Word Is Born!

The footballers who supported the bans on playing for dummy 'multi-racial' teams during the apartheid era. The heroes of the African game who deployed their prowess on the dusty township football parks (you could hardly call them stadiums). Often accompanied by choirs of fans singing their hearts out, and not the obvious borrowed-from-Britain anthems and hymns (ironically, the mound occupied by the Liverpool choir at Anfield was an abbreviation of the Afrikaans word for hill — 'kopje') who mixed their adulation for the players with some rousing calls to arms in the struggle for freedom, most of which were not understood by the authorities, who rarely went to black football games during the apartheid era.