Abstract
As the title of the book reveals, Ashwin Desai’s recent monograph is about the historic and present-day significance of soccer in Wentworth, a coloured township located in the south-east of Durban. Desai offers a rich, thoughtful and caring narrative that goes beyond the ‘master narratives’ of both South African sport history and histories of daily life in townships under apartheid (Alegi, 2020; Dlamini, 2009).
In the preface, Desai explains that the motivation for the book was born out of a promise made in a pub, and his own passion for the game. In the only reference to his own playing days, Desai refers to his time playing in Grahamstown with United Teenagers and with the Kwazakhele Soccer board (KWASBO). He played as a centre-half. As he states, he earned the nickname, ‘“Die Boom” (The Tree). I thought it was because of my strength in tackling and sturdiness in the face of adversity, but I soon learnt it was because of my inability to turn with grace and pace’ (p. 11). Thankfully, Desai’s former playing style is not reflected in his writing. Analogous to some of the best ‘ball-playing’ centre-backs, Desai deftly moves the ball through and between subjects, turning with grace and pace between discussions of soccer, place and identity.
Although he utilises ‘group biography’ as his method, his ethnographic and historic sensibilities also shine. For large portions of the book, Desai provides space for former players, coaches, managers, fans and community members to share their stories and photographs. He provides brief interjections to help frame or guide the narrative, but the bulk of the book is told through the words and images of people from and in Wentworth. Between the words of community members, like a centre-back surveying the field in front of him, Desai is able to see and move into important spaces to tackle concepts like friendship, sacrifice, caring, nostalgia and hope, and explain how these concepts intersect with understandings of space and place. Borrowing from Njabulo Ndebele, Desai explains his interest in moving beyond the spectacular, moving beyond a reductive focus on the ‘powerful’ and ‘powerless’, to focus on ‘“the nooks and crannies”, the c(r)ooks and grannies’ (p. 11). Desai’s book is very much an elucidation of these nooks and crannies. Throughout the book he draws on metaphors of people on the edge and in the cracks, alongside metaphors of growth, spring, rebirth and creation. Importantly, Desai does not romanticise or glorify this process of destruction and creation, but instead provides rich descriptions of people’s lives and activities.
His discussions illuminate how the friendship, caring and sacrifice that was evident in soccer spaces, and in the construction of identity and place in Wentworth, cannot be separated from apartheid planning and laws that designated Wentworth a coloured township, fractured relationships and social bonds, and allowed for the development of a petrochemical industry that surrounded the community, enveloping it in pollution to this day. In this context, Desai does not romanticise soccer or present it as a solution to social problems, like so many NGOs and sports evangelists are apt to. This is most evident in the biography of Gary Goldstone, one of the prominent players for Leeds United and other clubs in Wentworth and Durban. As Desai describes it, ‘Goldstone was always on the edge of being enveloped by drugs, fighting and gangs’ (p. 40), and listening to stories of Goldstone,
you realise there were no straight lines. He was all body, spontaneous and fluid, dominating the midfield, always on the edge of fury. But why then is he talked about with such tenderness? In all this, you see, there was a vulnerability, hovering on the precipice of self-destruction, a sadness even (p. 88).
Desai extends this metaphor beyond individuals in the cracks; he positions Wentworth itself this way. In the first chapter, he explains that the area was a military barrack for whites until the late 1930s when it was designated a coloured area. It was not until the 1950s that coloureds began to move into Wentworth and this movement was accelerated through the 1960s and 1970s with forced removals, the Group Areas Act and movement from the Transkei after it was established as a Homeland. As Desai explains, Wentworth as a coloured township and the coloured ‘nation’ in general was created to buttress whiteness. Desai shows how ‘Colouredness’ has historically, and still currently operates as an in-between identity, as an identity in the cracks, as an identity defined by not being White, Black or Indian. It was in this sense that soccer players, administrators and fans built both coloured and Wentworth identities that were intricately linked to clubs like Leeds United.
The second through fifth chapters detail the development and growth of soccer in Wentworth during the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. Starting in chapter 2 with the founding of Leeds United in the early 1970s by Bennie Whitby, these four chapters roughly follow a linear narrative, ending in the dissolution of Leeds United, following its promotion to the professional level and its sale to various businessmen, detailed in chapter 5. I say the chapters offer a roughly linear path, only because there is seemingly a beginning and an end to Leeds United. However, as Desai points out, stories of soccer, identity, race and place rarely follow straight lines.
Chapter 2 introduces a number of key figures, but it primarily focuses on Bennie Whitby, the founder of Leeds United. ‘Born on 16 December 1948, his commitment to nurturing soccer in Wentworth bordered on the fanatical. Whitby was of that era of big men who ran clubs, threw their own resources into the game and brooked little interference’ (Desai, 2020, p. 46). Leeds United represented a breakaway from a previous club run by Papa Stokes called Railway Swallows. Through the stories of and about Stokes and Whitby, Desai shows how both men sacrificed for the sake of building their clubs. Both men made efforts to create identities around their clubs and to construct their clubs as families. Their stories reflect Desai’s interest with growth and rebirth within the cracks. The influx of people into Wentworth through the Group Areas Act and other apartheid interventions often resulted in a fracturing of previously existing social connections and bonds. Railway Swallows and Leeds United built new bonds. Their stories somewhat diverge when the chapter shifts to detail Whitby’s drive for success, his desire to recruit the best players including Gary Goldstone and Dennis Petersen, and his own struggles and negotiations with the increasing professionalisation of the game that challenged both his own authority over players and the connection of Wentworth to Leeds United.
Chapter 3 goes into more detail on the forms of friendship that were engendered through soccer in Wentworth. The chapter details the relationship between Goldstone and Petersen, two top players who began playing together in the 1960s and contributed to the growth of Leeds United throughout the 1970s. These two men developed a somewhat unlikely friendship, largely based on connections to place and identity fostered through soccer. As Desai notes, ‘they were not “birds of a feather”, as Goldstone puts it. Firm friends off the field, Dennis the Menace stayed close to home, while Gary ventured widely, wildly. Still, the bond between Gary and Dennis has lasted for five decades’ (p. 62). The title of the chapter, ‘The Art of Friendship,’ is apt. It is descriptive of how relationships on the field seep into people’s daily lives in sometimes indescribable and beautiful ways.
Chapter 4, through the stories of numerous players such as Patrick ‘Boa’ Wiseman, Patrick ‘Putts’ Moodley, Elvis Singh, and Gregory and Cheesa Baptist, offers important observations on how players and clubs operated and made decisions in a quickly changing soccer landscape in the 1970s and 1980s. The ‘master narratives’ of South African soccer often involve placing players in particular political camps depending on the decisions they made in 1970s and 1980s with regards to where they chose to play. Desai does well to avoid this narrative and instead, through players’ biographies, offers insights into how place, identity, politics, as well as financial and professional opportunities and interests, all contributed to decisions about where to play. It was the dynamics of this time period that also lead to the end of Leeds United.
The last three chapters bring the history of soccer in Wentworth into the present. Chapter 6 looks at current day efforts of promoting soccer and community in Wentworth. It focuses on the stories of former players and administrators from Leeds United and other clubs, and their current clubs. For example, Lorna Richardson (Petersen), the sister of Dennis Petersen was the chairperson of the Leeds United Supporters Club and is the current owner of Young Cavaliers. The stories of Young Cavaliers are steeped in nostalgia for the ways that soccer in the 1970s and 1980s created family and developed bonds between players and community members. Again, drawing on metaphors for spring and rebirth, Desai introduces Ashley Singh, the son of the well-known former Leeds United Striker, Elvis Singh; ‘Amidst the sadness and ruin, a blade of grass has pushed through. There is another football-playing Singh coming through: Elvis’s son Ashley plays for Young Cavaliers’ (p.125). The themes of chapter 6 follow this metaphor through people’s stories of building soccer clubs. These clubs contain traces of the past and represent the continual effort to build identity and place within Wentworth. Chapter 7 moves away from the soccer pitch to provide an ethnographic examination of ongoing housing, employment, environmental and health issues in Wentworth. In a sense, chapter 7 provides context for the ‘sadness and ruin’ that soccer clubs and players attempt to push through. Desai’s use of ‘ruin’ is similar to how Ann Laura Stoler described the concept in the book Imperial Debris: On Ruins and Ruination, as the ongoing toxic and violent aftermath of colonialism that leads to accumulating environmental, physical and mental degradations (Stoler, 2013). In a similar fashion, Desai draws on Rob Nixon’s conception of slow violence, particularly in relation to the presence of the petrochemical industry surrounding Wentworth, the resulting health, environmental and economic impacts. Throughout this chapter, Desai also outlines the ongoing struggles for housing and how the lack of space and the increasing territorialisation through gangs presents obstacles for what some soccer clubs aim to achieve, and to perceptions of space and identity.
The final chapter provides more space for Desai to offer his own insights and again he shows that his moniker, Die Boom, is not reflective of his scholarship. Throughout the book, stories and images of soccer in Wentworth seem to be floating and weaving around Desai, in the same manner that Gary Goldstone and Dennis Petersen would weave around the pitch and bamboozle defenders. However, in the final chapter Desai turns with grace and pace between insightful observations of how soccer in Wentworth illuminates numerous concepts. These include observations on habitus, violence, suffering, grief, nostalgia, hope, identity and place. Overall, Desai has provided a captivating history based on rich biographical and ethnographic data. Although he set out to complete a ‘group biography’, he has in essence provided a biography of a club, and in tribute to the Virginia Woolf quote he provides in chapter 2, he has detailed Leeds United’s failures and successes, the humble and illustrious, its greatness and its smallness.