Mark Shinners, a former anti-apartheid prisoner on South Africa's notorious Robben Island penal colony, will forever associate the beautiful game with a bundle of filthy rags.

A team captain in the now FIFA-recognised Makana League, Shinners recalls the games as a beacon of hope on the Atlantic Ocean outcrop, a half-an-hour ferry ride from Cape Town which is now mainly inhabited by penguins and seals.

"They cut us off from normal society, they tried to break us," said Shinners, who served a combined 23 years on the island between 1963 and 1990 for conspiring to overthrow the erstwhile whites-only regime.

"Football was a way of saying to yourself: 'This is what I am capable of doing.' It was a way of saying in our isolation that we realign ourselves with the world, that we consider ourselves part of a greater universe," he told AFP.

Set for the big screen

Now, a movie about the league aims to share their inspiring story with a worldwide audience, with Shinners portrayed by Presley Chweneyagae who played the title role in South Africa's 2005 Oscar-winning "Tsotsi."

Entitled "More Than Just a Game," the film will premiere in Durban on Friday as part of events to mark the preliminary draw for the qualifying tournament of the 2010 World Cup to be hosted in South Africa.

"The lesson from Robben Island and from South Africa is one for all the world," Jerome Champagne, a senior official with the football governing body FIFA, said on a visit to Robben Island earlier this year with some of Makana's former players.

"It is a story of human strength."

A ball of rags

Robben Island inmates first played football secretly in their cells, using balls crafted out of string, paper, cardboard and rags.

Following pressure from the International Committee of the Red Cross, the prison authorities were persuaded to give the league the go-ahead in 1966, allowing prisoners to get kits, level their own playing field and erect proper goals.

The inmates designed trophies and certificates which the prison authorities confiscated immediately after every awards ceremony.

The prisoners named their league the Makana Football Association after a Xhosa prophet who was banished to the island in 1819 for resisting British colonial expansion and drowned while trying to escape by boat.

"For us, playing soccer on Robben Island was just another way of survival... in a situation intended to dehumanise us," said former player Anthony Suze.

"A game that other people take for granted helped a group of people find sanity. Soccer saved many of us."

A long history

Robben Island, used as a place of banishment by various South African administrations since the early 1500s and later as a leper colony, opened its doors to political prisoners in 1962 as the apartheid state intensified its clamp-down on opponents and critics in a bid to retain minority privilege.

Only black, Indian and coloured (mixed race) men were jailed on the island and were forced to work on the lime quarry — leaving many with permanent damage to their eyesight.

Nelson Mandela, later to become South Africa's first black president, was the island's best known inmate. He was kept in isolation with other high-risk prisoners and was not allowed to partake in, or watch, the football games.

A fitting tribute

On Mandela's birthday in July this year, decades after Robben Island goalkeeper Sipho Tshabalala predicted in a letter to FIFA that "some day we will meet the giants of the game, the Makana Football Association was granted honorary FIFA membership at a special ceremony on the island.

"This place represents the triumph of the human spirit," businessman and 2009 presidential hopeful Tokyo Sexwale, a former prisoner and Makana player, said at the occasion.

Robben Island, now a popular tourist attraction, hosted the first-ever meeting held to discuss South Africa's bid to host the 2010 football World Cup, the first to be held on the African continent.

"Thirty years ago, I would never even have thought of a World Cup coming to South Africa," said Suze.

"But as a people fighting for a certain cause, we believed in freedom in our lifetime. This is a reward we did not expect."

AFP