Playing on the sands of hope

The sun rises slowly. It climbs the face of one hill, spreading it warm glow on a stretch of beach before climbing the next. This ritual is ancient, just as the ways of the people who live here. Modernity has not yet fully established itself here. This the Wild Coast of South Africa, the Transkei.

Second Beach, Port St. Johns, is home to a team of young men who are negotiating the contradictions between tradition and modernity, an inheritance over which they have little influence or control.

Work opportunities are limited for the players, nearly all are undereducated and unemployed, and the deeply entrenched poverty, product of the region’s turbulent history, is the root of many social ills. Some players have been involved in drugs, gangs and crime, alcohol abuse, some come from broken homes.

And yet the young men have found one arena where they can be their own masters.