Dance Siwelele

Glossary

Introduction

Be careful, chances are that if you don’t plan your trips to Mangaung, Bloemfontein, you’re likely to miss out big time. The in-thing is to let your trip coincide with Bloemfontein Celtic home matches, to enable you to witness – live! – the magical razzmatazz of their vibrant followers, the spectacular Siwelele. People from all over the world witnessed such razzle-dazzle during the 2010 FIFA World Cup, so why not you? Perhaps your city, township or village can sing and dance, but as passionately as Siwelele? You sure are kidding!

If Phunya Sele Sele, the beloved green-and-white Bloemfontein Celtic Football Club, were like their Siwelele sa Masolokolara, it’d be rated as one of the most feared football clubs on the African continent.

Unfortunately, the Free State side has never ever won any of the passport-to-fame competitions in the Premier Soccer League (PSL) up to the 2016/2017 season. Besides the MTN8 and Telkom KO competitions, we are talking specifically about the ABSA Premiership and the Nedbank Cup. Winning the Nedbank Cup allows you to play in the CAF Confederation Cup. League champions and runners-up compete for the much-sought-after Confederation of African Football (CAF) Champions League. The ultimate victors of the Champions League then represent Africa in the Federation of International Football Associations (FIFA) Club World Cup tournament.

In this book, we will delve into reasons as to why there is this strong connection between Celtic as a club, its supporters, and Life President Petrus Molemela. The book also dwells on life inside and outside Celtic, particularly from the year 2015 backward – what a time it was!

What comes to the surface of this deep lake is that the Celtic team and its management are the body-parts while their supporters (Siwelele) are the engine. If you like, you can also say Siwelele is the soul of Phunya Sele Sele. Ke taba eo, e hela jalo! (This African phrase, which is in Setswana, translates as that’s the way it is.) This book is liberally sprinkled with such phrases and quotes in Sesotho and Setswana, which, besides English and Afrikaans, are the languages chiefly spoken in Mangaung. Of course, I’m not saying isiXhosa is not spoken at all! (For more explanations of phrases and other unfamiliar words used in the book, see the Glossary.)

Let’s remember that Celtic, which were reluctantly adopted by one-time herdboy Petrus Rantlai Molemela, certainly have some of the most colourful and vocal sports supporters in the world.

Dance Siwelele is about these wonderful supporters more than the history of Bloemfontein Celtic. Nevertheless, I could not ignore touching on Celtic FC, nor, for that matter, ignore Molemela’s contributions, which resulted in this massive fanaticism for the club.

As Celtic is part of the South African soccer scene, naturally we also deal with football matters in general, relating to other clubs here at home and elsewhere in the world. And this shall be handled professionally without fear or favour! An example is the fact that our football, particularly our professional structures, initially experienced some turbulent times due to the pride of certain individuals. From time to time, hopefully without sermonising, I shall illustrate that it is possible to shape up a worthwhile future if we learn from our past mistakes.

Siwelele, as Celtic fans choose to be called, twice scooped special awards at PSL award functions, something still to be matched by their arch-rivals, Kaizer Chiefs and Orlando Pirates, who boast stupendous support, and the celebrated Tshwane duo of Mamelodi Sundowns and SuperSport United, who, by 2009, had won the league title seven times between them (almost literally changing the PSL from the Premier Soccer League to Pretoria Soccer League).

But when it comes to support, it’s haba for some of the so-called big teams, unlike for Phunya Sele Sele.

Siwelele are not only passionate, but can also be troublesome and defiant and paranoid at times. However, it seems their resistance and intransigence can be excused, considering the history of this City of Roses: Bloemfontein is Dutch for fountain of flowers.

As a matter of fact, one of the world’s most heralded icons, Nelson Mandela, once observed, The past is a rich resource on which we can draw in order to make decisions for the future. Indeed, King Moshoeshoe (pronounced Mo-shwe-shwe) came to Bloemfontein in 1854 to query the nullifying of treaties signed earlier pertaining to the original Basotho-owned land, whose boundaries stretched from slightly beyond the Senqu River in the south up to the Lekoa River in the north. By north, I am here referring to the area up to Tebang, which the Voortrekker bullies later willy-nilly named Heidelberg.

Driven by anger and frustration, the Basotho resorted to guerrilla tactics, raiding cattle and burning fields at Voortrekker farms. These farmers were those who had fled from the rule of fellow settlers from Britain. The British were at that stage in charge of the Cape Colony (the area covered by the Cape Colony belonged mainly to the Khoi, San, Griquas and amaXhosa.)

So you cannot divorce Bloemfontein from the country’s rich history.

In 1912, after years of subjugation by whites, concerned, elite, black South Africans and some chiefs, including chiefs from neighbouring countries, eager to fight for their rights, converged on Mangaung, to form the South African Native National Congress. The organisation was to be later (in 1923) named the African National Congress (ANC), thus starting the struggle to liberate themselves politically and economically. The ANC bigwigs, who included Thomas Maphikela, met regularly at the latter’s house at Morakile Street in Batho Location to map the political liberation of the black people of South Africa.

It is in this historical and political spirit that Celtic, ironically a club named after the original Celtic Football Club in Glasgow, Scotland, are backed by loyal supporters who want to do things differently, to the bitter end if push comes to shove. These supporters have also vowed not to be treated like some plaas-japies by Jozi ‘clevers’. This would be a serious risk for the outsiders; Bloemfontein folks come from an area that long prepared them to be free thinkers. On the surface, you would think you are dealing with ja-baas types, only to discover that you have been hit for a six.

The Celtic logo also tells an interesting story about their political liberty. Founding captain, Abraham Ace Sempe, tells us that their club officials were held for questioning by police regarding the logo, but they denied that it had anything to do with politics. The truth is that it had a lot to do with that!

The logo, a clenched fist, cleverly inserted inside a soccer ball, was designed and publicly displayed shortly after the formation of the club in 1969, a year after Steve Bantu Biko co-founded SASO (South African Students’ Organisation). Biko’s message was Black Solidarity: it rallied the masses in whatever form to break the chains of oppression. Celtic officials were in turn inspired by such radical resolve.

The apartheid National Party government met such resistance and defiance symbols – which whites believed incited the masses into revolt – with banning orders and jail terms. At times this ended in death, as happened to Biko on 12 September 1977, when he was cold-bloodedly assassinated by apartheid police. We can also add that Jamaican singers like Peter Tosh were not silent at all at the time, as they would hauntingly insist "Am I need equal rights an’ justice...The clenched-fist symbol was also influenced by the Stokely Carmichael-led, fiery Black Power Movement of the 1960s, fighting right in the Belly of the Beast, America. We are talking about the Black is Beautiful and I’m Black and Proud" era. Carmichael, who later changed his name to Kwame Ture, later left America to be become a citizen of Guinea. Football being a political field of sorts, please understand why a large section of Siwelele veterans are of a strong view that the A-Team was bent on destroying Celtic. The then endless squabbles between Celtic supporters and their Kaizer Chiefs counterparts bear testimony to this. Never mind the fact that Celtic’s hierarchy would talk business with Chiefs in terms of selling players.

Celtic fans claimed that the A-Team – a group that included influential soccer bosses and some self-assured charlatans, in both the defunct National Professional Soccer League (NPSL) and later in the National Soccer League (NSL) – was out to destroy Phunya Sele Sele, as they feared they could erode Chiefs’ popularity.

Did I hear someone scream paranoid?

The A-Team – boasting prominent club bosses like Chiefs chairman Kaizer Motaung – dismissed the allegations as rubbish, attributing them to jealousy against Amakhosi. Chiefs were, at the time, one of local football’s trend-setters in more ways than one. They had a good administration, as is the case now, and largely ran their business professionally. Amakhosi also played a beautiful brand of soccer that greatly helped them attract more, and sometimes the most, spectators to their matches.

They were the 2001/2 African Cup Winners Cup champions, and were after that awarded the CAF Club of The Year citation. As we speak today, they even have supporters in other African countries like Ghana, Lesotho, Swaziland, Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Botswana. Amakhosi, as has been the case since the 1970s, remain kings in terms of packing stadiums to the rafters.

There is also a popular rock band – Kaiser (sic) Chiefs – in Leeds, England, which was named after Kaizer Chiefs. Stru! The band, which used to be known as Ruston Parva and then Parva, chose to associate themselves with the Kaizer Chiefs brand, thanks to the popularity of Leeds United captain, Lucas Rhoo Radebe, a former Amakhosi captain. Radebe played for the English side, Leeds United, from 1994 to 2005.

Motaung himself is one of the most innovative soccer administrators in Africa; he heads the finance committee of the billion-rand sponsored PSL. I personally also know him to be generous. My softball club, Katlehong Katz, was once donated playing kit by this gentleman. And for his efforts to empower other people, Motaung has won numerous awards including the prestigious Order of Ikhamanga in Silver.

To an extent, you can therefore not fault Motaung for accusing anyone of hallucinating regarding claims that their unmatched trophy collection – in the NPSL and NSL – at times came about through biased referees. Motaung would be right in most instances, but certainly not all the time. This was because of the blunders caused by one NSL leader, Abdul Bhamjee (Public Relations Officer), in matters relating to Chiefs. Bhamjee would occasionally come up with decisions that baffled even those around him, seemingly to benefit Chiefs.

A case in point: I was on a panel of judges that included senior soccer journalists during a BP Top Eight competition in 1991. Almost 90 percent of the panellists voted Philemon Chippa Masinga as player of the tournament against Chiefs’ Fani Madida. This we had done based on Masinga’s performance, notwithstanding Chiefs winning the competition. When the announcement was made that Madida was the actual winner, we confronted the NSL bosses, including Bhamjee, to demand a recount or at least to be shown the voting slips. We were coolly told that the evidence had been destroyed. At least the NSL compromised by deciding to share the prize between the two players – which showed up the dirty tricks!

Jomo Sono – Jomo Cosmos boss – had this to say about the whole silliness: This is plain robbery... it’s worse than the famed ‘Great Train Robbery’ in England years ago. Why punish my boy if they don’t like me?

Criticising sport and possibly its politics, Australian satirist-cum-author Barry Humphries, opined: Sport is a loathsome and dangerous pursuit.

In the book Resilient Ntate Molemela, also by Molefi Mika, Molemela reminds us why at some stage he did a chesa mpama on Bhamjee – yebo, he slapped him, for allegedly trying to arrange the fixture in such a manner that it would give Amakhosi an unwarranted advantage over Celtic.

The forgiving-but-not-forgetting Siwelele veterans, in their anger over those years, are also not sparing even of the man who later hatched the magnificent idea for South Africa to host the FIFA World Cup. Yes, the late Solomon Stix Morewa, who was the president of the defunct South African Soccer Association (SASA), and later the South African Football Association (SAFA), was once a member of the A-Team. For the record, Morewa pleaded ignorance about the existence of the A-Team – insisting that the group were all just friends, from football and other fields, sharing common interests. Never mind the denials; Morewa was also guilty by association in so far as Siwelele were concerned. The thinking was that the A-Team was giving instructions to Abdul Bhamjee. Cyril Kobus, chief executive officer of the NSL, would also at times be blamed for being one of the brains behind the A-Team, even though he was an Orlando Pirates devotee.

At that stage, there were apparently unwritten rules that Bucs and Chiefs officials (past and present) were not expected to form some partnerships in view of the fact that Kaizer Chiefs were founded by former rebels who had been expelled by Bucs. Players like Ratha Jimmy Greaves Mokgoatlheng, Zero Johnson, and an official, Ewert Nene, were suspended for allegedly organising an unauthorised friendly match. The move was viewed by some influential supporters at Pirates as a step towards forming a rival club. Kaizer Motaung, who was at the time playing in America, was not affected by the expulsion, but he later also quit Bucs. This happened after he failed in his attempts to get the expulsion of his friends annulled.

However, things gradually changed for the better when sporting icon and visionary Motaung, a former Buccaneer, started talking football to the likes of the late Sipho Sixty Mali, when the latter official was a Pirates chairman in the mid-1980s. It was also through such initiatives by Motaung that Bucs accepted erstwhile club secretary, Irvin Khoza, back into their fold after he had left their administration. In a way, this might provide a clue about the meaning of Once a Pirate, always a Pirate. By the way, Khoza, although not linked to any club then, nevertheless was associated with some big guns within the so-called A-Team club who, as earlier revealed, comprised people from the corporate world and different professional fields that included well-known medicos and legal eagles. Some A-Team members also had political connections within banned liberation movements like the ANC, PAC and Black Consciousness.

The A-Team, at the end of the day, lionised by some for largely being a brainy lot, and vilified by others for being manipulative, also included club owners: Coloured Passmore (of Giant Blackpool), Victor Selane and Orphan Duma (both of PG Rangers). Blackpool FC and Rangers, which were poorly run, later died ‘natural deaths’.

Those who were privileged to attend A-Team get-togethers would salivate whenever they mentioned some of the most expensive wines and whiskies that were consumed at a particular plot south-east of Soweto. Of course, it would be unfair to you, dear reader, not to mention that favoured invitees at times were among the other members of the Fourth Estate. Stru! Unconfirmed reports had it that some of them