Mystery of SA’s unsung ‘Maserati of football’
Steve Mokone was the first black South African to play in Europe but his brilliance was little known at home, writes Marc Strydom
MANY of the details of Steve “Kalamazoo” Mokone’s life are still shrouded in mystery. Which is the point, really.
The football ace died in Baltimore on March 20, three days before his 83rd birthday. Never truly appreciated at home, where reports of his foreign exploits were suppressed during apartheid, Mokone had no national team for which he could play and gain international exposure in the age before globally televised football.
The salient points of a glittering, though at times halting, career are well known. But details of what trophies he won, or when he scored crucial goals, are far harder to come by.
Moving to Europe at a time when it was unheard of for a South African, or even for a sub-Saharan footballer, to do so, Mokone’s departure was further complicated by the reluctance of the apartheid government — scared of what he might symbolise — to grant him a passport.
We know Mokone moved from Durban Bush Bucks to Coventry City in 1955, becoming the first black South African to play in Europe. He had played for a South African black national XI at 16. We know that the diminutive, explosive winger was unhappy in England, where his pace and skills — honed, as with most young players from townships, by playing street football with a tennis ball — were too often unappreciated.
Years later, Mokone revealed how Coventry players of the time trained military style, climbing over walls with ropes, and only practised with a ball once a week. The long-ball style further baffled a player used to the short-passing game.
He was hailed as an exotic novelty and his arrival was widely covered in the English press. He was served by white people for the first time in his life. But he moved from England as soon as he could, to Heracles Almelo in the Dutch third division.
Here he became an instant hero as the club’s greatest player, a legacy that led to “Kalamazoo” having a street named after him in Amsterdam in the ’90s. Heracles would draw crowds of 20 000 to watch the phenomenon from South Africa, even though Almelo’s population was just 35 000. He had a stand named after him at the club’s Polman stadium.
In 1995, Dutch journalist Tom Egbers published the book De Zwarte Meteoor (The Black Me- teor), which was turned into a film, about Mokone.
After helping promote Heracles to the top ranks of Dutch football, Mokone, plagued by injuries, joined Cardiff City in the English second division. He was then signed by Barcelona, who loaned him to Marseille.
He found top-flight success at Torino in Italy. He scored all five goals in a 5-2 win against Verona, and became the first foreigner to score a hat-trick against Dynamo Kiev, the Ukrainian team which were then considered Russian.
Kalamazoo earned his highest plaudits in Italy. But as with previous leagues he had played in, he apparently started brightly, then faded.
A famous quote from Italian scribe Beppe Branco has come to epitomise Mokone: “If Pele of Brazil is the Rolls-Royce of soc- cer players, Stanley Matthews of England the Mercedes-Benz, and Alfredo di Stefano of Argentina and Spain the Cadillac of soccer players, then Kala of South Africa, lithe and lean, is surely the Maserati.”
One World Cup year the Italian press wrote that if Mokone had a national team to play for on a global stage, he could have earned the European footballer of the year prize. In those days there was no Sky Sports and Eurosport televising the Italian game in England, or German games in Spain.
It seems this was the reason Mokone was never as widely idolised as the Peles and Di Stefanos. And perhaps, as a pi- oneering African footballer in Europe, he faced additional pitfalls that made it difficult to be consistently brilliant.
Mokone drifted to Valencia, Sunshine George Cross in Melbourne, and then Canada. He settled in the US.
Even the events of his life after football are hazy.
Mokone’s widow, Louise, said the apartheid government made it difficult for him to return once he had left South Africa.
“That was very hard for him, that he wanted to come but was unable to,” she said from Baltimore. “They allowed him in the one time to receive a sports award in 1979, but that was the only time.”
Kalamazoo, who earned a PhD in psychology and became an assistant professor at the University of Rochester in New York state, dealt with the isolation of exile better than a later South African football pioneer, Albert Johanneson.
Johanneson was the first black player to play in an FA Cup final, appearing for Leeds United in 1965. Thirty years later he died in England, a pauper and an alcoholic.
But Mokone ran foul of the law in the US after being accused of chemical attacks on his estranged wife Joyce Maaga and her attorney, Ann Boylan Rogers, in 1977. He was sentenced to a total of 12 years in prison in separate cases in 1978 and 1980, but details of the incidents are vague and disputed.
Lye, or sodium hydroxide, was thrown in Maaga’s face when the couple were going through a divorce. A week later sulphuric acid was used in a similar attack on Rogers.
Mokone always maintained his innocence. Former classmate Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu said at the time such an attack would be completely out of character for Mokone and made appeals for clemency.
Egbers wrote another book, Twaalf Gestolen Jaare (Twelve Stolen Years), published in 2002, in which he cited a series of letters that he said had been exchanged between the apartheid government and the US Central Intelligence Agency.
Mokone, now an academic, had become increasingly politicised and outspoken and the South African government had asked the CIA to bring him in line, Egbers wrote.
The saga was further muddied by Mokone having been assaulted by four masked assailants in a car park before the attacks for which he was convicted.
Perhaps only Kalamazoo and members of his family knew what the truth of the case really was.
Mokone’s death in hospital in a distant US city, 13 000km from his birthplace in Doornfontein, is made more poignant by his wish to have his ashes brought back and scattered over a football ground in South Africa.
Before the young Mokone, sheltered from the outside world, boarded a plane for cold, grey, post-war England in 1955, he was approached by prominent ANC figures Willie Nkomo and Peter Tsele. They told him that every goal he scored would be a step closer to his people’s liberation.
The apartheid government warned him to keep his mouth shut while overseas, but through his success he undermined the myth of white superiority promoted by the Na- tional Party.
In a 2012 article in City Press marking his 80th birthday, Mokone wrote: “It seems like only yesterday when I scored my first goal in my first game for Coventry. I can still hear the deafening roar of the crowd when the ball hit the back of the net. I can still hear the crowd shouting: ‘Give the ball to Steve, Steve, Steve.’
“What an experience it was to get into the changeroom and be the only black person taking a shower with white players. I didn’t know whether to address them by their first names or to call them baas, as was customary in apartheid South Africa.
“All those memories come floating into my mind as I approach turning 80 . . . What a wonderful ride it has been for a young black kid from the dusty streets of apartheid South Africa.”
Louise Mokone said she would like to help to establish a museum in South Africa to honour Kalamazoo’s life. It seems the least this country could do for one of its greatest, most unheralded heroes.
What an experience it was to get into the changeroom and be the only black person taking a shower with white players. I didn’t know whether to address them by their first names or to call them ’baas’ What a wonderful ride it has been for a young black kid from the dusty streets of apartheid South Africa