The Free State K-team in England – without assegais

The 16-member team of the Orange Free State Kaffir Football Club, captained by Joseph Twayi, sailed from Cape Town to Southampton in August 1899 aboard the SS Gaika. The tour was organized by Safa and financed by British clubs.

Incidentally, after his return, Twayi, a greengrocer, became involved in politics and in 1915 he became treasurer of the SA Native National Congress, the forerunner of the ANC.

The media in South Africa was skeptical. The Cape Argus wrote on August 10, 1899: “The whole affair is as ridiculous as it is unsportsmanlike and has much the air of a hippodrome. Football fans in the Western Province can hardly believe that a gang of Kafirs can seriously be expected to give a worthy demonstration, and the British football public will soon realize this fact. The enterprising financiers will probably rake in the shekels, but every white man south of the Zambezi who is not directly interested in the enterprise will regret the whole affair.”

But in Britain, anticipation was high. There had long been a demand for exhibitions and performances of black Africans, most of them ‘freak shows’, such as the Khoe woman Saartjie Baartman who was exhibited naked in 1810.

In 1899, circus owner Frank Fillis took a group of Zulus and some Afrikaners to London, where they staged mock fights, sang and danced. Here is a short film clip of their arrival in Southampton.

The star of the show was the singer and dancer Peter Kushana Lobengula, who claimed to be the son of the last Ndebele king, Lobengula. It was advertised as “Savage South Africa, a vivid, realistic and picturesque depiction of life in the African wilderness”. The show was attended by thousands of Londoners each day.

(Twenty years later, a Koranna, Franz Taibosch, known as the “Wild Dancing Bushman” with the stage name Clicko, was also a big hit with the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus in Britain and America.)

The Free State team did not perform well against the British clubs and were jeered by the crowd. They scored at least one goal in every game, but according to the British press their opponents simply allowed it.

The team had previously played only on hard surfaces rather than the soft grass of Britain and did not even have proper boots with studs for the first part of the tour. They were also clearly inexperienced and poorly coached, as match reports showed that their goalkeeper sometimes left the goal and played as a striker.