Viewed on a map, the South African township of Phillipi sheds light on the imbalance of Apartheid. Two disparate elements are soon evident: a patchwork of open, undeveloped land and, in between, islands of streets arbitrarily squished together in a maze.  In stark contrast, the streets of wealthy, formerly-white suburbs look rather like fingers of an outstretched hand, spaciously set apart.

     Urban planning under Apartheid-era South Africa often took such shapes.  The poor black populations were squeezed into tight, congested areas surrounded by large “buffer zones,” ensuring that there would be no casual mixing with residents of the affluent suburbs. 

     A closer look at the map will reveal factories, dirty coal-fired power plants, and sewage treatment facilities in those buffer zones.  And, amidst the heavy industry and dense humanity are also open tracts of land, lying fallow.  Sometimes, an informal settlement will be allowed to take root, and other times it will remain open to cows, public urinators, and children wanting to play games.      

     Among the old mattresses, broken bottles, and half-buried stones in a drainage basin near the train station, boys from the Xhosa tribe play baseball.  These are the Philippi Angels and they will play every week until the rainy season.  Because the drainage is mostly rock, it fills with water in the lightest rain and takes weeks of sun to dry out.

     Baseball seems quite out of place in Africa but, baseball itself is not new to South Africa.  It was first introduced by American troops during WWII.  In some communities, baseball and softball leagues have played ever since.  During Apartheid, there were white-only leagues and ‘coloured’-only leagues.  Different from the American version of the word, ‘coloured’ was a separate racial classification referring to those of mixed, white-and-African blood.  With the end of Apartheid, and the first free elections in 1994, came the desegregation of sports.

     However, baseball was never introduced to the Black Africans, those lowest in the Apartheid pecking-order.  It would not have appeared on television nor would they have found themselves in the segregated communities where baseball was played. 

     The laws of Apartheid were largely modeled after the Jim Crow laws of the Southern United States.  But the significance of South Africa is that the racial populations are effectively reversed.  The white ruling population of South Africa was never greater than 14% and the black African population never less than 70%.  In the United States, it was nearly the opposite.  South African blacks were, and largely still are, condemned to lives of rural joblessness or urban squalor. 

     The most popular and heavily funded sports in South Africa are cricket, rugby, and soccer.  Cricket and rugby have traditionally been white sports, although this is beginning to undergo transformation.  That has left only soccer for black kids to play and to fashion their sports dreams around.  There are no professional baseball teams in South Africa;  it remains only an amateur sport.      

     However, South Africa had a strong showing at the first World Baseball Classic, in 2006, taking an 8-7 lead into the ninth inning against Canada.  The following day, Canada beat the USA.

     In 2006, the Phillipi Angels began playing baseball within the Baseball Association of Western Province, which is comprised of 76 youth and 46 adult teams from across the Capetown metro-area.  They fielded a team of under-12-year-olds and a team of under-14-year-olds.  The U/14 team finished in 2nd place in their division of 9 teams.  The U/12 Angels won their division, losing only 2 games over the course of an 18-game season; this, all in their first year of play.

     The country’s huge pool of talent and the lack of other immediate opportunities could make South Africa another Dominican Republic-style hotbed for baseball.  In the past few years, there have been efforts by Major League Baseball to introduce the sport to children in schools.  One of the challenges is that very few educators know baseball well enough to teach the kids.

     Nyameko Gabada, 32, hails from the Eastern Cape Province, where he played softball in school.  Later, working as a teacher in the Boland District, 50 miles east of Cape Town, he was introduced to baseball, encouraged to learn the game, and bring it into black schools.

     In June 2006, he took a new job and relocated to Philippi Township, Cape Town.  Now hooked on baseball, he began to put together a team in Philippi, starting with 6 gloves, 1 ball, and 1 bat.  He spoke to kids on his street and then went to their houses and met their parents.  He simply offered to teach the kids a game they had never seen or played before in order to keep them off the streets.

     I first met the Philippi Angels at a pre-season T-ball tournament.  They were very noticeable because they were they only group of blacks.  They also stood out because most of the kids were well over 10 years old, the top age for the tournament.  They had no uniforms.  They did have some baseball gloves that were brand new, still in the cello wrap.  They were also 3 hours late for the start of the games.  I introduced myself to the coach, we exchanged cell phone numbers, and I went back to my team. 

     What I could not have seen from first glance are the circumstances that led them to be there.  I was not there waiting outside on the street corner from 6 a.m. until the bus finally showed up at 9:30 a.m. to transport them.  I was not there when the white and “coloured” league officials encouraged Nyameko Gabada to put a team together in Philippi township, offering them 1 bat, 6 gloves, 1 ball, and suggested they attend a tournament designed for 8-year-olds.  I also wasn’t there to look after these kids to see that they actually had something to eat while they waited all morning for the bus to pick them up and all afternoon to be brought home after the conclusion of a tournament in which they were unable to take part.  I was genuinely intrigued, but otherwise took no other significant notice.

     The next time I met the Philippi Angels, it was the second game of the regular season for my Under-14 team from the suburbs.  We were scheduled to travel to the township to play Philippi because they were still struggling with transportation.  We were cautioned by the league that the field conditions were rough and that ‘we must just try and make the best of it’.  I looked forward to going there, to seeing their reality for myself.  I believed it would be a meaningful experience for my more-privileged players to have their eyes opened.  Their parents, however, had a different take on the situation.  A scouting contingent of parent mobilized to go ahead and scope out the scene.  They determined the field too dangerous and the neighborhood too dicey to risk bringing their kids into. 

     Despite my vehement objections, plans were quickly hatched to load the Philippi team onto the back of a pickup truck and bring them out to our ‘greener pasture’.  Our club chairman even agreed to give them a hot dog and a coke after the game.  I didn’t grow up in South Africa, but I knew instinctively that this was an injustice.

     I did grow up in Concord, New Hampshire and I grew up Jewish.  In the 70’s and 80’s, Concord was a pretty WASP-centric community, from my perspective.  There were no black kids in any of my school classes and only two other identifiable Jews in Concord High School.  I was tackled and pinned down and spit on more than once.  My nicknames were all anti-semetic epithets.  But, I found a loophole. 

     I discovered that I could be far more scathing in my indictment of Jews than any of my peers, for I had more material to work with.  I began my assault on my own creed in junior high.  It actually made me pretty popular, a class comic.  It only took a year of living in Russia to kick it out of me.  There, I met Jews who had really been persecuted, who had changed their identities (as I had once fancied), obtained fake documents, even converted and fervently practiced Russian Orthodox Christianity all to fly under the ‘Semetic-radar’. 

     To Jared, my Bar Mitzvah school classmate and the brunt of my self-loathing scorn, I owe the deepest of apologies.  He had a tight-knit Jewish family that observed the Sabbath.  I came from a single-parent home and lost my mother in a car accident before I ever really got to know her.  While I picked on Jared, on some deeper level, I envied him.

     Despite my challenges, I clearly had it far easier growing up than the kids from Philippi.  I had access to higher education and the benefits of a working, middle-class American lifestyle.  Still, I grew up as an underdog, literally shorter and less able-bodied than most of my peers, especially on the sports fields. 

     Thus, it was my own life-long struggle to prove my mettle on the baseball diamond that coursed through my head as I awaited the arrival of the Angels from Philippi at our grounds in Somerset West. 

     When they arrived, they still had no matching uniforms save some hand-me-down, decades-old, outstretched pants and a couple-odd shirts.  The gloves were now out of cello wrap but still showed few signs of adequate use.  At that point, I guess something akin to grace took control of me and I combined both teams into an extended, pre-game warm-up.  I ran hard with them in the African sun, happy for nimble legs of my own.  I then paired them up with their counterparts for partner stretches.  I devised an impromptu stretching and name-guessing game.  They would have to hold a stretch until one child could get everyone’s name correct.  We all winced in pain while chortling with laughter.  And, somehow, that bright South African spring day, I think I helped to break down the impossibly high economic walls we were hidden behind.  I hid my own tears behind dark sunglasses. 

     They did go on to play a game that day that was grossly mismatched, but the spirit of togetherness was such that the score was irrelevant.  During the course of that game, I watched these Philippi boys learning and improving their baseball skills with, literally, every pitch.  And, once they figured out how to hold a bat, they quickly figured out how to knock our third-string pitcher out of the game.  Later, I helped transport the team back to the township and I saw their “field” and the tin and palette-board shacks some of them call home.  I scraped together what bits and pieces of old equipment I felt my own club would never miss and gave it to them, wishing it was something more.  We parted and I again returned to my own safer haven.

    After two lopsided wins, including that game against Philippi, my team was moved up to the competitive A-league.  I became concerned with preparing my best players for all-star trials and then, once 7 of them, including myself as a coach, had been selected for the provincial squads, I began to focus on the national tournaments.  We did go on to win both championships that I coached, but I noticed something missing.  Save for my adopted son, there was no other child of black African descent among the 120 kids that had been selected to represent our province, in a country where more than 70% of the population is black. 

     In fact, the only other black in our contingent was Nyameko Gabada, the Philippi coach, who had come to volunteer for the thankless role of umpire.  It was then that I was brought back to the Angels of Philippi.  These kids, I realized, were the underdogs on the ball field, just as I had been.

     When Nyameko and I spoke,  he told me about the struggles the Angels have faced.  That early-season game against my team was not the only occasion when visiting clubs deemed Philippi unfit for their children.  The opposing parents and coaches had likened bringing their kids there, akin to letting them swim among feeding sharks.  In an 18-game season, they never succeeded in playing one game at home in front of their own supporters.

     Still, the Angels persevered.  They grew and learned and fought and won, most of the time.  With four games left in the season and a chance to win the league, Marshall, the young man who had been coaching the U-14 team was forced by economic circumstances to move in with family in Durban, 800 miles away.  Nyameko was left as the sole adult to manage two teams who often played simultaneous games at different venues, twenty to thirty miles apart.

     Their field and their lack of transportation were only the visible inequities.  Most children come from families torn apart by AIDS, crime, poverty, TB, and, even work, which, if it comes, may take the sole breadwinner away from home for most of the year.  Add to that poor sanitation, lack of plumbing and heating and a place to escape the rain; the list goes on and on.  Some children will even choose to play barefoot rather than ruin their only pair of shoes and risk being sent home from school for improper footwear.

     As an American baseball player and coach ready for a challenge, I offered to conduct a few Sunday baseball clinics for the Angels.  I showed up at the dirt field at 1 pm and no one else was there, save me and my adopted black son.  We must have looked a spectacle: a short white man playing catch with one black boy amidst broken glass, rubbish, and passersby.  Very slowly, the kids started to trickle in. 

     They were late because when they saw the field from a distance, all they could see was water and mud.  There was only one corner that was dry enough to play on. 

     Even with all the kids there at one time, it was nearly impossible to keep them all on a singular task.  I couldn’t even succeed in counting all of them; each time I tried, numbers of them were off chasing missed balls or were overlapping one another with their offline throws.  Their number was well over 30 and they all had gloves on, an accomplishment.  In addition, there were at least 12 more gloves with broken straps that I gathered to repair.  Somehow, getting them simply to warm up properly, to even line up in straight lines and give themselves enough space to throw, was a great challenge. Their numbers were daunting.

     This is the reality of making progress in the townships in South Africa.  The need is so enormous.  If invited, there would be hundreds of boys and girls there within minutes, all ready to give this new sport a try.

     I struggle to come to terms with the best approach to dealing with the vast numbers of kids, the lack of a proper field, and sufficient equipment.  As an idealistic American, I want it to be right.  I want for them to have goals and seek to fulfill some of them through baseball.

     Nyameko sees it differently:  “If there were no kids playing baseball here right now, you would see a lot of gangsters in this place.  You cannot rob if you are playing a sport.”

      Unemployment in the urban townships can exceed 70%.  Those that do find jobs, often as menial laborers, earn only a pittance.  Crime is a natural by-product, a daily reality.

     Masxhole Jack, 14,  has the sweetest smile and plays a mean shortstop. In Philippi, it’s quite hard to work on simple things like fielding ground balls properly when the ground is filled with rocks, dips, and potholes.  There is no such thing as a bad hop; they’re all bad.  Yet, Jack has learned to charge the ball and take it on the short hop, before it jumps up and into his face.  It’s a technique that takes most ball players years to develop, even on smooth, consistent infields.  Jack has got it down in just his first year of play.  Somehow, he is emblematic of what the Philippi Angels are really all about: making something out of absolutely nothing.

     Jack says, “I love playing baseball.  It makes me feel excitement. It keep [sic] me out of drugs and streets and that, getting lazy in the house watching t.v. all day.  I wish one day I could be a best superstar of baseball…  That’s all I have.”

      I think Jack puts it far more poetically in his own, second-language English than I ever could with my higher education. 

     It reminds me of something I learned in R.O.P.E., (Reaching Our Potential In Education), an outdoor-classroom, life-skills course taught by Tom Herbert at Concord High School 18 years ago. He pushed us to attempt things we’d never done before and doubted we were capable of, to approach difficulties with the certainty that “there is always more in you than you think”.

     Had it not been for those obstacles put before me, on the ballfield, and in the classroom, Jack’s words may have been lost on me.  I may have changed my Jewish name.  I may have continued to feel sorry for my slightly unfortunate, middle-class lot in life.  I may never have come to know the Angels of Philippi.

The Township of Philippi, Cape Flats, Cape Town, South Africa.

Conditions of the playing field in Philippi.

Flooding after the rains.

The Angels play two make-shift practice games on the driest patches of the drainage they call their “field”.

Players take a warm-up run around the drainage.  An old, abandoned sofa in the foreground, shack-homes in the mid-ground, and Table Mountain, (left), and Devil’s Peak, (right), in the background.

Nyameko Gabada, 32, Philippi Angels Founder.

Anda Nontshakaza, 14, works on a one-handed hitting drill.

The Under-12-year-old team hoists their trophy for winning their division.

Warming up arms and dodging the rocks.

Field clean-up prior to mowing the first baseball diamond in Philippi.

Stickball, South African style.

An improvised game with a plastic practice golf ball and a curtain rod.

The first practice game on cut grass and dry ground.

The first official baseball match in Philippi vs. the Fish Hoek Dolphins.

Coach Busi Bobelo leads the Under-10 team in a cheer.

Excitement at the plate, Philippi U/10’s vs. the Durbanville.

Washing cars to raise funds for a baseball tournament.

Lazola Ndlangalavu, 13, made history as one of the first Xhosas to play baseball for Western Province in the national tournament.

Lazola shares the catching skills he’s learned with the club players.

Masxhole Jack, 14, shortstop, Philippi Angels

The author (center) with son, Tshimega Ramaphala, 13 (left) and Sihle Mafanya, 13, pitcher from Philippi, pose with trophy as National U/14 champions.