African footballers are now a regular part of British football. In the 2018-19 season of England’s Premier League, all three leading goal scorers were African – Mohamed Salah, Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, and Sadio Mané.
While tempting to think of African involvement in British football as a recent development, it is not; Africans can trace their history of playing in Britain right back to the dawn of the professional era. Arthur Wharton, regarded by many as the first Black professional footballer, played for Sheffield United in the 1880s – among other clubs – and was born in Gold Coast, modern-day Ghana. Wharton wasn’t even the first Black footballer in Britain; Andrew Watson – born in Guyana and of mixed heritage – turned out for Glasgow’s Queen’s Park FC had captained Scotland to a record 6-1 win over England in 1881.
However, the first time an African team visited Britain, Ireland, and France was way back in 1899, and it’s a little-known story that deserves much more attention.
A brief history of football in Africa
Unsurprisingly, football arrived in Africa via British colonial settlers. Europeans had worked their way inland from the coast over the centuries, exploiting Africa for its resources and labour. It’s at Port Elizabeth, a major base for the copper trade in the British-controlled Cape Colony, where football was most likely played first in 1862. As the game took place more than a year before the Football Association (FA) rules were set down, it’s unclear what code of ‘football’ was played, but it featured an XI based in the Colony versus some recent arrivals.
Society on the Cape was split along racial lines, and the 1870s and 1880s saw a number of clubs founded in Natal, such as the whites-only Pietermaritzburg County Football Club in 1879 and Africa’s oldest existing Association football club, now named Savages Football Club Pietermaritzburg, in 1882. The decade also saw the emergence of African and Indian-founded clubs in Durban and Johannesburg.
In 1892, the all-white South African Football Association (SAFA) was formed and was soon affiliated with the Football Association in London. In 1897, famous early football evangelists, Corinthian FC, arrived on its first overseas tour. The mammoth trip would take in 23 games over two months. It was SAFA’s honorary president, mining magnate Cecil Rhodes, who guaranteed funding for the tour.
The Orange Free State team tour
But football was not just a game for the Europeans; Africans had been also learning the game. In September 1899, a Black South African team docked in Southampton. The 16-man squad from the Orange Free State had been assembled by that region’s FA alongside WM Williams of the Welsh FA. The team wore ambers shirts and black shorts, and – unofficially – were often referred to in the British press with racist terminology as if common parlance. It would have been the first Black team the British, Irish or French sides had faced. However, such fixtures would not have been possible back in South Africa due to racial segregation.
The South Africans drew large crowds wherever they played, which included games in as varied locations as Sheppey in Kent to Greenock near Glasgow. Belfast Celtic in Ireland, Tottenham Hotspur, Aston Villa, Newcastle United and Portsmouth also played the tourists.
Unfortunately, the tour was more of an entertainment spectacle put on for a curious British audience rather than a meeting of sporting equals. The Orange Free State team lost 9-3 at both Scarborough and Liverpool, for example. The tour drew criticism from white South Africans, in particular, where inter-racial matches where unheard of. A white Capetowner complained that “it is only right that the football public should know that such a team in no way represents South African football,” and claimed that the Black population in the Cape had “taken the game from the ‘whites’.”1
Sections of the British press were equally scathing. After a match at Easter Road, home of Hibernian, local media compared the visiting side to rugby players. “To our way of thinking, the white men who are at the bottom of this tour are open to criticism from more than one standpoint,” a writer in the Edinburgh Evening News grumbled.2
The African side was captained by 28-year-old Joseph Twayi from Bloemfontein. Sixteen years later, Twayi was treasurer of the organization that would later become the African National Congress (ANC). Within weeks of his team’s arrival, Twayi found himself in a politically sensitive moment as the South African War broke out between the British Empire and the Boer republics, which included the Orange Free State. Twayi expressed his loyalty to Queen Victoria to the British press, and his team even wore red, white, and blue ribbons in a match against Aston Villa.
The only match the African side won on its long tour was its only game in France, against Sporting Club Tourcoing in Roubaix. Chris Bolsmann has studied the 1899 tour at length. I interviewed him for my first book Origin Stories: The Pioneers Who Took Football to the World, about the roots of the game around the globe. “The 1899 team were South African pioneers that were ridiculed in Britain and ignored in their homeland because they were Black,” he explains. “They rightfully deserve their place and acknowledgement in football history.”
It was nearly a quarter of a century later, in 1924, until a white South African team toured England, but got a very different reception; they got to meet King George V at Sandringham.
This is a rewrite of a section of my book, Origin Stories: The Pioneers Who Took Football to the World, which looks at the roots of the game in each major country and region, including Africa.
1 Lancashire Evening Post, 16 September 1899 (p2)
2 Edinburgh Evening News, 15 September 1899 (p5)