Nkosi Potjo Molala: Soccer star, Azapo leader and Robben Island prisoner
NKOSI Potjo Molala, who has died in Atteridgeville at the age of 64, was a professional footballer known as “Let Them Dance”, leader of the Azanian People’s Organisation and political prisoner.
He was born in the Pretoria township on September 5 1951 and matriculated at Pax College in Pietersburg (Polokwane), where his soccer skills caught the eye of scouts from Bantule Callies, as the team then was before changing its name to Pretoria Callies.
When he left school Molala, by now a clerk at Kalafong Hospital in Atteridgeville, was offered a place at Pretoria Callies alongside greats like Lucas “Masterpiece” Moripe, Patrick “Frelimo” Dibetla and George “Mastermind” Kgobe.
He shone as a winger and in the midfield, where his dribbling skills earned him the nickname “Let Them Dance” because, as he said, “I used to make opponents dance through my wizardry.”
In 1974 he was selected to represent South Africa in the South Africa Black XI, which played against the Brazilian club Fluminense in Botswana.
This was a fateful year for Molala for a rather more important reason. It was the year one of the longest trials in South African legal history began after student leaders from the Black People’s Convention and the South African Students’ Organisation were arrested following a Viva Frelimo rally in Durban.
He began following the trial because he had got to know some of the accused, the socalled Saso Nine, including Mosiuoa Lekota, whose own formidable soccer skills had earned him the nickname “Terror”. Lekota’s team, from the University of the North, had played Molala’s team, from Pax College, and they’d become friends.
Whenever he could, Molala attended proceedings and learnt about the black consciousness philosophy as expounded by Steve Biko, founder of the Black Consciousness Movement and a witness for the defence. He decided to become active in the Black People’s Convention, which followed the black consciousness philosophy.
In 1976, his professional soccer career came to a premature end when he was arrested, charged with sabotage and sentenced to six years on Robben Island. On his release in 1983 he became active in Azapo and was made chairman of the Atteridgeville branch in 1984. He became Azapo’s deputy president in 1985 and president in 1986.
Azapo was locked in a fierce battle on two fronts at the time. Rivalry between it and the United Democratic Front had erupted into open and deadly violence, especially in Soweto, Alexandra and in the Eastern Cape. While this war was raging there were also frequent and often bloody clashes with the police.
During one such skirmish while he was attending a banned funeral, Molala was blinded in one eye when he was hit by a teargas canister.
In 1987, he and about 300 other Azapo members were detained during a police crackdown. In an interview with the Christian Science Monitor after his release, he said he refused to be intimidated over his role in the Black Consciousness Movement.
He explained how black consciousness had evolved from being a philosophy to help blacks overcome “psychological oppression” to being a political movement championing socialism. He thought socialism was the only “relevant solution” to the problem of economic inequality, which he predicted would not go away after the abolition of apartheid.
The majority of blacks would continue to earn their living from the sale of their labour, he said. “If apartheid is abolished, black people will still have to contend with the problems of staff reductions, rising prices and falling wages.”
He said Azapo received almost no money from overseas and depended almost entirely on an annual donation from the South African Council of Churches.
In spite of this he insisted Azapo was much stronger than it appeared to be. But after the unbanning of liberation movements in 1990 it condemned itself to increasing irrelevance by refusing to participate in multiparty talks with the apartheid government or in the 1994 democratic elections.
In 2002, it ceased to exist in any meaningful sense when Molala led a breakaway movement, called the Black Consciousness Forum, after Azapo president Mosibudi Mangena accepted a deputy minister’s post in Thabo Mbeki’s government.
In 2014, Molala threw the less than hugely significant weight of his movement behind the launch of the EFF’s election manifesto. — Chris Barron
If apartheid is abolished, black people will still have to contend with the problems of staff reductions, rising prices and falling wages