his younger years, talking me through his troubled upbringing in an impoverished neighbourhood of the Eastern Cape before moving to Khayelitsha as a teenager.
‘I was careless when I was younger, and fathered two children when I was still almost a child myself’, he shared openly. ‘I moved here to live with my Aunt, to make money to send home to the mothers, but soon fell into the same traps and bad habits you hear about in the media’.
The plot of rough ground where Dumi first started playing football in his Khayelitsha neighbourhood.
Thankfully, football was Dumi’s saving grace, along with a newfound religious faith. This combination was to define the next few chapters of not only his life, but also the lives of hundreds of young boys in the township.
‘I used to live, breathe, eat and drink football’, he declared, ‘and would use it as a way to avoid the distractions and bad influences that my friends were being led by’.
‘We never had footballs, but I would run around the streets kicking crumpled cans, or collecting plastic bags to roll up and use instead’.
‘It was bricks for goalposts usually, old overturned school desks if we were lucky’.
Aware of the huge passion for the game around him, but frustrated by the lack of coaching, equipment or opportunities, Dumi decided to do something about it.
‘I took a ball to the field and started juggling it’, he explained, pointing out the rocky and debris-filled field where he first began his sessions.
‘All of a sudden I was sitting there surrounded by 15 boys, all calling me ‘coach’ already’.
‘Before I knew it, they’d brought friends, and I had nearly 50 on my hands with only 1 football. Within a week it was over 100’, he shared proudly, ‘but I didn’t know what to do with them all!’
Dumi oversees training at the local Mandela Park recreation ground.
Dumi quickly spotted the opportunity to help these young men get educated, and to become leaders in their community, avoiding the temptations so widely available to them. Having recently rediscovered his faith thanks to a friend, the plan was to teach religious values through experiences of football, and vice versa.
‘The pitch was where they wanted to be’, he shared, ‘so I didn’t have to force them, or worry about them turning up’.
‘Football has an incredibly religious quality all over the world’, he shared, ‘people worship teams and players, and congregate in large numbers over a shared passion - it’s very similar when you think about it’.
‘When I saw how keen they were to be on the field, I thought to myself, why can’t we make the football pitch their church?’
What began as one man juggling a ball, surrounded by enthusiastic youngsters, has now evolved into the ‘Royal Priesthood Academy’, the vehicle that has allowed Dumi’s ambitions to come to life.
‘Family values, good morals, teamwork and community spirit. All of these things are so important for young boys to learn here, or else you lose them very early’, he warned.
‘Their parents will likely be away for 12 hours a day, travelling to the wealthy areas for work, and often these kids don’t get any kind of encouragement or attention, which they badly need to keep them on the right track’.
‘Through football, we’ve been able to go beyond the game with these boys’.
‘We’re not coaching football’, he asserted, ‘we’re coaching life’.
His wide words stuck with me as the first part of the tour came to an end, inspiring me to learn more about Dumi’s footballing experiences, and to see the lads in action for myself. Read on for the next stage of the story…
Dumi showing me the town’s ‘Football Centre for Hope’, built as part of the 2010 World Cup legacy.