Reporting from Atteridgeville, South Africa — At 60, he walks like an old man, hobbling slowly out of his room, sitting stiffly on a plastic chair in the house he grew up in, with its corrugated tin roof, cheap furniture and glass cabinet crowded with faded mementos.
He absently touches his swollen right knee, the old soccer injury that cut short his career and sent him home to Atteridgeville and a life spent selling shoes in a sporting goods store.
But here in the township outside Pretoria where he was born, he will always be a hero.
"Everyone who knows South African soccer knows me," he croaks softly, smiling, in the days before his country will host the sport's quadrennial World Cup.
His name is Lucas Moripe, but in the township they call him something else: Masterpieces.
***
Soccer was imported to Africa in the 1860s by British soldiers and promoted by colonial authorities, missionaries and mining executives, who saw it as part of their "civilizing" mission, said Peter Alegi, who teaches African history at Michigan State University and is the author of "African Soccerscapes."
In South Africa, Indian- and African-run soccer leagues sprang up. For blacks living under apartheid, soccer became entwined with racial identity, community pride, politics and the struggle for freedom.
Playing soccer or running a club or league was among the only ways a black man could achieve status. Most players earned a meager amount. But by the logic of apartheid, soccer wasn't considered real work, and a black professional player could be arrested for being unemployed and sent to the countryside to work for a farmer.
Yet some of those who organized the leagues and clubs grew wealthy by black standards — one of the few legal means for a black man to do so.
African National Congress leaders saw the sport, called football in most of the world, as a means to attract young people to politics. Political rallies and meetings were advertised at soccer games, and ANC meetings were sometimes held after matches.
Inmates on Robben Island, the notorious prison where Nelson Mandela spent 18 of his 27 years in captivity, played in their own league.
Like everything in South Africa, soccer was segregated, and efforts to integrate the sport played their part in the wider liberation struggle.
In 1929, mine company clerks and white do-gooders formed a black Bantu soccer league in Johannesburg. The rival Johannesburg African Football Assn., or JAFA, which resisted cooperation with the white minority government, split off in 1933.
The Bantu league, supported by the apartheid regime, was given training and facilities. JAFA teams played on any spare piece of ground, with homemade goal posts.
In 1950, a black South African team was invited to play in Congo. The government proposed sending a Bantu-JAFA team under a white manager.
The leader of JAFA, Dan Twala, rejected the idea. "There is no European in our executive, and we cannot think of anyone who could fill this position adequately other than our own African man," he wrote.
The compliant Bantu league squad was sent instead.
It lost.
In 1951, the struggle to eliminate racial separation took a step forward with the launch of the South African Soccer Federation, representing 46,000 black, mixed-race and Indian players, 80% of the country's registered footballers.
A year later, FIFA, soccer's international governing body, admitted a white minority league, the South African Football Assn., even though it represented only 20% of players. But a campaign to expel South Africa from FIFA gained momentum after the 1960 Sharpeville massacre, when police opened fire on black protesters, killing 69.
FIFA declared that any national football association must be open to all players regardless of race, and in 1961, it suspended South Africa.
But efforts to turn the suspension into an expulsion were frustrated by a conservative Briton, Stanley Rous, FIFA's president from 1961 to 1974. He maintained that politics and soccer shouldn't mix. Finally in 1976, South Africa was kicked out of the organization, a major blow to the apartheid government.
Leepile Taunyane, 82, was one of many black soccer officials who fought apartheid through their sport and for whom the FIFA expulsion was a great victory.
"There was this constant banging against the barriers of the nationalist, ideological policy of the government," said Taunyane, president-for-life of South Africa's Premier Soccer League. "Football was among the first sporting bodies that constantly banged against this barrier. It was a constant struggle. We knew what we were doing, and we knew what we were fighting against."
***
Lucas Moripe was like nearly every urban African boy: addicted to soccer.
"We played in bare feet. We used tennis balls. Boys from one street would play the next street. I was just playing and I didn't even realize I had talent."
