The quietest, but perhaps the most profound, change in English football in the past decade has been the thorough integration of African footballers into the upper echelons of the game. Jay-Jay Okocha, Celestine Babayaro, Nwankwo Kanu, Quentin Fortune, Fredi Kanoute, Tresor Lualua, Yakubu Ayegbeni, Kolo Toure, and many others, have established themselves at the highest level, but at the head of this recent tradition of African footballing excellence in England stands Lucas Radebe. He arrived at Elland Road in 1994 in a deal that brought both him and the highly-fancied Phil Masinga from South Africa to join Howard Wilkinson’s Leeds United. Eleven years later, Radebe has now played his final game in England.
There were African footballers in the British game before Radebe. Leeds United’s own Albert Johanneson arrived in 1961 from Johannesburg and played 200 games for the club before moving to York City in 1970. In 1965 he was the first African to play in the Cup Final His performance on the day was, however, characterized by an all too familiar occurrence of stage fright. It was George Best who noted that, ‘Albert was quite a brave man to actually go on the pitch in the first place, wasn’t he?’ The racism of the period was endemic. Johanneson did not help matters for he had the unfortunate habit of calling his fellow teammates ‘sir.’ After his retirement from football, he disappeared into obscurity; in 1995 he died alone in a Leeds high-rise flat, the victim of depression and alcoholism.
The same natural reticence did not mark the personality of the Ghana striker, Tony Yeboah. He arrived at Leeds at about the same time as Radebe, with a reputation as the tough, free-scoring, centre-forward of Eintracht Frankfurt. When Wilkinson was asked by the press if he was ‘any good,’ meaning was he another of these Africans whose natural ebullience might not survive a harsh English winter, Wilkinson replied with one of his better ripostes, pointing out that Eintracht Frankfurt had not made him captain because he was black. In the end, Yeboah stayed for two years at Leeds. He eventually left after a bitter falling out with the new manager, George Graham.
The late Eighties and early Nineties are best remembered for the rise of black British footballers. This, after all, was the era that saw Ugo Ehiogu captain the England Under-21 side against Holland in 1993. In the same year, Paul Ince became the first black footballer to captain the full England side when he led the team out against the United States. However, the rise of Lucas Radebe was about to refocus the media’s attention on African players.
Born in Soweto, South Africa, in 1969, Radebe grew up in a small house as one of 11 brothers and sisters. His early years coincided with the most difficult period of the anti-apartheid struggle, and he was frequently a witness to the escalating violence perpetrated by both local gangs and the white South African security forces. Radebe, who carried a knife and was street-smart, just about managed to stay on the right side of the law, although he was active in the student movement hijacking government vehicles, and dispensing vigilante justice when necessary, although Radebe himself never physically harmed anybody.
When Radebe was 15, his increasingly anxious parents sent him away to school in one of the so-called independent homelands, Bophuthatswana, in the north-west of the country. There he began to train as a teacher, but he was bored by his studies and by the strange rural surroundings. To pass the time in the ‘bantustan’ he began to play football, initially preferring to play in goal, but soon switching to the outfield where he was a holding midfielder.
His skills brought him to the attention of the famous Johannesburg club, Kaizer Chiefs, and their well-known scout Patrick ‘Ace’ Ntsoelengoe. He persuaded Radebe to move back to Johannesburg and sign professional forms. Soon after, in 1991, an incident occurred that made the young footballer realize just how precarious his situation was in South Africa. While on his way with one of his brothers to do some shopping for his mother, he heard gunfire. Used to the sound of shots, he and his brother looked around to see just who had been shot. It was then that Radebe felt the pain in his back and noticed that he was covered in blood.
Once he reached hospital, the doctors determined that no vital organs had been hit, although Radebe had lost a considerable amount of blood. The bullet had entered his back, and passed out through his thigh, but he was reassured that he would be able to play football again. Although nobody was ever arrested and charged with his shooting, Radebe initially suspected that somebody had been hired to shoot him. There had, after all, been talk of his leaving Kaizer Chiefs for another club, and such ‘punishments’ were not uncommon in the prevailing climate of the country. When, three years later, Leeds United came knocking on his door, Radebe was ready to start life anew elsewhere.
His first two seasons at Leeds were not promising, with Radebe making only a handful of appearances. To make matters worse, his friend and fellow South African Phil Masinga (known to the Leeds cognoscenti as ‘Waltzing Masinga’) was also finding it difficult to establish himself in the first team, even though he was supposed to be the ‘key’ acquisition of the pair. After two years, Masinga was sold on to St.Gallen in Switzerland.
Radebe’s perseverance was repaid with the arrival as manager of George Graham in September 1996. Graham saw what Wilkinson had failed to see, and his very first action as manager was to lobby the board to sign this ‘fringe’ player to a long-term contract. Finally, clear of niggling injuries and a doubting manager, Radebe quickly became a rock at the heart of the Leeds defence. In 1998 ‘the chief’ was appointed club captain. Other English clubs noticed, and in the late Nineties a steady flow of African players began to filter into the mainstream of English football.
Radebe’s development as a South African international coincided with the emergence of his country from the apartheid era. He made his debut for Bafana Bafana, [as the South African team is familiarly known,] in 1991, and in 1996 he was part of the triumphant team who, on home soil, defeated Tunisia 2-0 to win the African Cup of Nations. By the time the World Cup in France came around in 1998, Radebe – by now a friend of Nelson Mandela, who referred to the defender as ‘Big Tree’ – was captaining South Africa to a respectable campaign in their first-ever appearance in the finals. Their only defeat was to the host nation and eventual winners.
In September 1998, Graham left Leeds for Tottenham Hotspur, and Lucas Radebe was devastated. His game had blossomed under the tutelage of the defensive-minded Scotsman, and Radebe considered moving with Graham to Tottenham. However, the new manager, David O’Leary, like his predecessor, made it clear to the Leeds board that the first, and most important, priority was the resigning of Radebe to a contract that would effectively keep him at Leeds for the rest of his career. It wasn’t just Radebe’s performances on the field that earned the respect of O’Leary and others, but his extraordinary dedication to anti-racism work, and his commitment to the evolution of football in his home country was attracting wide attention. In 2000, FIFA honoured him with their Fair Play Award, and the citation made special mention of his work with children in Soweto and all over South Africa.
It was in 2000 that the most serious attempt to lure Radebe away from Elland Road was repelled when Leeds United turned down an offer of £6 million from A.S.Roma. Thereafter, nearly two years of recurring knee and ankle injuries led to his retirement from international football as the most capped South African of all time, but these problems also severely restricted his playing time at Leeds.
In 2002 I interviewed a recuperating Radebe in a cramped office at Elland Road. As we talked about his South African childhood, about Leeds United and racism, we were continually interrupted by everybody from coach Brian Kidd to Rio Ferdinand. They were surprised to see him at the training ground, and clearly full of respect for the quiet dignity of the man. [It was easy to see how this tall, physically imposing man had earned his nickname from Nelson Mandela, but the reflective thoughtfulness of his conversation lent him the air of a politician or a diplomat as opposed to that of a footballer.]
Now the playing days of South Africa’s first footballing superstar are over. Last week a remarkable array of players assembled at Elland Road to participate in a testimonial that saw a Leeds Legends XI pitted against a World Football XI under the judicious eye of Sam Allardyce.
I was there, too. I am a life-long Leeds United fan, but I would not have flown in from New York City, where I now live, to pay tribute to any post-Revie player other than ‘the chief.’ I attended my first Leeds game as a five-year old back in 1963. I revelled in the triumphs of the Sixties and Seventies while learning how to endure the racism and hostility of the period. [However, in the end, the verbal and, at times, physical abuse eventually proved too much and I spent ten years boycotting Elland Road. The sad fact was that, for the longest while, it appeared that neither Leeds United, nor the city council, wished to do anything about this serious problem.]
The arrival of Lucas Radebe at Elland Road finally brought to the club a man who combined world-class footballing excellence with the dignity and authority to combat racism, both for Leeds United and for South Africa. In these difficult, transitional times for the game, I salute him as representing everything that is good about football. Radebe is donating the £500,000 that his testimonial game earned to charity, a gesture which is thoroughly in character. I wish there were some way to keep him at Leeds for ever, but as South Africa prepares to host the 2010 World Cup we will, fortunately, be hearing much more about ‘the chief’ in the immediate years ahead.